October 25, 2007 (LPAC)--Paddy Ashdown, a well-known UK political figure and former UN High Representative for Bosnia and Herzegovina, warned that NATO has "lost in Afghanistan" and its failure to bring stability there could provoke a regional sectarian war "on a grand scale," the Telegraph reports today. Lord Ashdown is being proposed as a new "super envoy" to Afghanistan, at the NATO and NATO-Russia council meeting in Noordwijk today. Ashdown gave a very stark assessment of the situation: "We have lost, I think, and success is now unlikely...I believe losing in Afghanistan is worse than losing in Iraq. It will mean that Pakistan will fall and it will have serious implications internally for the security of our own countries and will instigate a wider Shiite [Shia], Sunni regional war on a grand scale. Some people refer to the First and Second World Wars as European civil wars and I think a similar regional civil war could be initiated by this [failure] to match this magnitude."

Britain and the U.S. are pushing for the creation of a super envoy, the Telegraph reports, because they are "infuriated" about the lack of European and other support for the military intervention and "reconstruction" - which is going nowhere -- in Afghanistan. Other candidates besides Ashdown are a miserable lineup: they include former Green Party leader Joschka Fischer, a former German foreign minister; Bernard Kouchner, the serving French foreign minister; and Jaroslav Kaczynski, the pro-Neo-con Polish prime minister who just lost the national elections Oct. 21.