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In 1997, Charles toured Saudi Arabia, when relations with Britain had been put under strain over Saudi dissidents in London. “Spreading his message that the west can learn from Islam’s spirituality, the Prince of Wales charmed his Saudi audience, royals and plebeians alike,” reported the American diplomats.

Charles was the “star attraction” at the king’s annual cultural festival, they reported, spending “hours at the camel races, listening to (and stoically remaining awake for) Arabic poetry and ballads, feasting with 1,200 dignitaries and ultimately joining the crown prince and his half-brother in the sword dance”.

The US re on the receiving end of an apparent gaffe, when he visited Indonesia in 1989 to promote nature conservation. “A dubious point included the gift [from the government] to HRH of two small mounted Komodo dragons in a glass case. The prince graciously accepted the gift. We have pointed out to aghast Commonwealth colleagues that Komodos are bred in captivity here,” said the Americans.

In a cable headlined “No undies, we’re British”, the US diplomats reported on the Queen’s tour to Jamaica in 1994 where she was due to inspect various factories. “An effort by the Government of Jamaica to highlight its recent successes in the garment-assembly industry required a discreet change before it was deemed acceptable by the Queen’s minders.

“Evidently no one bothered to ask management at the chosen plant in Montego Bay’s free zone exactly what sort of garments they assembled. When the answer came back ‘women’s underwear’, the decision was quickly made to move the tour to a T-shirt manufacturing facility (after, presumably, Her Majesty’s advance man was revived with smelling salts)”.

They are the stories you never read about the royals: a narrowly averted moment of embarrassment when the Queen was nearly taken on a tour of an underwear factory in Jamaica, and a moving, conciliatory speech made by Prince Andrew in Argentina after the Falklands war.

They are among candid glimpses behind the scenes of royal tours recorded by US diplomats around the world and released under the US freedom of information act, and they reveal a lighter side of the tours.

You can play on your own, if you’re into that kind of thing, or create a mini-league to go up against your best friends, bitterest enemies, Matt LeTissier, who is our expert for this season, and random people you’ve met on Twitter. Setting up a league is easy – simply click on friends’ leagues and follow the step-by-step instructions – and you can also play Pick the Score via Facebook.

If you need any help with your selections, click on the Experts’ Picks button to see the predictions of Matt Le Tissier.

The player who scores the most points each week will win a £25 bet with Sportingbet.com (if scores are tied, whoever is closest to predicting the time of the earliest goal in the Premier League that week will win).

“To collect the £25 bet prize, the winner will be required to open up an account with Sporting Bet.”
The person who notches up the most points at the end of the season will win a signed England shirt.

Pick the Score, guardian.co.uk’s online football game, is free to enter and incredibly easy to play. And you can also win brilliant weekly and overall prizes.

To start playing, click here or on the register tab on the left-hand side of the page – it will take less than a minute to sign up. If you have played Pick the Score in previous seasons, you can use your old log-in and password. If you have forgotten your password click here.

Once you have registered click on enter your predictions to choose your picks for upcoming Premier League matches. You must choose the number of goals you think each side will score (click on 0 if you think a team won’t score at all). You get one point for a correct result, and three points for getting both the result and score right. Don’t worry if you miss a week as you will earn the average points tally of all players that week.

Obama has already sent nearly 20,000 additional troops to Afghanistan, raising the total of US troops to about 68,000 by the end of the year. In all, Nato has committed about 100,000 troops to the war effort. McChrystal is widely expected to ask for even more forces, as he tries to implement the kind of counter-insurgency strategy that prevented Iraq from descending into all-out civil war two years ago.

While Obama has to wrestle with Afghanistan, there is also renewed concern about Iraq, where suicide bombers have stepped up attacks that have killed hundreds of Iraqis as political tension mounts ahead of January’s elections.

Afghanistan has been in political limbo since the presidential election on 20 August, with partial results so far placing President Hamid Karzai in the lead, but not by enough to avoid a second round against his main challenger, Abdullah Abdullah. The election, which the Taliban failed to disrupt with rocket attacks, has been marred by allegations of fraud with around a third of the votes counted.

Gilles Dorronsoro, an Afghanistan expert covering the elections for the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, a Washington thinktank, said the Taliban controlled the countryside and had a strong presence even inside cities such as Kandahar and Ghazni.

“Outside the major cities, Afghan administration is non-existent. As President Obama must realise, whether Afghanistan is led by Hamid Karzai or anyone else, the problem for the international coalition is not one of insufficient force; it is insufficient government,” Dorronsoro said.

“Over the next 12 to 15 months, among the things you absolutely, positively have to do is persuade a sceptical American public that this can work, that you have a plan and a strategy that is feasible,” Stephen Biddle, a military expert who advises the US-led command in Afghanistan, told the McClatchy-Tribune news service.

Another leading counter-insurgency expert said Afghanistan’s government must fight corruption and deliver services to Afghans quickly, because Taliban militants were filling gaps and winning support. The Taliban were already running courts, hospitals and even an ombudsman in parallel to the government, making a real difference to local people, said David Kilcullen, a senior adviser to McChrystal.

“A government that is losing to a counter-insurgency isn’t being outfought, it is being out-governed. And that’s what’s happening in Afghanistan,” Kilcullen told Australia’s National Press Club.

US officials have spoken openly about the failing war effort in Afghanistan and McChrystal’s report will be a distillation of their strong misgivings. He says the aim should be for Afghan forces to take the lead, but that the Afghan army will not be ready for three years and the police will need longer.

The report does not mention increasing troop numbers, but the implication is that more soldiers will be needed to turn around an unsuccessful strategy. Officers in Afghanistan consider much of the effort of the last eight years wasted, with too few troops deployed and many of them placed in the wrong regions and given the wrong orders.

Any recommendation of a troop increase would come against a background of growing scepticism about the war, with the latest Washington Post-ABC news poll showing that 49% of Americans now think the fight in Afghanistan is worthwhile. Obama appointed McChrystal to turn around a war that is sucking in more and more western troops with litte discernible progress against the Taliban, which has proven to be much more resilient and organised than expected.