No, I don't think we have surrendered to the Taliban and AQ, but we have pretty much surrendered to the Treasury!
the Brits have a track record a little better than the US and for good reason.
I might have agreed with that sentiment at one point back in 2003-5. Now, I would say that we are slowly improving, but still have a way to go compared to the US. From my perspective the period between about 2005 - 2010 were real dark times for our COIN efforts. For far too long the British military rested on its laurels / fell back / became overly reliant on its experiences in NI and other campaigns such as Malaya, Borneo etc. The only problem being that whilst that experience might have been useful as a starting point in Iraq and Afghanistan, constantly falling back on it was a failure to appreciate the complexities of both those campaigns and the fact that they had developed and morphed into something else very quickly, making much of our old NI experience almost irrelevant. And yet we still banged on about how good we were because of it.
There is no denying that the US' efforts at COIN over the period 2001-03 weren't great. Too much willy waving between the top brass and politicians over the role and structure of the military as a whole meant that the campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan were as much about the single Services campaigning for their own place in the future ORBAT as much as actually achieving the grand strategic onbjectives. I would argue the decision to disband almost all the Iraqi security infrastruture overnight in 03 is a good example of the failure to grasp what was going on.
But I have to take my hat of to the US. Whilst we were sitting back thinking we knew it all, the US were busy looking at where they were going wrong and actually doing something about it, rather than taking the UK approach of laughing at the lessons process and proudly proclaiming we do lessons identified rather than learned. We seemed to have got over that bout of ignorance now and are trying hard to regain our position. We will never be quiet able to match the US before we pull out of Afghan, but we have made significant improvements from where we were in the mid-noughties.