The death or capture of an enemy commander is always a big battlefield event — but rarely a decisive one. So the capture of Abdul Ghani Baradar, the Taleban’s top military commander, in a joint US-Pakistani operation announced eight days ago, followed two days later by the detention of another Taleban leader, Mullah Kabir, followed by a claim on Wednesday that nearly half the Pakistan-based Taleban leadership is now in custody — these are all important events.
But their greatest importance lies not in what they are, but what they tell us. First, we must reconsider the assumption that Pakistan was neither willing nor perhaps able to tackle all four insurgent groups to which it plays host (al-Qaeda, the Pakistan Taleban, the Afghan Taleban and Punjabi extremists) at the same time.
And we assume, therefore, that their policy was to act against al-Qaeda to please the US, against the Pakistan Taleban and Punjabi extremists to save themselves, but to do nothing serious about the Afghan Taleban, who were, of course, originally their own creation. At last, it seems, they have decided to open the way to squeezing them between General Stanley McChrystal’s Helmand hammer in the North and Pakistan’s anvil in the South.
And second, it tells us that if the Pakistani Government feels strong enough to do this, then it must be more secure than many people thought. Since Islamabad is crucial to progress in Afghanistan, this is all, apparently, good news.
The other piece of good news is that we do, at last, seem to be getting our act together on the battlefield. We are now following the right military strategy — protecting the people, not chasing the enemy. We have limited our aims to the achievable and matched our resources to our objectives. True, the US Marines have found progress harder than they expected and we are still some way from the point where the local governor of Marjah (an expatriate who has spent the last 15 years in Germany and who was appointed by President Karzai without reference to the local shura) can travel to his office by road rather than in a US helicopter. True also that the real test for the McChrystal plan lies not in Marjah, from where the Taleban has largely fled, but in getting them out of much larger Kandahar, to which we must turn shortly. And none of this will be made easier by the baleful and continuing examples of the inadvertent killing of civilians, which erodes support for Nato and increases it for the Taleban.
Nevertheless, on the military front, if recent progress continues, it is now possible to turn the momentum on the battlefield in our favour in the next few weeks or months.
So we appear to have made two substantial steps forward recently in Afghanistan.
But the problem is that getting two things right will not be enough. We have to get everything right if we are to turn things round. If you win the military battle in these kinds of wars, but lose the political one — you lose.
And this, I fear, is still where we are. While the new Rolls-Royce military team starts to turn things round on the ground, there is the complete absence of any similar heavyweight international leadership on the political front. Here, we have either made no progress or moved backwards.
International co-ordination has not improved. It has, if anything worsened — which is why President Karzai was able to use the vacuum where a solid and united international position should have been, to take unilateral control of appointments to the Electoral Complaints Commission, which proved such an embarrasment to him in the presidential elections a few months ago.
Meanwhile, although Western military resources have increased, the EU has continued to prove completely incapable of finding the trainers necessary to fulfil one of our key exit strategies — the retraining and reform of the Afghan police. This alone makes the achievement of President Obama’s target of starting withdrawal in the middle of next year extremely unlikely.
Meanwhile, there is still no single, effective co-ordination body for the international community’s combined effort in Afghanistan, nor, crucially, any single person invested with the political will (especially from the White House) to bang international heads together. General McChrystal, who might play this role, seems reluctant to do so.
Our second problem is President Karzai. After his election some hoped for a Karzai II, leading a Government purged of corruption, the most corrosive element undermining his support (and ours). These hopes have been completely disappointed. Indeed, but for the Afghan Parliament’s determination not to allow Cabinet nominees tainted by corruption, things might be much worse than they are.
Continuing talk of getting rid of Karzai is nonsense and would create more problems than it would solve. The right thing to do is to shift some of our activity and money away from the institutions of Kabul and use it to build up local government. This would run far better with the grain of tribal structures in the country; it would send a clear message to President Karzai that we rely on him less than he thinks and it would provide the best context for a genuine attempt at reconciliation with the Taleban, when this becomes a feasible proposition — which it isn’t yet.
Finally we must remember that this war can be lost as easily in the bars and front rooms of Western countries as in the mountains and the deserts of Afghanistan. The recent Dutch decision to withdraw troops is not unique. Support for the war is weak and weakening in Canada, the third largest contributor of troops. And last Tuesday’s BBC Newsnight poll showing that 69 per cent of UK citizens think that the war is unwinnable ought to send a shiver through No 10.
The truth is that Western governments — and most especially our own — have completely failed to make it clear that winning this war is their first priority and completely failed to convince the public that it can be won. Contrast the recent military success in preshaping public expectations on casualties before Operation Moshtarak with the complete absence of anything similar on strategy from the Government.
Unless we address these continuing political failures in Afghanistan — and soon — then once again the capture of our enemies, our success on the battlefield and the sacrifices of our soldiers may well not prove enough.
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