Afghanistan – the beginning of the end game?
5 July 2010
I have supported the international engagement in Afghanistan for eight years. And I still do. But now it’s keeping me awake at night.
I have no doubts about why it is important to succeed in Afghanistan.
Failure or withdrawal would deepen instability in the world’s most unstable region; increase the fragility of nuclear armed Pakistan; provide a second front for the already rising tension between Delhi and Islamabad; precipitate an almost certain civil war in Afghanistan; terribly — perhaps even terminally— damage NATO and allow Al Qaeda to expand from a small corner of Pakistan where they are under great pressure, to reoccupy to the south of Afghanistan where they would be under none. We don’t need a crystal ball to know what the consequences would be — and it wouldn’t be to make us safer.
Neither do I believe that this was a conflict we were always bound to lose.
Our failures in Afghanistan were not inevitable. They are entirely of our own making.
At last we have a fully unified military force. But we still have nothing remotely approaching this on the political side — no single international political plan; no clear set of priorities; no ability to speak and act with a single voice and no structures for engaging in a unified and effective manner with our partners in the Karzai Government. We have no engagement with the neighbours either, another of the key principles of post-conflict stabilisation we have chosen to ignore.
Here is a list of Afghanistan’s neighbours, all of whom have a direct interest in preventing a vacuum of chaos in Afghanistan and/or a Jihadi triumph in the region; Iran, Tadzhikistan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, China, Saudi Arabia and Russia, not to mention Pakistan and India. But NATO seems to prefer to fail alone, than create the context in which these neighbours can play some part to help us succeed together.
Nor have our failures all been foreign ones. We have failed to convince our people that this war is necessary either; or persuade them that we have been following a policy leading to success. Compare and contrast Mrs Thatcher and the Falklands and you will see what I mean. Now a steady 65 per cent of the populations in all countries involved are in favour of withdrawal. The figure is nearer 70 per cent in Britain. If, in the face of accelerating casualties as the fighting season unfolds, this sleeping giant wakes, things could change very quickly indeed.
Thank God and at last (also thank sacked General McChrystal, his replacement General Petraeus and our own David Richards) we are now following the right military strategy of protecting the people rather than chasing the enemy. But after seven years of doing the opposite, they have such a mountain to climb to regain control of the battlefield that I wonder whether we are really prepared to pay the increasingly heavy price in men and money – and above all, time – to enable them to do so.
And even if we are, here’s the rub. In these kind of operations, winning militarily but losing politically, means losing. And we are losing politically. It’s the insurgency that is expanding across the country, not the writ of Kabul.
No doubt I will be told that this is all too pessimistic and there are good tales to tell too. And no doubt there are.
But none of these are altering the prevailing perception in the minds of the ordinary Afghans whose support is crucial to winning. However much we may like to deny it, they think that everyone is now heading for the door. Some are doing it quickly like the Dutch and the Canadians. And some in more measured manner, like the US and ourselves.
Maybe President Obama didn’t quite mean what he said last year when he announced the start of the US withdrawal next summer. But words, even inadvertent ones, have a momentum of their own. And few in Afghanistan doubt the direction in which that momentum is now travelling.
And they are probably right.
They know, even if we chose not to, that this is the beginning of the end game in Afghanistan.
A victor’s peace is probably no longer within our reach. We may have to accept a peace on terms which are much more uncomfortable. And the longer we leave preparing for this, the weaker our hand will get.
Some say that we must give the present strategy a little longer to see if it will work. Alright. Though my guess is that we have less time than our Governments hope for.
But sticking it out to see if it works, is not an excuse for refusing to consider what we should do if it doesn’t. It’s time to start discretely assembling a plan B.
First, we do need to keep up the military pressure where we are able. To withdraw now would mean losing all control over the final outcome. Frederick the Great used to say “Diplomacy without arms is like music without instruments” And that’s true in Afghanistan too.
Secondly, we need to start talking to the Taleban. Some say we can’t do this because there isn’t one Taleban, there are lots of them. But that makes it easier, not less so. There’s almost certainly more going here than is publicly visible. But this isn’t going to matter unless Washington gets involved — and at present they think they will have more leverage later. I doubt that.
The third strand begins with recognising that a peace directed only to the South is likely to be unacceptable to the North, deepening the risk of civil war afterwards. It has to be a peace for the whole country, not just the Pashtuns.
And this is where the neighbours come back in. We should start preparing the way for an international conference on the future of Afghanistan aimed at a treaty, a bit like Dayton for Bosnia, which assures the territorial integrity of the country, buys in the neighbours and uses key great powers such as the US, China and perhaps Russia, as guarantors. Would this prevent any chance of a civil war? No. But it might give us the best available bulwark against one. Would it be difficult to do? Of course. But not as difficult as facing the consequences of failure. Would it mean dealing with some unpleasant folk? Certainly. But in Bosnia, Milsoevic and Tudjman were no angels either.
None of this would be pretty. None of it would be comfortable. But if we do find that what we hoped was possible, isn’t, we have no alternative but to consider what is left, however uncomfortable it may be.