Like the Iraq elections 5 years ago, the Afghan elections are being hailed as the foundation of democracy in a war-torn country. The reality however is very different. As in Iraq, so now in Afghanistan the insurgency is still in full swing, indeed on all the evidence growing stronger all the time, and the writ of the Kabul government scarcely runs further than a few miles beyond the capital. Talk about democracy in such a situation is simply a chimera. Indeed talk about government itself is something of a misnomer. It is riddled with corruption, driven by conflicting tensions between warlords, and headed by the weak and vacillating Karzai. His lack of authority is revealed in his allowing the murderous Dostum of the Northern League to return from exile on the eve of the election, in his succumbing to reactionary pressure over oppressive sex laws, and in his ineffectiveness in imposing any control over feuding warlords. To a depressing political scenario is then added a military stalemate with rapidly rising US-UK fatalities and a Taliban insurgency that still controls (even after Panther’s Claw) the great majority of Helmand province, linked to an unbeaten insurgency in Iraq that has just exploded again with lethal force in Baghdad, disproving claims that Bush’s surge and the Sunni ‘Awakening’ had finished it off. So what should be the strategy from here?

The basic question remains: why are we in Afghanistan at all, and what exactly are our objectives supposed to be? Our forces are in Afghanistan because after 9/11 Bush asked Blair for British troops to support a US punitive expedition to root out Osama bin Laden’s Al Qaeda from its Afghan bases, prior to the invasion of Iraq which was always the neo-con central objective (though Saddam Hussein had no role in 9/11 whatsoever). Britain would not have a major role, but would provide essential cover for the diplomatic presentation of a widespread international NATO campaign. John Reid as Defence Secretary even told the Commons that Britain’s participation could soon be over without even a shot being fired. After hostilities already longer than the second world war and now sharply rising casualties, the painful but necessary demand needs to be pressed: what can we reasonably expect to achieve from our continued presence there, and is it justified at the cost of so many British lives?
The official answer, which is now wearing very thin, is that we can secure and hold enough territory and keep the Taliban in sufficient check to allow a democratically elected government time to assemble and train security forces enough to take on the Taliban themselves. That is already mission creep, well beyond any initial objectives. But it is also unrealistic. What has happened is that a long-term smouldering civil war between the Pashtun (the dominant ethnic group in the south), the Northern League (mainly composed of Uzbehs and Tajiks) and other warlord militias has had superimposed on it a foreign invasion which has now united the parties in struggle to expel the occupation forces. To suppress the Taliban in these circumstances and then to keep the warring factions apart and thence eventually united towards common objectives of political and economic development would take a prolonged campaign by several hundred thousand NATO (in fact US and UK) troops which public opinion in neither country would conceivably warrant. This has to be faced up to sooner rather than later.
So what is the alternative? It is to bring the Taliban and the other main ethnic groups into a government of national unity as quickly as appropriate negotiations can be concluded. It is to switch the focus away from military pacification towards economic and social development, both to tackle the raw poverty and poor services for most of the population, to enable a sustainable non-narcotics economy to take root, and to develop an NGO community as the recipient of foreign aid both to circumvent government corruption and to build viable and influential community structures. Against that background it is also to prepare a plan for withdrawal of all foreign forces within 18 months which, more than anything else, would greatly lower the tempo and volume of violence. If then in that situation the national government still requested international aid to consolidate the security of the country, it would be for the UN, not the US or UK, to provide that support.

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