A top German general who was instrumental in planning the Bundesw-ehrs mission in Afghani-stan has said that the intervention has failed and the Taliban will regain power within months of withdrawal. Ten years after the invasion, he is far from alone with his critique. It was 10 years ago that the United States, together with its NATO allies, marched into Afghanistan to put an end to Taliban rule and begin the hunt for Al-Qaeda chief Osama bin Laden. A decade later, the Osama is dead. But, says Harald Kujat, former general inspector of the German military, the mission has been a failure. The mission fulfilled the political aim of showing solidarity with the United States, Kujat told the German daily Mitteldeutsche Zeitung. But if you measure progress against the goal of stabilising a country and a region, then the mission has failed. Kujat said that it was ignored for too long that the opponent was fighting a military battle and we needed to do the same. In reference to claims from German political leaders, among others, he said the argument that it was a stabilisation mission was maintained for too long. The result, he said, is that soldiers were not given what they needed in order to effectively fight the enemy. Kujat is hardly the first to criticise the Afghanistan war. But his words carry weight in Germany. He was a leading planner of the German mission to Afghanistan and served as general inspector of the German military - the Bundeswehrs highest-ranking soldier - from 2000 to 2002. Part of his job included advising both the German government and the Defence Ministry on military matters. The former Bundeswehr leader also took aim at Germanys plan to complete withdrawal of all of its 5,000 combat troops from Afghanistan by 2014, a timeline that was reiterated on Friday by Germanys special representative for Afghanistan, Michael Steiner. If we withdraw from Afghanistan in 2014, said Kujat, then the Taliban will take over power again within just a few months.