We make no apologies for returning to Afghanistan within a few days of our last comment. This war in a far-away land is pivotal to so much - a pawn in many games. 

It is about the ability of the West to project power, whether Western values can be exported through the barrel of a gun, the balance of power within the West, strategies for dealing with anti-Western insurgency and whether the populations of the West will follow their leaders into the maw of perpetual, expensive and unrewarding global police actions.

What We Are Dealing With

A map of the security situation in Afghanistan soon indicates what the military are dealing with – the country is divided into two equal halves by a line drawn from South West to North East.

South of that line, it is violence and war with a potentially similar situation over the border in Pakistan. The Pakistanis have a very different view from their Western 'allies' on what can and cannot be done in relation to recalcitrant tribes .

North of that line, Western presence, reconstruction money and a dilution of the Pathan interest means a stabilising country with improving education and healthcare but one that offers an increasing drain on Western budgets and relies for its stability on widepread corruption and clientage.

The capital, Kabul, is nearly surrounded, as Baghdad once was, by enemy territory,  It is in a semi-siege state with foreigners restricted to compounds and constant rumours of suicide attacks.  Many of these foreigners are hated for their insensitive lifestyle.

Meanwhile, 764 troops have been killed in nearly eight years, mostly American but with a significant number of Britons and Canadians on the list. The Canadians have almost had enough and the Britons are finding it hard to justify dying for a regime that appears to them increasingly dodgy.

A two-tier country has become what Secretary of State Gates called a ‘two-tier alliance’ with risk-averse members policing the north and dedicated liberals dying in the south.

Getting Blood From A Stone

Secretary of State Rice’s trip to London was almost entirely focused on the tension within NATO over who should share the burden in Afghanistan.

It was interesting that she tried to protect the theoretical base for NATO’s involvement in the country, referring to “the transformation that NATO itself has gone through in really learning how to fight this fight”. This is code for saying that, to the Atlanticists, Afghanistan is about so much more than one single 'failed state'.

At the Lithuania NATO Defence Ministers’ Meeting, we had always expected some face-saving formulae because the Alliance is so critical to European elites but the German decision not to send more troops to Southern Afghanistan seemed pretty final as we 'go to press'.

The British did their usual trick of trying to speak with two voices, suggesting to their Allies that new troop deployments showed a commitment to the Afghan war that they should emulate whilst telling the British public that this was a mere shuffling of the pack and no new commitment was being made.

Nothing more clearly demonstrates that the British progressive crusade has no real hold on its electorate.

It was left to the French to perform the necessary and somewhat theatrically timed face-saving volte face by saying that it would send troops to help the Canadians - and so increase the chances that the Canadians would not walk away in 2009.

However, France revealed no numbers or details and our cynical old mind could not help seeing more than a coincidence between this offer and French success in getting the Chad Resolution through the UNSC earlier in the week.

NATO wants 7,000 more men – the US is providing 3,200 more marines but only for seven months and the French are unlikely to provide nearly 4,000 now and 7,000 in the Autumn. So the fundamental problems for NATO are far from solved.

As always in the Afghan case, policy is not being dictated by the needs of the country (except perhaps in the curious liberal mind-set of the British Foreign Office) but by the needs of sovereign powers in relation to each other.

In this case, France is buying itself into a top table position if it re-enters (as Sarkozy plans) NATO’s military command. From the French perspective, this far-away war is just a means to that end.

Afghanistan Ltd, a West Corp Subsidiary

On another but complementary front entirely, the IMF attacked the Karzai Administration for failing to support economic reforms that are allegedly necessary for development, although you would think the poor man had more on his plate than extending the market.

The IMF advisers left Kabul  “spitting with anger” [Financial Times, 7 February] at Afghan failures to keep promises that the country had made in return for debt write-offs, although perhaps more credit should be given to Karzai in getting his quasi-anarchic half-state to get the national budget to parliament on time and scrapping crooked import taxes.

The West wants a drive against corruption and mismanagement but the poor man is naturally far more preoccupied with preserving some semblance of national sovereignty and increasing his broadly liberal political reach against a formidable traditionalist enemy.

If IMF officials are “deeply demoralized”, I suggest we consider how the liberals immediately around Karzai are feeling – not helped by the politically-inspired death penalty against a foolish liberal student who downloaded women’s rights material and whose fate is now exercising the minds of Western liberals. This was not meant to happen.

The IMF claims that a failure to meet tax reform targets was frustrating donors who might well withdraw their financial support. The explicit threat is directed at a country that cannot cover its operating costs out of tax. The tax take is 8% - far below average African levels of 20%.

There is no such thing as a State without adequate taxation levels – American right-wing libertarians note – and levels of 10% and below mean by definition that a State is ‘failed’ and requires ‘international community’ subsidies for which political patience is not unlimited.

Policymakers are aware that difficult economic conditions in the West are going to make a political consensus for continued funding less rather than more likely. In effect, Afghanistan is a loss-making investment of West Corp.

A removal of reconstruction funds would have the consequence of forcing the country into effective liquidation. It would concede the market to Taliban plc and, if strategists do not want that, then the only alternative is to remove the Executive Chairman (Karzai) and make it a fully fledged Business Unit within West Corp. 

But formal empire is not on the Agenda. Since Paddy Ashdown decided not to become Chief Executive, and with rumours of Khalilzad becoming Executive Chairman (sorry, President) proving premature Washington fluff, the West has few options but to get out completely or to keep pouring the money in and offering exhortation to do better.

The Dope Trade & Alliance Splits

The Afghan economy is sustained on foreign aid and the dope trade and this adds piquancy to widespread non-US resistance to US strategy in dealing with the opium trade. Logically, less dope money means a requirement for more foreign aid - and vice versa.

A lightning rod for the policy splits between the US and almost everyone else that were busily being covered over in Kabul yesterday is the US proposal to undertake aerial spraying of poppy fields.

This is a policy widely opposed by 'allies', including major reconstruction donors like the World Bank as well as the Europeans in NATO and the Afghan Government. The UK and the World Bank want a package of economic measures instead.

The US position is that the Taliban are being increasingly well financed by the opium trade. It is estimated that TalibanCorp will get $100m revenues from the 2008 poppy crop. Their opponents say that the equivalent of napalming peasant fields will strengthen the insurgency.

The US’ prime concern is the military defeat of the Taliban and Karzai is being pulled ever more deeply under the US umbrella (both share a frustration with Pakistan) because no credible alternative has been presented.

What the US wanted from the ‘international community’ was, first, military support and, second, reconstruction funding. The rest of the West has not and cannot deliver the first so it has moved on to providing cash.

Unfortunately, the political consensus for providing cash is not much better than that for providing soldiers – so that all that has happened is that Western engagement has been extended on a wheeze that has merely bought time, and not a lot of that.

The Options

There are two options on offer.

The first is to compromise with Pathan nationalism and Islamic culture at the margins and go in for the ‘kill’, whatever it takes (the US strategy), including, if necessary the destruction of the opium trade.  Then, offer a liberal Kabul regime the smoking ruins and the chance to rebuild.

The second seems to be to treat Afghanistan as a reflection of Western domestic concerns in which a perfect little liberal micro-state is recognized, while the countryside seethes in insurgency and mayhem that is slowly bought off with cash.

Eventually the West, under this option, will bribe and outbid the Taliban - as the British secretly tried to do to clumsy effect in Helmand - and a liberal state will emerge slowly through a civil society guided by people educated in the West and with Western values.

The Karzai-Miliband-Rice Summit in Kabul on 7 February had as its primary purpose to demonstrate unity and cohesion after the near-collapse of Anglo-UK relations in recent weeks. Karzai did his bit to patch up matters and the conflict may considered to have been settled – in public and for the moment.

But the fundamentals for conflict remain in place – the UK has a liberal imperialist agenda, the US has an extirpation agenda and Karzai has a liberal nationalist agenda that requires compromise on liberal values for nationalist ends. In this sense, the UK is both getting under the feet of the Americans and is an ‘aggressor’ against Karzai's sovereign ambitions.

Which view has common sense on its side? Common sense may suggest that the West is on the edge of failure and should plan to withdraw to secure Pakistan and then squeeze the insurgency dry through border co-operation with not only Pakistan but Iran and the SCO, but that sort of common sense is not on the cards.

The ‘international community’ strategy might represent common sense if Western publics were persuaded (which they are not) that the threat from Afghanistan is worth a lot of dead young men and oodles of their tax dosh going into a far-away country instead of their own urban poor or rural backwaters.

Common sense thus leaves us with the American strategy – brute force and cunning to form a State out of blood and a blind eye to niceties.

The rest of the West really has no right to criticize unless it participates more fully yet Governments have no right to send young men and cash into the pit without the support of their domestic populations. And so the tragedy unfolds …

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