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roachboy · 07-19-2007, 02:08 PM

it almost seems that it either is or is not time in many places

Quote:

We are failing in Afghanistan

The costs of losing this war far outweigh those of Iraq. We must urgently change the approach

Paddy Ashdown
Thursday July 19, 2007
The Guardian

In July 2006, Britain's highly respected commander of international forces in Afghanistan, General David Richards, issued a stark warning: "Afghanistan is a good and winnable war but, at the pace we are proceeding, we need to realise that we could actually fail here." A year on, as yesterday's defence committee report indicates, we are indeed beginning to fail in Afghanistan.

Failure is not yet inevitable. But it is now likely, and will remain likely until we increase resources and redress the disastrous failure of the international community to get its act together. The tragedy is that this is happening despite a high level of professionalism and a lot of raw courage among our soldiers. And it is happening despite some outstanding reconstruction successes outside the hot conflict areas of Helmand province.

I recently had a rather heated conversation with a government minister who assured me that we were winning in Afghanistan because "we were killing more Taliban". But success is not measured in dead Taliban. It's measured in how many more water supplies are being reconnected; how many more people now have the benefit of the rule of law and good governance; how many have the prospect of a job; and, above all, whether we are winning or losing the battle for public opinion, which is central to successful reconstruction.

The polls measuring domestic opinion show falling support for the international presence. The decline has been relatively small, but once this slide begins it can move fast and be difficult to turn around. Modern war is fought among the people, and so is post-conflict reconstruction. The battle for public opinion is the crucial battle: if you lose it, you lose full stop. We have to turn this around very rapidly if we are not to have another, and more painful, failure on our hands after Iraq.

A number of factors have placed us in this perilous situation. We have been left with too few resources - above all, as yesterday's report underlines, too few soldiers' boots on the ground. A balkanisation of strategy has muddled our focus - the British are obsessed with Helmand, but arguably Kandahar and Kabul are the crucial areas. Sharply deteriorating relations between President Karzai's government and that of President Musharaff have hardly helped. But the paramount reason for our failing grip lies with ourselves.

In the task of post-conflict reconstruction, the international community's tendency to repeat what fails is quite bewildering. The fundamental principles are a coherent strategy, unity of voice, and coordinated international action. All three are almost totally lacking in Afghanistan.

One can normally at least rely on the military to understand the importance of unity of command. But in Afghanistan, even this is absent. The US military are not exclusively under the command of Nato's mission in Afghanistan, and frequently conduct operations that run counter to the Nato force's basic doctrine of minimising civilian deaths. Worse, US special forces and CIA operations are run not from the theatre but from Washington. This is exactly the fractured command structure that led to the US disaster in Somalia.

On civilian reconstruction, the situation is worse still. There is no effective coordination. Individual nations' obsession with their own bilateral plans produce duplication, waste and confusion. Our partners in the Afghan government are baffled by the stream of contradictory instructions and the absence of an international partner with a clear view of what must be done. The hapless UN special representative in Kabul, Tom Koenigs, who might have the task of coordinating international effort, has neither the power nor the support from major capitals to do so.

The poppy eradication programme provides a graphic illustration. There are 15 international and local organisations working on it. Britain has the nominal duty of coordinating their actions but has failed to do so. The result? Some £200m spent on the programme - and the last two poppy harvests have been the biggest in Afghanistan's history. I am not at all sure that our strategy on eradication is right. But if we have one, we ought to be able to do better than this. We are putting 1/25th the amount of soldiers and 1/50th the amount of aid per head of population into Afghanistan than we put into Bosnia and Kosovo. That is less in terms of resources than has ever been put into a successful post-conflict stabilisation and reconstruction effort. Does this mean we are bound to fail? Probably not. But "probably not" becomes "definitely yes" if, on top of a starvation of resources, we also fail to organise what we have to best effect.

The costs of failure in Afghanistan are much more dangerous than Iraq. Failure would mean a hugely increased risk of instability in Pakistan, with dangerous implications for the security of the region - and for the internal security of Britain. One result could be the beginning of a wider conflict that would start with war-lordism but end with a Sunni-Shia civil war on a regional scale. And then there is the effect on Nato. One highly respected UK general has told me that he believes failure in Afghanistan could do the same damage to the Atlantic alliance as the UN's failures in Bosnia did to that organisation. What we could be looking at is not just damage to the Atlantic relationship but perhaps eventually even to the US security guarantee for Europe.

Britain has identified Afghanistan as one of its major foreign affairs priorities. We have one of our brightest ambassadors and one of our biggest embassies there. This is right. Perhaps no western country has a greater stake in succeeding in Afghanistan than we do. Perhaps therefore no person has a greater interest in seeing that we turn things around in time to avert failure than our new foreign secretary, David Miliband.

· Paddy Ashdown was high representative for Bosnia and Herzegovina from 2002 until January 2006

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisf...129594,00.html