Professor Lieven said that some of the simplest precautions had been effective in the prevention of terrorism and he noted that all of the outrages in the West, including the second largest attack by far after 9/11, the Oklahoma City bombing, had been carried out using fertilizer as a base.

By simply limiting access to fertilizer through insisting that all buyers must show an agricultural requirement, the facility to construct home-made devices had been severely limited. Even those with merely the appearance of a believer would be questioned closely on their intentions. Combined with good police and intelligence work the fertilizer restrictions had helped reduce the risk, as witness the failed Glasgow attack and the recent attempt in Times Square, New York, where the attacker had been reduced to setting fire to a taxi.

Despite these successes, he said: 'It's quite a different matter stopping them getting to us by going out to them, say to take over, to train, to run, to reform parts of the Muslim world with military force.'

In this context, Professor Lieven fully endorsed the assessment of the UN co-ordinator on international terrorism, Richard Barrett, who observed that the idea that the British presence in Afghanistan was part of the defence against terrorism as 'complete rubbish — I've never heard such nonsense.'

'I'm quite sure that if there were no longer troops in Afghanistan there'd be less agitation,' he said, adding that the initial post-9/11 sympathy for America had long since melted away and that the vast majority of people in Pakistan, at all levels, believed that 9/11 had been an American 'inside job'. This view was also held by the Pakistani communities in Britain.

In Afghanistan itself there was a widespread belief that the British were there to take revenge for their defeat at the battle of Maiwand in July 1880, a rumour that British activities had fed in recent years leading to an overall perception that London was intent on potentially aggressive and imperial agendas.

The result, said Prof Lieven, who has been researching a book on Pakistan, was that while Pakistanis did not support the Taliban or al-Qaeda revolutionary agenda in Pakistan, there was sympathy for the Afghan Taliban who were seen as essentially a national resistance force. This highlighted an often under-emphasized element of the Muslim struggle that the West was facing around the world — the important element of nationalist issues which often played a part in motivation and recruitment for the groups pursuing the central scriptural and religious issues.

Indeed the al-Qaeda leadership in Afghanistan made a point of this aspect in their immediate post-9/11 declaration when they pointed out the opportunity made available to them to present themselves as anti-Israeli and anti-American in mobilizing the Muslim masses. If they had been presenting themselves as a purely religious force, they would have attracted much limited support.

So it is the case within Pakistan itself that there is an important differentiation made between the Afghan and the Pakistani Taliban which has been reflected in the policies of the Pakistani government. With a fairly ruthless policy of 'divide and rule', including selective assassination in Pashtun areas of the country, the government had managed to turn around a situation in which 18 months ago it had seemed possible that Pakistan Taliban might have been in a position to overthrow the government. That was no longer the case and would not be unless a new al-Qaeda attack on America, which could be traced to areas of Pakistan, might result in attacks on Pakistan.

In that case, said Prof Lieven, sections of the army would be likely to mutiny and the danger of the disintegration of the Pakistan state would be real.

The conclusion here was that efforts to control the growth of extremism on Muslim soil and containing terrorist threats could only be carried out by Muslim governments and security services.

'Our attempts to do this in Afghanistan have proved overwhelmingly counter-productive by which, however, I do not mean that we should simply scuttle from Afghanistan…Now that we are there we have to try to emerge with the reputation of the British Army as intact as possible.' The army was an asset of considerable importance to the country and to Western Europe as a whole since, with the exception of France, it was the region's only fighting army.

'We also owe it to the Afghan people not to walk away as we did after the Soviet withdrawal. But how to get out of there?' The future came down to a series of questions. The first thing that the NATO force could do was to leave the Afghan army capable of holding the Afghan cities. Prof Lieven said he was extremely skeptical about the capability of a Kabul-based, non-Pashtun government to control extensive areas of the Pashtun-controlled countryside, no-one having been able to do that for the last 30 years except the Taliban.

'But, on the other hand, if they can hold cities, at least the humiliation of another Saigon would be avoided; something of considerable importance to the British and American governments because of political questions about the future of the American administration and the tremendous emotional and moral boost that an outright victory would give to our enemies in the Muslim world.

'However, we are facing much bigger obstacles than the Soviets faced when it comes to creating this army; because for one thing they inherited the Royal Afghan Army with its central staff intact. We have to create something new on the basis of the Afghan militias that we have had since 2001 and that's a much more difficult task.'

Another critical aspect was that the Royal Army that continued under the Najibullah regime was largely a Pashtun force, whereas today the allies were trying to do exactly the opposite and create an army out of a patchwork of different tribes, races and nationalities with which to hold the cities.

The question was whether Afghanistan was now as badly divided as it was in the 1990s as a result of the military realities and the alignment of outside forces or whether some sort of deal could be reached with the Taliban leading up to an agreement on the de facto partition of the country into different spheres of influence. The key player in brokering such a deal would be Pakistan. Islamabad's minimal requirement would be a central government friendly to Pakistan or a set of buffer areas directed against their great fear: the expansion of Indian influence in Afghanistan.

top