Afghanistan 24 June 2010
Times article
Here is the truth that dare not speak its name in Afghanistan. Everyone is now heading for the exit. And even if we don’t acknowledge this, the Afghans – and especially the Taliban – know it very well.
Some, like the Canadians and Dutch are heading for the door as fast as they can. Others, like President Obama, are edging more slowly, hoping for good order and a victor’s peace.
But a victor’s peace is now almost certainly beyond our reach. We may have to take any peace we can get.
The start of the fighting season, sharply accelerating casualties and the sacking of General McChrystal may bring things to a head much faster than many, including the Government, hoped
There are many reasons for our present predicament.
But one of them is not because this was a conflict we didn’t have to fight. The consequences of failing in Afghanistan are very grave; for the region, for NATO and for its member countries. But understanding this does not absolve us from answering the question that must now be asked; how do we justify sending young men out to be killed and terribly maimed in a conflict, however important, in which success is now, by some distance, not the most likely outcome?
Nor was this was a war we could never have won. Our present position was not inevitable. It is the consequence of our own mistakes.
NATO’s initial aims were over ambitious, under resourced, insufficiently clear and lacked any semblance of unity of command.
The international coalition has been consistently unable to construct a single plan with a few priorities which we can all pursue together. It still cannot speak with a single voice. It still cannot act in a focussed and co-ordinated way. And even if it had all of these, it still has no formal effective mechanism of co-ordinating them with the Karzai Government.
We are now (thanks to Gen McChrystal) following the right military strategy – protecting the people rather than chasing the enemy. But I fear that this comes so late and that turning the battlefield in our favour now will require an expenditure of blood, time and treasure which we are no longer prepared to devote to it.
And even if we could now begin to win the military battle, we are still losing the political one, chained as we are to a regime in Kabul which is widely perceived as corrupt and whose writ in the country continues to decline. In these operations, winning on the battlefield is not enough. If you lose politically, you lose.
And then there are the neighbours. Iran, Uzbekistan, Kirgizstan, Tajikistan, China, Russia, Saudi Arabia India and Pakistan; all of these have a direct interest in ensuring that Afghanistan does not become a vacuum of instability and/or that JIhadism doesn’t triumph in the region. All could have played a role – greater or lesser – in assisting us. But NATO seems to prefer failing alone, to bringing the neighbours in to help us succeed.
Meanwhile, at home, Western Governments have consistently failed to make the convincing case that can be made for this war; or exhibit the determination to win it which would carry our publics with us. There is a real chance that this war will be lost in the pubs, cafes and beer cellars of Europe, long before our soldiers lose it in the deserts and mountains of Afghanistan.
Some say we should give the McChrystal “surge” a little longer to work. Maybe.
But its time also to start thinking about a Plan B if it doesn’t.
One Plan B would be to shift our strategy from Counter Insurgency (COIN), fighting the Taliban, to Counter Terrorism (CT), concentrating on Al Qaeda. This would recognise that keeping the Taliban out of Government was not our aim – keeping Al Qaeda out of Afghanistan was. The Taliban could run the Pashtun areas and participate in the Government, provided (on pain of violent sanction from the air and through Special Forces) that they didn’t march on Kabul or let Al Qaeda back. This would leave NATO to concentrate on the rest of the country.
This strategy has advantages. It is firmly rooted in the real interests of Britain and the West. It would enable us to reduce our UK stake from 10,000 whose first role was fighting to around 2,000 whose chief job was training. It should greatly cut the casualty rate. And it would give us new space to start turning things round.
But there are dangers as well. The insurgency is now spreading well beyond the Pashtun South. It would not be easy to maintain a unitary Afghanistan against a de facto partition of the country. Could we count on the Afghan National Army in these circumstances? Could we really keep Al Qaeda out of urban conurbations like Kandahar where they would be embedded in the people? How would we deal with the perception that NATO had been defeated and the dynamic this would this create? All these are problematic, some severely so.
The second, arguably better Plan B would be to start now to prepare for what we know must come in the end – a peace settlement for Afghanistan. Our aim in this should not be confined just to ending the conflict with what dignity we can, but also to leave behind as stable an Afghanistan as we are able. The danger would be a civil war into which the neighbours – and especially India and Pakistan, would be drawn. The best way to protect against this is for the peace agreement to be anchored within a wider international treaty – something like the Dayton agreement, which asserts the territorial integrity of the country, incorporates the neighbours and is underpinned by international guarantee from the great states who have an interest in peace in the region, such as the US, China and Russia.
None of this will be produce certain peace. None of it is without risk. None of it is pretty and some of it is uncomfortable to contemplate. But when the possible becomes impossible, you have to have to be prepared to consider what is left, comfortable or not.
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