On the Today programme this morning Gordon Brown gave an unflustered interview on Afghanistan in his usual calm low-key monotone, but advanced a strategy riddled with flaws and wishful thinking. He argued there were three approaches to the current Afghan impasse. One is to withdraw troops from Afghanistan and spend the money instead on reinforcing anti-terrorist security in Britain (the proposal of Kim Howells, MP, who happens to be the Intelligence Services Committee), which he rejected out of hand. The second is to make overtures and offer concessions to the Taliban in order to split them awaqy from Al Qaeda and deny the latter a base of operations in Afghanistan, which he equally disdained. The third is to train growing Afghan police and security forces to the point where they can take responsibility themselves for the country’s internal security. He enthused that he had formulated this policy, that Obama was signed up to it, and that he was now actively pressing the rest of the EU to provide extra troops to get behind it. Alas It is pitted with unrealities.

First, he recognised it could only work if the hyper-scale of corruption in Karzai’s government could be purged. No-one seriously believes it can be. No enhanced counter-insurgency strategy can succeed without a legitimate and uncorrupt government as partner, yet Karzai’s record makes that impossible. Second, the record of Afghan police trainees reveals them as unreliable, prone to corruption and extortion towards the very people they are supposed to be protecting, and worst of all possessed of fluid loyalties which are venal towards the highest bidder which could well be the Taliban. The recent murder by a turncoat Afghan police officer of 8 British soldiers who were closely mentoring the police unit was tragically a graphic demonstration of their notorious unreliability.
Third, the timescale of training the proposed 135,000 police and military forces almost from nothing and instilling the necessary discipline and culture of loyalty is improbably long given the rate of current British casualties and the growing domestic unpopularity of the war in the UK. And fourth, the scale of NATO forces envisaged for these tasks – a further 500 British troops, 100 German, and possibly 25,000 American, bringing the total of Western forces in Afghanistan to little over 100,000 – is still far too small to secure dominance over treacherous mountainous terrain like Afghanistan.

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