Afghanistan: the wasted years and lives

What would winning look like? Underpinning Afghan democracy? Stabilising the Karzai regime? Providing education and healthcare to the Afghan population, both male and female? Delivering law and order? Eradicating corruption? Creating a working economy? Crushing the drug trade?Protecting Pakistan from instability? Or simply defeating the Taliban and creating a stable state?

The truth is on the day of its second "democratic" election, after yeans of pain and more than 200 British deaths, we are no closer to any of these objectives. Throughout that period, our resources have been inadequate, our strategy has been flawed, and many young lives have been spent to little or no effect.

From the point of view of the Afghan, the perception of the Allied forces has gone from the liberators of 2002, to an army of occupation in 2009. Although comparisons with Vietnam are trite and generally wrong, there is one grim similarity. We are seen by the population as propping up a corrupt and largely useless government, one that cannot even deliver basic security and justice to its own people — let alone the more ambitious aspects of government such as education and healthcare. The only beneficiaries of the past several years appear to be the 20 or so corrupt families who have become multimillionaires under Karzai — families that are all associated with him or his warlords.

Corruption is so rife that in the southern provinces the ordinary population are as likely to go to the Taliban for justice as to the government. In Kabul, if your cousin is kidnapped, the last people you go to are the police.

We have only ourselves to blame. The current tension over how long the war will last — from 40 years according to one general, to five from another, to some optimistic lesser time from the Secretary of State, demonstrate how schizophrenic our policy-makers are. This schizophrenia afflicts every aspect of our strategy, be it political, economic, social, judicial or diplomatic.

Take our policy on the poppy trade. Before we went into Afghanistan, Tony Blair accepted responsibility from the G6 for eradicating the Afghan opium trade. We did so little that the American government was publicly fulminating about our incompetence. Then when our forces went into Helmand, the epicentre of opium production, we decided that poppy eradication was contrary to our "hearts and minds" policy.

After a couple more years it dawned on the Government that the poppy was the primary funder of Taliban operations, so we had better eradicate it after all. Then it arose that it was illegal for ISAF (Nato) troops to police "civilian" drugs operations. We had the farce of British police counter-narcotics officers sent to Helmand who were not allowed to leave the base in Lash Kar Gar. Today there is still no co-ordinated eradication and replacement policy.

We will eventually get it right but we have wasted six years and many lives because of our shallow initial understanding of the problem. Similar indecision has affected our military strategy, with the infamous "Platoon House strategy" forced on us by the Karzai government, making Taliban targets of our brave young soldiers and crippling our ability to control the ground.

The question remains, what now? What is necessary is a level of effort and commitment as intense as that which turned around the Iraq conflict, but on a broader and more complex front, and sustained over a longer period.

Afghanistan is a bigger and more difficult country than Iraq. It has complex tribal, linguistic and political divisions. It is grindingly poor. It has no tradition of strong central government. Indeed, it has a 30-year tradition of civil war. Its most problematic areas have a massive economic dependency on the poppy.

But it also has a more direct impact on British and wider Western interests. While there is no direct link between the Taliban and terrorism on the streets of Britain, it could collapse back into a chaotic state that provided a bolt-hole for terrorists. It is undoubtedly the greatest source of heroin on UK streets. Finally, it also has potentially devastating effects on Pakistan — a nuclear power and major keystone in the region's stability.

So even if we put to one side the sacrifices of our brave young soldiers, and the suffering of the ordinary Afghans, this war deserves more resources, more political effort and imagination, and a clearer focus than we are giving it.

We need a military surge which involves a massive increase in force, to both decapitate the Taliban and deny them control of the countryside. We need a security policy that allows ordinary Afghans to get their goods to market without paying levies to the Taliban, common bandits and corrupt policemen, levies that make it pointless growing any cash crop other than poppy.

We need to have a blitz on corruption at the national and provincial level, and an imaginative use of the tribal system to deliver justice at the local level. We need to start implementing our aid policy seriously, rather than the dilettantish dabbling we are currently undertaking. It should focus hard on the economic infrastructure, roads and irrigation, since poverty is the big enemy.

Most of all we need a massive increase in the size of the Afghan National Army. The American counter-insurgency field manual implies that Afghanistan should have about 600,000 indigenous soldiers, about the size of the security forces in Iraq. That number is probably a minimum. It is much greater than the current plans.

This is important for several reasons. It is the only way we will be able to take and hold the countryside. It will put real power into a coherent Afghan State. And it will answer the question in every Afghan mind, namely what happens when the Westerners leave? At the moment the answer is the return of the Taliban. That would not be so with a proper Afghan Army, and as a result the ordinary Afghan would, for the first time, have good reason to support us. This may cost money but it is money the West should be willing to subsidise.

Whoever wins the presidential election, they must understand some things have to happen and progress must now be made. There is a price on the commitment of our troops. The British public are impatient for success and will not tolerate indefinitely our soldiers' involvement in an open-ended conflict.

If we carry through this strategy, we will have a decent chance of creating a stable Afghan state, and of bringing this operation to a conclusion with honour and dignity. If we do not do it then our strategic indecision will throw away all the tactical victories that our brave young soldiers buy with their lives. That would be both a political and a moral failure, indeed it would be a disgrace. If we believe this war was worth starting, we should believe it is worth winning.