Excerpts from an editorial in The Guardian yesterday:
In the last few days, Britain’s most senior military commander in Afghanistan and the British ambassador in Kabul have both been reported as saying that the war in Afghanistan cannot be won militarily and that the current coalition strategy is failing. They are right. Fighting in Helmand, the British commander, Brig. Mark Carleton-Smith, is sensibly downbeat in his assessment of what his force can achieve. His men, sustaining heavy losses, have taken the sting out of the Taleban this year. But he knows that the conflict is not an alternative to a political settlement that would include parts of the Taleban.
Saying this and achieving a deal are two different things, however. As things stand, each NATO country that contributes militarily peers at Afghanistan through the prism of its own troop deployment. Some, like the French, who lost 10 soldiers in an ill-planned reconnaissance patrol outside Kabul in August, have had to relearn old lessons. Separate NATO forces are doing their own thing in Helmand, Uruzgan and Kunduz. More damaging still is the absence of a common political strategy.
Kabul’s foreign diplomats these days no longer try to hide their disdain for President Hamid Karzai and his clan. On Monday the president’s brother, Ahmed Wali Karzai, the chief of Kandahar council, was forced to deny a well-sourced story in the New York Times that he was involved in the heroin trade. He claimed he was the punchbag for US anger over his brother’s criticism of a US missile attack which killed 90 villagers, most of them children. Whatever the truth, the working relationship between satrap and chief foreign sponsor is now badly frayed.
Little wonder that Britain’s ambassador to Kabul says that Karzai’s government has lost all trust at home. Sir Sherard Cowper-Coles’ point — as reported by a French satirical magazine, but not denied — goes wider than the issue of the Afghan president, who unwisely became the linchpin of Washington’s strategy.
It involves the wider corruption of his regime, which no reconstruction effort, however sustained, can survive. As Lord Ashdown, who nearly became the UN boss in Kabul, has said, until governance is improved, there is no hope of persuading Afghans that the central government is a better bet than the Taleban.
Two events could turn this narrative of failure around: The election of new leaders in both Washington and Kabul. Both new leaders would do well to distinguish between the Taleban and the jihadis, and tackle reality rather than set forth Panglossian hopes. As it is, this intervention is going the way of all others in this part of the world — badly.
