Afghans of all stripes, including the Ambassador to London Dr Rahim Mohammad Sherzoy, share the same opinion: 'I just wish they would change their policy,' he sighs in his spacious office in the embassy, which fronts onto Hyde Park.

In Washington all the signs are of a civilian government which is going to end up with a policy led by the military because of apparently immutable decisions made months ago to surge thousands of troops into Afghanistan just as it did in Iraq. Another classic case of the generals fighting the last war instead of the next one. A huge sign bearing the words 'Beware Mission Creep' should be hung in the offices of all western military planners.

While the White House presses ahead with a review of Afghan policy, the soldiers are making their preparations as though any change of policy can be ruled out ahead of time. General David Petraeus, now in charge of all military operations in the Middle East and West Asia, and riding on the success of the surge in Iraq, can do no wrong. He convinced the new president even before he came to office that the surge was the right thing to do even though the two operational areas are not remotely similar either in military or political terms.

In Britain, the situation is little different and all the signs are that London will tag along with Washington. 'We don't have a clear concept of what we're doing. There's no understanding of the situation in our institutions,' said one expert observer. Britain is making a modest contribution to the new surge but without any great enthusiasm.

General Petraeus has revealed nothing of how he intends to approach Afghanistan. All we know is that it is likely to mirror the methods he outlined in his counter-insurgency study which itself owes much to the experiences gleaned by the Americans in Vietnam. But Al-Qaeda is not the Viet Cong and the government of Hamid Karzai is not to be compared with that of Nouri al-Maliki in Baghdad.

The surge in Iraq was successful not least because the Maliki government was and is a real power in the land. It was the deal done with the Sunni tribes to stabilise the country that clinched the argument — something which was in both their interests and those of the Americans.

The Sunni tribal coalition was the creation of Saddam Hussein and therefore has a long-standing and substantial political following in the country. The leadership is a powerful force in the parliament and has always been able to mobilise street demonstrations at short notice — an important part of the political armoury in a country where the political landscape has evolved so fast over the past few years. The coalition agreed to call its militias off the streets and help stabilise the country in order to ensure that it gains its share of power in the government and is in a position to fight the influence of Shia Iran. Add to that millions of dollars and 85,000 weapons made available by the United States and a commitment from the Sunnis to take on Al Qaeda    and you have extremely powerful reasons for the change in the political landscape from incipient civil war to a stabilisation pact which shows every sign of holding.

With the weapons supplies and the decision of the U.S. Army to cease opposing the Sunnis, it could be argued that Washington bought peace. But whatever one's opinion of that there is no such option in Afghanistan.

Apart from Hamid Karzai's tenuous hold on the region around Kabul the rest of the country is in the hands of local warlords and notables. In any given village or hamlet power may be in the hands of a local imam or mayor whose writ will run in that area but not much further. There are no nationally-based political organisations that can be used to mobilise support or control. Apart from the stable northwest the only real organisational power in the land is the Taliban whose influence is expanding through the eastern areas. In short, seven years of a western presence and the expenditure of $62 billion has achieved very little. In the east of the country the situation is rolling back fast to that which pertained in the months following the allied victory of 2001.

The reality is that Taliban influence flowed into areas where the western troops started to deploy from 2004 when the talk in western chancelleries was of state building. Those ambitions of a gender-sensitive democratic state are now recognised to have been unrealistic and all the talk is now of stabilisation or even containment in some of the more gloomy analyses.

But even now it is clear that $4-5 billion a year, of which $1.3 billion goes on consultancy fees, may be making the westerners feel good about themselves but it is not pleasing the Afghans. They want irrigation, roads and electricity but they are not getting that kind of assistance, in the main, and when it is delivered it appears inappropriate in scale. Take the famous turbine that was delivered to Helmand and had to be protected by 3,000 British troops. It will not come on stream for another two years. What are the chances that it will be intact when the time comes?  In the Canadian area of operations, roads built during the day had to be protected at night with guard posts every 150 metres or they would be blown up.

With the present surge plan as presented by the American leadership there appears nothing else in prospect but pouring more fuel on the Taliban fire with the result that more fighters will be drawn in from across the border in Pakistan. The conundrum remains the requirement that to stabilise Afghanistan it needs to be sterilised against infiltration from the North West Frontier Province. That remains as distant a prospect as ever.

At present the majority of the money and effort is going into unstable areas where the westerners are unpopular feeding the instability and hastening the day when European publics, at least,  will say enough is enough: in these  cash-strapped times charity begins at home.

The politicians will have to bow to public pressure and bring the troops home whether the job is done or not.   Far better to go for a full-blown and realistic review now and institute a more realistic scale of deployment that more closely matches the wishes of the host nation.

The first priority in that nuts and bolts review is to start by analysing what each contributing nation is capable of and willing to contribute to the operation and then decide how those assets will be deployed.

The combination best suited to the job would seem to be a force to seal the main incoming routes from Pakistan; a small operational strike force to attack Taliban strongholds where necessary and put the rest of the resources into the improvement of infrastructure and quality of life programmes in the poorer areas of the country using, most importantly, civilian management; if you put the military in charge unsurprisingly you'll get a military-led operation. 

The indications are not good that  there will be either a successful transition to a more effective approach or that the lines of command will become better defined.

At present a myriad of 4-star generals compete for attention and State Department lines of communication complicate the picture. Both special envoy Richard Holbrooke and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton report directly and independently to the president. The 4-star commander of the Afghanistan Nato force reports to his Nato superior in Europe; another 4-star general is commander of Centcom, the American regional command for the area, while another former 4-star general is the new U.S. ambassador in Kabul.

Complicating the situation are the various 'tests' that Afghanistan now constitutes: it is a 'test' of the new out-of-area capability of Nato; it is a 'test' of the new American president but more important it is a 'test' of what the future of Afghanistan is going to be. Let it not be forgotten that that is the most important test and the only one that really matters to the people who matter most: the Afghans.

top