ASKED during a television discussion this week whether the war in Afghanistan has been worth it, former UK Armed Forces Minister Adam Ingram gave the forthright reply "of course".

As a fellow guest on STV's Scotland Tonight programme, I begged to differ with his view that our forthcoming military exit from Afghanistan will leave behind a country in good shape.

I wish I could believe otherwise, not least for those families of British and other service personnel like the three Royal Regiment of Scotland soldiers who made the ultimate sacrifice this week when they were killed by a Taliban roadside bomb.

However, whatever way you measure the supposed achievements of our mission in Afghanistan, its success has been limited at best and at worst it may even have added an incendiary component to future conflict within the country.

Let me give just one example that acts a microcosm of Western failures. I'm talking about the United States Agency for International Development's (USAID) decision earlier this year to scrap the completion of a dam project meant to supply electricity to Kandahar, the spiritual home of the Taliban in Afghanistan.

Hailed as a flagship reconstruction project of the kind needed to create stability by building Afghan infrastructure, the Kajaki dam in Helmand is a $266 million white elephant epitomising wider development failures across the country.

US, British and other soldiers died trying to ensure the Kajaki scheme's success. For the UK military the transporting overland through hostile territory of huge hydroelectric turbines was one of the biggest operations of the war.

According to a report by the highly respected independent think-tank the Afghan Analysts Network (AAN), based on interviews with British and American officials, Operation Eagle's Nest was carried out largely for those within the military and USAID who championed the project as offering some kind of 'redemption' after the Iraq fiasco.

General David Petraeus, the former commander of Nato forces in Afghanistan, is known to have said the Kajaki project had proven to be an object lesson in "over promising but under-delivery".

Way back when things looked more promising we heard so much about the West's three pillar "clear, hold, build" Afghan strategy.

Clear? Well, al Qaeda may have almost gone but the Taliban are still there. Hold? How can we say that when we are leaving and are unsure if the Afghan security forces are up to the job. Build? Something like $100 billion has been spent 'rebuilding' Afghanistan in the last decade but despite this it still has the world's highest infant mortality rate; 122 of every 1000 children die before they are one-year-old.

Afghanistan too still ranks near the bottom on per capita income, literacy, life expectancy, electricity usage and on the World Bank's broad Human Development Index.

Adam Ingram spoke glowingly of the new schools and how girls are now being educated. He did not mention those the Taliban have subsequently attacked or blown up, more than 100 in the last year alone. Teachers in these schools often go unpaid or are murdered.

The US alone may have spent nearly $100 billion 'rebuilding' Afghanistan but accountants for the special inspector general for Afghan reconstruction (SIGAR) can only account for less than 10% of this.

Perhaps this is hardly surprising when, as was recently revealed, the CIA for the past decade has been dropping off bags of cash worth tens of millions of dollars at the office of Afghan President Hamid Karzai.

Karzai in turn has used this to grease the palms of cronies and a few warlords along the way. So much for making a positive contribution to Afghanistan's reconstruction, so much for ensuring that widespread corruption is tackled head on.

All this before we even get to the subject of Afghanistan's illegal drug trade. Back in 2001 Tony Blair was at pains to point out that; "Ninety per cent of the heroin on British streets originates in Afghanistan.

He said: "The arms the Taliban are buying today are paid for with the lives of young British people buying their drugs on British streets ... that is another part of their regime that we should seek to destroy."

More than a decade later, Afghanistan's heroin trade flourishes.

In only the last few weeks there has been confirmation of a bumper harvest despite years of efforts by the Nato-led coalition to tackle the problem and Mr Blair and other politicians' promises to staunch the flow of illegal Afghan drugs. Afghanistan now supplies more than 98% of the heroin that blights Scotland.

Heroin is all about winners and losers. If Scotland is the loser, then the Taliban and their allies in Afghanistan are outright winners.

Over the last few years it is estimated up to 70% of the Taliban's entire funding now comes from the heroin trade; in other words, anything up to $300 million annually, of which a huge chunk buys the guns, bullets, rocket launchers and components for the roadside bombs that kill and maim our service personnel and Afghan civilians with terrible regularity.

How ironic it is that while the Taliban profit, the Americans and British have been pouring money into tackling the scourge of the Improvised Explosive Device (IED) attacks like the one that killed the three Royal Highland Fusiliers this week. Since 2006 alone the US Government has spent more than $21 billion to that end.

Surely, after almost a decade of sacrifice in Afghanistan, this is not good enough. And all this before the most pressing question of all; what will happen when the last coalition troops leave and the Afghans are left to fend for themselves?

If history is any guide the old adage that, "foreign assistance follows the flag," will mean that most Government aid and development money will likely dry up in the absence of any strong military presence in Afghanistan.

As coalition forces reduce their 'footprint', the Taliban can be expected to lay down their own.

Others like powerful warlords will jockey for positions of power, and there is always that lurking ethnic tension that has bedevilled Afghanistan's past.

Personally, I do not believe the war was a sham from the get-go and hoped given my lengthy relationship with this long suffering country that it might, if successfully prosecuted, give Afghans some respite.

When the history of our involvement in Afghanistan is written, there will be much debate about military strategy and tactics. The reality however is our own actions helped ensure our failure.

Was it worth it? That depends on who you ask. Adam Ingram might insist "of course". As for mission accomplished? I think not.