Before we make our promised shift of emphasis from the periphery of the West to its Eurasian core, we should take our last look for a long while at the worsening situation in Afghanistan.

The Taliban struck this week at government buildings in Khost, near a US base (deploying three suicide bombers). This suggests that a bloody disruption of the electoral campaign might be on the cards.

To the South, the US has asked Pakistan to deploy troops at key points on its border with Pakistan to restrict Taliban movements. The troubled state of Pakistan needs no further comment here.

To the North, there is a growing crisis in Tajikistan. President Rakhmon has been calling on the population to stockpile food to ensure food security for the next two years as the economy weakens and violence threatens to spread from Afghanistan.

The Political Solution?

Nevertheless, the British are now claiming to have achieved their ends in Helmand, implying a halt to offensive military activity and an attempt to hold ground for the election. The British have also sent another 125 troops to Afghanistan.

Yet the military warns the public of more tough fighting in the weeks to come. What precisely is happening and to what purpose remains confused. Conflicting messages from almost every party engaged in this war means that little that is said can be wholly trusted.

The tactic of holding urban territory is designed to do little more than create the conditions for a sufficiently successful election so that it can subsequently be claimed that democracy has achieved a foothold.

The Afghan people need to believe that the ground held will not be abandoned once they have voted. As it dawns on policymakers that ground cannot be held by military force alone for very long, except at a high cost in men and money, there is little alternative left but a ‘political solution’.

The phrase ‘political solution’ really means cutting deals with warlords and ‘moderate’ Taliban (in effect, less ideological regional affiliates and allies of the Taliban). The theory states that you start the process by hitting these people hard with your 'superior' military force.

Once you have proved your military capability, you send in emissaries for a dialogue. Political deals then detach a region, handing it over to a local elite in return for some central Government presence, some commitment to liberal values, some local control over reconstruction funds and peace.

The Afghan warlords have to believe that the West can sustain a long conflict and be ruthless in pursuing their ends. This assumes that they are not clever enough to log into British news web sites and work out for themselves that there is no real stomach for the fight in the enemy's home camp.

In terms of hearts and minds, the Western effort seems doomed from the start - doubts about its willingness to be ruthless in battle, doubts about its determination to hang on for years, doubts about whether it can protect the people in the provinces from revenge and ethnic cleansing.

Government Through Audit

British Ministers are now touting the strategy in the classic mode of politicians who believe that if you say something loud enough it will happen. In this case, there is an almost obsessive riff on the need to extirpate corruption. Why?

Bribing warlords to get peace is one thing, but subsequent reconstruction funds cannot be seen to be bribes or funds granted without proper auditing. National legislatures will soon close off funding if the cash does not go to build bridges, schools and hospitals.

There is a similar attempt at audit and control in Somalia where the situation is even more dire. The pro-Western Somalis scarcely control the capital city, let alone the countryside.

Without scrutiny, warlords may invest the cash in bolt-holes overseas, open foreign bank accounts, reinvest in illegal trades or build up their local clientage. Yet how precisely the West will sustain peace without some form of personal reward for local elites and their followers has still not been explained.

Much of the chatter is directed at the British public and not at the Afghan people. It is an attempt to give some purpose to military losses and to hold the line against calls to withdraw. The British public need to feel that their soldiery are the 'goodies' in this struggle and this is still not entirely clear.

Fortunately for the Government, the immediate crisis will pass with the Afghan elections. All the UK Government needs then is some kind of relatively inexpensive stalemate between now and the British General Election which has a vaguely ethical underpinning.

The Afghan Perspective

All this presupposes that the 'moderate' Taliban themselves are minded to accept NATO’s implicit offer to deal and that the US and the Afghan Government stay in line with this approach – and that events in Pakistan do not muddy the waters further. 

The strategy becomes questionable if the Taliban are either pushed too hard and make examples of those who enter into dialogue (which has happened in the past) or begin to make serious military progress and see no reason to talk.

US ‘hawks’ really do not like this policy of engagement and are saying so. NATO, and so the British, have to demonstrate to the Afghan people not only that they are in for the long haul but perhaps will talk with ‘moderate’ Islamists elsewhere on equal terms. The precedent is disturbing for some in Washington.

It is hard to promise long term engagement when Western publics see no reason for public spending cuts to finance foreign adventures but 'talks with terrorists' could create significant political problems for Obama in Congress.

If a policy of talking to 'terrorists' catches hold, then many Americans will not be very impressed. We must not forget that we are in the early stages of a peace process further to the west which is ineluctably moving towards some kind of dialogue with Hamas if not with Hezbollah.

Conveniently, almost to order, the Afghan Government delivered a truce with the Taliban in Badghis Province (North West border near Turkmenistan) this week that will (assuming it is as real as it is claimed) permit the August 20th election to be held peaceably in the region.

Our suspicion is that the fine print of this deal would tell us a great deal about what the Afghans and West were prepared to signal as concessions to local insurgents but we do not have access to anything that has not been filtered for propaganda effect.

None of this is what the neo-conservatives or liberal progressives had in mind when they called the original invasion a liberation. The best that can be hoped for is a liberalised moderation of traditional culture in yet another attempt to turn this mountainous country into some semblance of a modern State.

This modernisation attempt is really little more than what the rough-hewn Afghan communists tried in the late 1970s. They emphasised Marxism, secularism and modernisation. The more sophisticated Afghan liberals of today emphasise democracy, human rights and modernisation.

Thirty years of bloody intervention have reduced us to hoping that we can reach the 'square one' of thirty years ago. Whether from inept Soviet or incompetent Western dabbling, Afghanistan has managed to lose three decades of development in the meantime.

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