Afghanistan

Unlike the invasion of Iraq, I supported the war against Afghanistan.

The attack was justified because of the Taliban’s protection of Al Qaeda following the 9/11 outrage. The terrorist attacks were one of the worst experienced by the UK; we lost 67 citizen, more that the Tube bombing four years later.

At the time the Taliban regime show a stupid, almost arrogant contempt of the US Administration. The failure to give over Osama Bin Laden was a monumental mistake.

Although, it felt at the time that President Bush’s actions were slow and considered, there seems to be very little planning for the aftermath of the war.

The American puppet, Hamid Karzai, is weak and corrupt and the NATO forces have been saddled with too many war aims; soldiers have been involved with security, construction, education services, anti-narcotic operations and nation building.

However, the most important of these aims is security. Outside of Kabul, the Allied forces have very little control, and this is after seven years of occupation. Any ground taken during the Summer has inevitably been relinquished during the Winter - although they tell us is going to be different this time. We can only hope this is correct.

One of the worst things that we are doing in Afghanistan is destroying the Poppy crop, the source of a good living for the farmers.

Boris Johnson recently highlighted the folly of this approach; as he rightly puts it, why are we cultivating Poppy crops in Oxfordshire and destroying them in Afghanistan?

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/columnists/borisjohnson/5814860/Its-poppycock-to-grow-crops-here-but-destroy-them-in-Afghanistan.html

We are not going to win hearts and minds with this approach.

So my prescription is that we abandon the anti-narcotic aim and draw up NHS contracts to actually buy in the Poppy crop.

Amongst the other aims we now need to re-focus and concentrate on security as the first priority.

Insofar as we should get involved in nation building we should not be doing this simply through NATO. Most of our allies who have cowered and prospered under the umbrella of NATO have simply not put up the troops to assist the US and UK forces.

We therefore need to turn to those nations who have hitherto been supporting the insurgency and bribe them with an exchange of power and control. We need to invite both Iran and Russia and maybe even China to help with putting in the infrastructure; Afghanistan is just a mass of dirt tracks and it needs roads before it needs (say) education services. We also need to revive efforts in bringing back the majority of the Taliban into the Afghan government; this should be on the proviso that they never allow terrorist training camps on their land in the future.

This approach is not risk-free; with every year that passes the situation in Afghanistan is actually getting far, far worse.

The reality is that the UK and the US are running out of money, and, in the past this has usually meant an early withdrawal. This remains the most likely, and deeply unsatisfactory, outcome.