AFGHANISTAN

Readers of The President And The General (24/6/10) will know that I am not in favour of the war in Afghanistan. I mentioned one reason then, but there are really three.

First, I don't support the "we needed to get rid of the Taliban, since they were bad people" argument. The concept of regime change has no basis in international law; one country can't simply walk into another one and start killing people. True, the war in Afghanistan (unlike, say, that in Iraq) was legal, since it was specifically authorised by the U.N.Security Council, which is allowed to sanction such things. However, the problem with that doctrine is that there are lots of bad people running governments in the world today. To be consistent, we should be petitioning the Security Council to wage war on - to name but a few - Sudan, Zimbabwe, Myanmar, Iran, Cambodia and perhaps even China. That's not going to happen.

Ah, say defendants, but the Taliban were particularly heinous, since they were exporting terror to the rest of the world; and in order to protect ourselves at home, we needed to root out that terror at its source. I don't buy this. I am neither a terrorist nor a security expert. But it doesn't seem to me to be that difficult to find an alternative place from which to cook up new schemes, if my original home is stuffed full of U.S. marines. Yemen, for instance, or Somalia. Or, most pertinently, Pakistan, just across the border. David Cameron may well have ruffled the Pakistani Government's feathers while visiting India last week. But he was merely stating in public what has long been accepted in private, namely that the Taliban are well entrenched in the lawless areas of the country along the frontier with Afghanistan, and are actively supported and protected by elements within the Pakistani intelligence community.

I might perhaps have accepted the above arguments if I thought we were winning. A sort of realpolitik position; OK, we're not morally in the right, or politically consistent, but at least a small part of the world will end up a better place by the time we have finished. However, now comes my third reason. I don't think we are winning, and I don't think we can win. As I wrote earlier, the world's great powers have at various times tried to subdue Afghanistan, the British in the 19th century, the Russians in the 20th. The one thing that stands out clearly from these earlier episodes is that Afghanistan refused to be subdued, and the said great powers were forced to exit with more than just a bloody nose. If Soviet Russia, hardly a delicate flower, couldn't knock its unruly neighbour into line, how can an unwieldy coalition of disparate forces, far from home base, be expected to do better? More sophisticated weaponry might be one answer. But as Vietnam showed, more sophisticated weaponry alone cannot beat stubborn resistance, particularly if the foreign weapons are propping up a notional Government that is widely perceived as both weak and corrupt.

Indeed, the parallels with Vietnam seem to be increasing. The publication in 1971 of the Pentagon Papers, a top-secret Department of Defense analysis of the U.S.' involvement in Vietnam between 1945 and 1967, which showed inter alia that the Johnson administration had lied to both Congress and the general public about its conduct of the war, had a fundamental effect on American opinion, and is widely seen today as the catalyst that ultimately led to the U.S.' humiliating withdrawal and defeat. Last week the whistle-blowing website Wikileaks published 75,000 of an estimated 90,000 classified military records dealing with Afghanistan from 2004-9, and which had been leaked to it. I haven't read them all, by any means. But judging from the comments of people who have read more of them than me, and from the ferocious reaction of the powers-that-be in the U.S., who seem to be more interested in shooting the messenger than in hearing the message, this could be a second Pentagon Papers moment. The war is apparently not going as well as politicians would have us believe; civilian casualties are high, local public opinion is not turning in favour of the coalition, objectives are not being met. Getting out of a mess we should never (in my view) have gotten into will tax the skills of western leaders over the coming years.

Walter Blotscher