Listening to William Hague yesterday in Kabul at the ninth international conference on the future of Afghanistan illustrated political doublespeak at its lowest ebb.   All local analysts recognise that the military balance is moving steadily away from Nato forces towards the Taliban.   Sangin, Musa Qala and Marjah cannot be secured and are constantly taken and retaken like some barren hill in Vietnam to deny it to the enemy.   The British casualty rate (322 soldiers killed to date) is now twice as high proportionately as the US rate and as high as the Soviet forces endured in the 1980s, and will certainly not be politically sustainable in the UK for long.   So where now?

All the arguments for staying put are going down like a lead balloon.   We are fighting in Afghanistan to protect the streets of London: this potty idea is believed by nobody when virtually all terrorist acts in the UK have been home-grown and indeed have mostly occurred precisely because foreign troops are occupying their country.   We need more time (after 9 years) to get Afghan forces to the point where they can adequately secure the country: nobody on the ground believes that this will happen in less than several decades, if then.   President Karzai must be given timescales to root out corruption: there is no evidence he either can or ever will do so.   The Petraeus strategy in Iraq of winning over (and bribing) ‘moderate’ insurgents must be given time to work: but Afghanistan is totally different from Iraq, and the exceedingly belligerent and conservative Pashtun Taliban will never play along with such collaboration.

So why are we in Afghanistan at all?   For much the same reason that we have been 7 years in Iraq – because the Americans/Bush wanted us there to provide a minor support role and diplomatic cover, and Blair was only too anxious to stand ‘shoulder to shoulder’.   This was the time of John Reid’s infamous sending 3,000 British troops to Helmand to ‘establish the pre-conditions for nation-building’ and ‘without a shot being fired’.   The political doublespeak knows no bounds.

As with Iraq the ostensible rationale keeps changing – first WMD, then Saddam’s monstrous suppression of human rights, then democratisation in the Middle East (but never the real reason -oil).   In Afghanistan first it was going after al Qaeda post-9/11, then it was the War on Terror, then it was nation-building and female emancipation (but never the real reson – geo-strategic control of the southern under-belly of the former Soviet empire, and now fear of military defeat).

Clearly all hope of victory has been abandoned.   The only way out now is a deal between the Taliban, the Pakistanis, and the corrupt clan around Karzai – as inauspicious a brew as one can find, though talking about it openly and advertising one’s relative impotence is counter-productive.   There will be serious loss of face, though that is a lot better than continuing serious loss of life.   If there is a lesson from this catastrophe, it’s that Parliament was far too quiescent and complacent, when Reid first made his announcement,  in not demanding far more rigorous conditions, objectives and timescales before sanctioning any British involvement at all.

Bookmark to: