Читать книгу Cables from Kabul: The Inside Story of the West’s Afghanistan Campaign - Sherard Cowper-Coles - Страница 19

Within weeks of my arrival in Kabul, the team of diplomats and intelligence officers in the British Embassy came to realise that the outlook on the political and security fronts was trending downwards. None of us thought that things were going off a cliff. Nor did any of us judge that the situation was irreversible. But we did believe that, without ‘course corrections’ (the rather coy phrase I used when briefing visitors), the prospects for the Western effort to stabilise Afghanistan were not good.

I realised only much later that I had not understood in 2007 that in truth the underlying situation then was even more serious than I had been prepared to admit. That spring and summer I still thought that we would have a good chance of turning things round merely by adjusting our counter-insurgency tactics, reflecting lessons learned in Malaya, Algeria, Vietnam or Northern Ireland. I had not grasped the extent to which we lacked a coherent overarching political strategy. By nature an optimist, and eager to sound upbeat and constructive to London, I thus started work with the British Embassy team on two initiatives intended to raise our counter-insurgency game.

We did so against a steady drumbeat of indications that security was deteriorating across the country. It wasn’t just the access maps provided by the UN, which showed fewer and fewer districts considered safe for operations by NGOs and other non-parties to the conflict. It was also anecdotal evidence from Afghans, who were no longer able, or at least willing, to visit their cousins in the provinces around Kabul or to travel by road to Kandahar. Added to this were the statistics of a steady rise in incidents, or SIGACTs (SIGnificant ACTions), recorded by NATO forces, and by the reputable Afghan NGO Safety Office. We reported this to London, in a series of telegrams, as objectively as we could.

Although David Miliband and the Afghan team in the FCO, as well as civilian analysts across government, broadly accepted our judgements, the analysts in the Ministry of Defence’s Defence Intelligence Service (DIS) were more doubtful. According to their analysis, security in Afghanistan had actually improved during the 2007 fighting season. What had not improved was the perception of security, which – the DIS conceded – was trending in the wrong direction. But the reality, they claimed, was that the insurgency was contracting.

Such problems were not unique to the British DIS, but affect, to a greater or lesser extent, all military intelligence services. The old joke about ‘military intelligence’ being a self-contradictory phrase is out of date: in my experience, nowadays most military intelligence officers are pretty able. But they are still serving officers, and part of a machine which understandably places a premium, especially in war, on optimism, loyalty and, to some extent, group think. In America as well as Britain, throughout the Afghan conflict we have seen distinct differences between the views of the military analysts and those of their civilian counterparts. For example, as the US media have reported, the analysts of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), deliberately kept quite separate from the Agency’s operations wing, have been consistently gloomier than almost any other analysts, and more consistently right. In February 2011, the American press reported that the US intelligence community had refrained from revising upwards its estimate of Taliban numbers, in order not to upset senior US officers: one source reported that the intelligence community had accepted that issues bearing on the success of the US military effort in Afghanistan were ‘outside [their] lane’.^*

In three and a half years, I sat through scores of intelligence briefings on my regular visits to Helmand. Many were very good indeed. But too many showed little awareness of the situation beyond where the insurgency washed up against British forces, and thus no proper sense of the underlying factors at work in Helmand. I remember in particular several excruciatingly simplistic descriptions of the tribal politics of Helmand (once it had become fashionable for us to ‘understand the tribes’).

Afghanistan has more than its fair share of geography, both human and physical, and of history. Understanding both as best one could was necessary, but never enough, for success. I had arrived in Kabul knowing only a little about Afghanistan’s recent history, and was to leave knowing only slightly more. But that wasn’t for want of reading and listening, whenever and wherever I could. Two periods interested me most: the Soviet intervention and the rise of the Taliban.

The story of the Soviet intervention has now been told in Rodric Braithwaite’s authoritative account, Afgantsy: The Russians in Afghanistan 1979–89.^* As he points out, the Soviet Union sent its forces into Afghanistan in December 1979 only reluctantly, and as a last resort, in response to repeated Afghan requests. They moved in, full of foreboding. Their motives were mixed, but certainly did not include access to a warm-water port on the Persian Gulf, as Western propaganda alleged at the time. The intervention was as much as anything to stop the Afghan Communist Party – the People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan – tearing itself apart. As with the Western intervention just over twenty years later, the Soviet move was meant to be temporary and limited. Inevitably, however, the Russians found that, once in, they could not easily leave, without destabilising even further a situation in which they had now become actors.

The story of the anti-Soviet jihad is relatively well known, thanks in part to films such as Charlie Wilson’s War and books such as Steve Coll’s remarkable Ghost Wars.^† But much of the story is myth. The jihad was more chaotic and anarchic than many Western supporters of the resistance realised. The seven main jihadi groups were supported by Pakistan’s Inter Services Intelligence directorate, and by the CIA and SIS (Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service), using funds from Saudi Arabia and elsewhere in the Muslim world. Often they seemed to be fighting each other almost as much as the regime in Kabul.

And that regime was bad, but perhaps slightly less bad than Western propaganda suggested. The Russians had a deeper understanding of Afghanistan than many of their Western successors. Much of the trouble they encountered was the result of misguided efforts to modernise Afghan society. In this, they had some success with the urban populations, but less with the conservative rural people. When he became General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in 1985, Mikhail Gorbachev soon concluded that Afghanistan was a ‘bleeding wound’ (a sentiment echoed in 2009, by the then senior US General in Afghanistan, Stan McChrystal, in respect of the Marjah district of Helmand).

But it took the Soviet authorities another four years to extract themselves from the quagmire. They did it mainly by installing a strong Afghan leader, Dr Najibullah, and telling him to ‘forget Communism, abandon socialism, embrace Islam and work with the tribes’. This he did, with some success. Out went the hammer and sickle, in came the crescent moon. Out went the People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan; in came the Watan or Nation movement. Najibullah’s former viceroy in the south, General Olumi, was Deputy Chairman of the Defence Committee of the lower house of the Afghan parliament, the Wolesi Jirga, during my time in Kabul. He used to tell me how he had been responsible for the seven provinces radiating out from the southern metropolis of Kandahar, and how he had managed to stabilise them by working with, not against, the tribes.

As the commander of the Soviet Fortieth Army, General Boris Gromov, watched his son march across the bridge over the Oxus River on 20 February 1989, as the last member of the Limited Group of Soviet Forces in Afghanistan to leave, he little guessed that the regime the Russians had left behind would not only survive for three years, but defeat the Western-backed jihad, including in an epic battle later in 1989 during which the mujahideen tried and failed to take Jalalabad from the Afghan Government. What brought the Najibullah regime down, in 1992, was the collapse of the Soviet Union and Boris Yeltsin’s decision to end all support, in money and kind (mostly arms and oil, but also food), to the Government in Kabul. No Afghan government in the last 250 years has survived without massive external subvention of one kind or another, and Dr Najibullah’s government was no different.

When the Najibullah regime fell in 1992, there followed one of the darkest periods in Afghanistan’s history: a bloody and bitter civil war between different regional warlords, many of whom are still active, and even in power, today. Most of west Kabul, and many other areas of the country, were devastated in the fighting.

As the last Taliban Ambassador to Pakistan, Mullah Abdul Salam Zaeef, has recorded in a remarkable memoir, My Life with the Taliban,^* the movement began in the villages of Kandahar province in reaction to the depredations and anarchy of the warlords. The Taliban (from the Arabic for ‘student’) were religious zealots, who preached (and delivered) austerity, justice and a fundamentalist brand of Islam resembling the Wahhabi puritanism of the tribes of central Arabia.

Moving out from rural Kandahar, the new movement gradually took control of much of the south and east of Afghanistan. By 1996 the whole country, apart from the Panjshir Valley and one or two other pockets in the north, was in the hands of the Taliban. Given what the warlords had done to the country, it was perhaps not surprising that many Afghans, including Hamid Karzai, had at first welcomed the arrival of the Taliban in Kabul in 1996. The new authorities (if that is what they were) stood for law, of a sort, and order, and against chaos and corruption. They were ignorant and primitive and naive, but they could hardly be worse than the appalling anarchy which had preceded them. Only gradually did the cruelty and incompetence of Taliban rule sink in, particularly among urban populations with a more Westernised approach to life. For the educated and enlightened women of Afghanistan’s cities and towns and villages, the new restrictions were especially appalling: a nightmare of medieval oppression, from which there seemed no escape.

One Afghan patriot, a Soviet-trained pilot who had reached a senior position in the Air Force under Communist rule, somehow stayed on through all this. He told me how much the Taliban disliked foreigners of all kinds. He saw the Taliban first and foremost as conservative religious nationalists, who stood for Islam, or at least an Afghan version thereof, and against outside influence of all kinds (except of course for that of their sponsors across the border in Pakistan). He spoke of the resentment the Taliban felt for the Arab ‘guests’ whose presence was known only to a few.

The extent to which the Taliban were aware of the horrors being plotted by Osama bin Laden and their other Arab and international guests has been much debated. For myself, I am persuaded that they were aware in general terms of bin Laden’s interest in global jihad against the West. But I wonder how much they knew about the plans for the atrocities of 9/11. All of this has been analysed in detail in a new study by Alex Strick van Linschoten and Felix Kuehn,^* the only two Westerners now living unprotected in Kandahar. They make the case for a sharp divide, in terms of both perceptions and operations, between the Taliban and Al Qaeda. It is a case which I and many others find close to conclusive, but it is an inconvenient one: as the US Special Representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan Richard Holbrooke once remarked to David Miliband and me, it suggests that, in the Western campaign against the Taliban, we may be fighting the wrong enemy in the wrong country – something the House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee came close to saying outright in its report on Afghanistan, published on 2 March 2011.^†

Plenty of contemporary accounts record the surprise and horror with which the Taliban and many Afghans greeted the news of the attacks on New York and Washington on 11 September 2001. Fewer witnesses report the turmoil which US and Western demands that the Taliban hand over Osama bin Laden and his lieutenants created among those then ruling most of Afghanistan. The same Afghan patriot who described to me life in the Afghan Defence Ministry under the Taliban also told me of the shuras (assemblies of elders) in Kandahar which debated the American demand. He was convinced that the tide in those discussions was moving in favour of expelling bin Laden, on grounds both of expediency (and survival of the Taliban government) and of justice (in that bin Laden had abused the precepts of melmastia or hospitality). But turning that tide into a majority would have taken more time than Western governments thirsting for violent revenge were prepared to give. After the humiliation of 9/11, America needed to kick some butt.

What happened after Western special forces, and intelligence agencies, helped the Northern Alliance (the anti-Taliban united Islamic front of ethnic groups mainly from the north) overthrow the Taliban regime, and drive the Taliban first from the north, and then from Kabul and Kandahar, is not for this book. But the key point is that the Taliban were not defeated then, or ever, but simply driven from power, and pushed out and down, south and east. The floodwaters had been pushed back, but they had not been drained. Worse still, at the hastily convened peace conference at the Hotel Petersberg on the Rhine outside Bonn in early December 2001 the vanquished were not represented: the resulting peace, and the political process that followed it, was a victors’ peace, imposed without even the reluctant consent of those who had ruled most of Afghanistan for the preceding five years.

It was against that historical background that we in the British Embassy launched our two initiatives. The first stemmed from my early conviction (which grew the longer I spent in Afghanistan) that garrisoning the insurgency-infected areas of the Pashtun belt with troops from outside would deliver at best only temporary and local security. In many respects, it was immaterial whether those troops came from Peoria or Plymouth or the Panjshir Valley: American GIs, British squaddies and Tajik Afghan National Army soldiers (who did not speak Pashtu) were all aliens in the eyes of the Pashtun populations they were supposed to protect. Nor would we or any conceivable Afghan government ever have the force density to cover all areas in the south and east of Afghanistan then in the grip of the insurgents.

I remembered what a senior British officer had told me over lunch before I left for Afghanistan that spring. He said that, when coalition troops went into an Arab village to kill or capture members of Al Qaeda in Iraq, the inhabitants of the village would get out of the way, closing their doors and shutters and generally keeping a low profile: they had no wish to get involved in a fight. In Afghanistan, on the other hand, the risks were much higher. When a Chinook put down outside a Pashtun compound on a kill or capture operation, every male in the neighbourhood over the age of about ten would, rather than hiding, seize his Kalashnikov and come out to attack the intruders. In the British officer’s view, Afghanistan was a much more dangerous operating environment than Iraq. In Afghanistan, or at least the Pashtun tribal areas, killing foreigners was a kind of national sport – a bit like village cricket in Sussex.

I also knew that in the nineteenth century Britain had discovered through long and bitter experience on the North West Frontier of the Indian Empire that the only way to pacify or stabilise the Pathan (or Pashtun) tribal areas beyond the Indus was to empower the tribes to secure and govern those areas for themselves. But we had taken more than half a century to learn this lesson. At first, in the 1830s and 1840s, and again in the 1870s and 1880s, the Victorian forerunners of today’s neo-cons had advocated a forward policy, in which the British Indian Army and its auxiliary forces had themselves garrisoned the tribal areas. This policy, of trying to secure these areas ourselves, had resulted in the two disastrous Anglo-Afghan Wars of the nineteenth century. There had followed what was known as the modified forward policy, in which the garrisons from British India had been restricted to key towns and main supply routes. That hadn’t worked either.

It had taken Lord Curzon, as viceroy of India from 1899 to 1905, to develop the policy which had kept the peace, more or less, on the North West Frontier for the first half of the twentieth century. Known as the closed-door policy, this had involved bringing British forces back east across the Indus and then using a network of political agents to get the tribes, or, more particularly, the tribal maliks (rulers) and elders, to take prime responsibility for security and governance. The political agents had been mostly officers from the Indian Army, who had transferred to the Indian Civil or Political Services and had spent an average of sixteen years on the Frontier between home leaves. One of them, Major (John) Gordon Lorimer, had produced what is still the best ever Pashtu grammar, published in 1902 by the Oxford University Press. A copy sits proudly on the shelves of the British Ambassador’s office in Kabul. Lorimer’s distinguished great-grandson, Major General John Lorimer, late of the Parachute Regiment, was the Commander of 12th Mechanised Brigade in Helmand for the six-month summer rotation in 2007 – and, almost as important, a lapsed classicist like me. John later became an outstanding MOD spokesman.

If, in those days, the tribes behaved, more or less, they were rewarded with bags of gold, or the equivalent. But, if they misbehaved, they were punished. At first, this was accomplished by columns of infantry and cavalry, such as the Malakand Field Force, so memorably described by Lieutenant W. L. S Churchill of the 4th Hussars in his book of the same name. Later, after the First World War, it was the Royal Air Force which was used to mete out the punishment, in what was described, in an Air Ministry pamphlet of the time, as Imperial Air Policing. (The American drone strikes in Pakistan are, of course, the modern equivalent of Imperial Air Policing.) The RAF, founded only in 1918, was in action more or less continuously on the North West Frontier between 1919 (when the Third Anglo-Afghan War ended) and the Partition of the Indian subcontinent in 1947.

With all that in mind, I recommended to London that we should encourage the Americans to look seriously at establishing a pilot scheme for what we called Community Defence Volunteers. The idea was simple: every male in the rural areas of the Pashtun belt had a Kalashnikov, or access to one. We should ensure that those guns were turned outwards against intruders, in the form of the Taliban, rather than inward, on whomever – if anyone – represented the Afghan Government locally, or on a rival tribe or drug mafia. The principle would be one of armed neighbourhood watch, or armed first response. The hope would be that such individuals, perhaps paid a small retainer, perhaps wearing a green armband or some other Islamically correct form of identification, would provide the first line of deterrence to intruders trying to intimidate the villagers. They would be provided with communications to enable them to call for help as soon as trouble appeared, but they would be expected to hold the line until that help arrived.

An essential condition was that any such local volunteers should be under the supervision of a tribally balanced assembly of local elders, as part of a wider political settlement, to be refereed by the UN and the international community more generally. Such volunteers would be there to keep the peace, once there was a peace to keep. Afghan forces of any kind, in or out of uniform, could not be expected to fight a full-blown counter-insurgency campaign.

I was keen to stress that we were not advocating the raising of militias, with uniforms and trucks and a formal structure. Instead, we were proposing something which went with the grain of tribal society in the areas where we trying, with very limited conventional forces, to protect the population. As one wag in the Embassy observed, it was not so much Dad’s Army as Dadullah’s Army: indeed the name harked back to the Home Guard, who had originally been known as Local Defence Volunteers. I also had in mind the system of arbakai, or tribal levies, which had protected Afghanistan’s eastern border under the monarchy.

The other important point was that I was not suggesting that ISAF proceed full tilt with setting up such a scheme right across the insurgency-infected areas. Rather, I thought we should experiment with a pilot scheme which involved the Afghan authorities at least as much as ISAF forces. Such a test drive of the idea would require parallel political and economic progress. Only thus could one ensure that the volunteers were under proper political control.

This first idea received a generally positive reaction from London. Everyone could see the wisdom of at least trying something on those lines, and of how such an approach tracked with Britain’s historical experience, in Afghanistan and elsewhere. An experiment made sense.

The same could not be said, however, of the second idea. Even before I had arrived in Afghanistan, I had been puzzled by the British Army’s policy of rotating whole brigades through Helmand every six months. I knew that successful counter-insurgency needed experienced leadership, with detailed knowledge of the human as well as the physical terrain. It also needed leadership known to the local population, and known by them to be committed for the long haul. I was aware that Sir Gerald Templer had been asked to do a tour of at least two years in Malaya, and that in Northern Ireland we had soon stopped rotating every six months the key brigade commanders in the province.

A further critical piece of background was that the standard US Army tour in Afghanistan at that time was fifteen months, without a break. The only exception to this was if a member of a GI’s immediate family was dangerously ill. In my view, fifteen months without a break was far too long: many GIs, particularly those in some of the toughest bases in the eastern mountains, seemed to be sustained on their tours only by happy pills or the muscular brand of evangelical Christianity promoted by the US Army chaplains, or both. But there had to be a balance somewhere between the continual rotation of British forces and the excessive demands placed on American forces.

I therefore recommended to London, in the second of two telegrams, that we should look at the possibility of moving the senior British officers in Helmand, and other key officers, particularly those in intelligence, on to longer tours. They could do so on new terms, akin to those of the civilians in the field. Perhaps they could have the option of having their families quartered in the Gulf or Oman, or of a long weekend back in Britain every two months. The idea would be to establish a standing Helmand Brigade of the British Army. I also recommended that the fighting units, the battalions or battle groups, should continue to be rotated every six months, or perhaps at even shorter intervals, on a staggered basis, throughout the year, thus spreading the load on the RAF air bridge.

I gained some encouragement from learning that senior ‘purple’ officers in the Ministry of Defence (MOD) in Whitehall and at the Permanent Joint Headquarters at Northwood in Middlesex (PJHQ) – that is, those in tri-service jobs – were sympathetic to such an approach. But the top brass of the British Army did not favour such a change. The Army was organised on the basis of brigades, and fought on the basis of brigades. This was an Army matter, not one for civilians or the PJHQ to interfere in. This argument had a number of holes in it. One was that several brigades were formed specifically for the purpose of the Helmand tour, and dissolved shortly after returning to the UK. A second flaw was that operations which involved the whole brigade were few and far between.

But the main reason why I rather cheekily stuck my head above the parapet was my view that the six-month rotation system risked the British Army in Helmand continually reinventing the wheel. In three and a half years working in and on Afghanistan, I saw eight different brigadiers and their brigades in Helmand. Those officers were without doubt some of the brightest and best in the British Army and the Royal Marines. But, with important and laudable variations, I saw a pattern repeat itself.

Each brigade would spend months or even years preparing for deployment. Preparations complete, the brigade would be moved gradually out to theatre, under a procedure known as Relief in Place (or, more colloquially, as the RIP). As thousands of troops flew out from the air base at Brize Norton in Oxfordshire in one direction, so thousands flew back. The strain on the RAF’s fleet of ageing Tristar troop transports was immense. Once in theatre, the brigadier and his team would work as closely as possible with the FCO and DFID teams in Helmand, as well as with the Afghans and, of course, the Americans. They clearly understood the importance of politics, particularly tribal politics, and of development. They grasped the need for strategic patience, and for consolidating the gains made by the previous brigade. They signed up to the ‘comprehensive approach’.

And yet, in almost every case, each brigadier did what he could be only expected to do, as he enjoyed what had to be the highlight of his professional career as a soldier: commanding a brigade in war. He planned and launched a major kinetic operation. That is what soldiers do, with glory at the back of every half-decent warrior’s mind. Each operation made local, tactical sense in Helmand. Each undoubtedly suppressed Taliban activity in its chosen area. Each might have happened even if there had been no six-month rotation system. Each was of course cleared through the ISAF machine. But, through no fault of the individual brigadiers, few of these operations were genuinely part of a serious overarching political strategy. None made more than a cursory nod in the direction of the US Army Counterinsurgency Field Manual’s reminder that counterinsurgency (or COIN) is mainly politics. Many consisted of little more than, in one Helmand brigade commander’s memorable phrase, ‘mowing the lawn’. If Ministers or officials in London questioned the need for a particular operation, they did so usually because they wanted to be assured that casualties would be kept to a minimum, not because they wondered how the operation fitted into a coherent national-level COIN strategy.

I was fortified in my conviction that longer tours for some officers made sense by an encounter during one visit to Helmand. A brave young officer who knew one of my sons came up to me and asked for a private word. He told a tale of disappointment. The efforts his battle group were making were just not producing lasting success. The strategy of training up the Afghan Army and Police to ‘hold’ areas ‘cleared’ by Task Force Helmand couldn’t work in the timescales then envisaged. Much later, when he was back in England, he told me privately: ‘many senior … officers … are covering up failings or trying to achieve short-term … solutions which actually lead to longer term failings’, adding, typically, that he would ‘leap at the chance to go out again [to Afghanistan] tomorrow’.

Despite the initial rebuff, I kept up the pressure for a bit. But after a while I gave up, because, absent a coherent wider political strategy, the effort needed to make such a change hardly seemed worth the trouble. Yet, in January 2011, the News of the World reported what MOD sources were promising at last: ‘TOP BRASS TO SPEND YEAR IN HELMAND’. We shall see.

The debate on CDVs or local defence forces ran on for years. The initial reaction from the Americans and the Afghans was sceptical. No one wanted a return to the bad old days of warlords and militias. Too many people had unpleasant memories of the way in which local private armies had terrorised Afghanistan between the fall of the Najibullah regime in 1992 and the arrival in Kabul of the Taliban in 1996. And there were more recent stories too, of how militias sponsored by Western agencies had driven the Taliban from power in 2001 and had had a free run of much of the country until NATO and the Afghan authorities had gradually asserted themselves. An Auxiliary Afghan Police Force had been raised in 2006, and then disbanded, for reasons which were never entirely clear to me. The US Embassy and the State Department were particularly hostile.

But, as the years passed, US forces started to experiment with rather more radical – and risky – ideas for raising local militia-type forces. So by 2011 this may have been an idea, invented this time in CentCom (US Central Command at Tampa in Florida) rather than in south London, whose time had come. But it will need careful handling. Back in 2007 we were probably too forward with our proposals. In the long run, however, Afghanistan will need some sort of armed neighbourhood watch scheme, but only as part of a wider political settlement which establishes representative local shuras of elders to whom such volunteers must be accountable.

Given that only 3 per cent of the soldiers in the Afghan National Army are Pashtuns from the south, some sort of more locally based recruitment for the Army has to make sense. Later in my time, I suggested that, in parallel with Community Defence Volunteers, we should look at experimenting with more territorial regiments in the Afghan Army, on the model of the British or Indian Armies. The principle would be unity through diversity, as any ceremonial gathering of British soldiers with all their different dress uniforms suggests. I always thought that the 1st Battalion The Helmandi Rangers, wearing some sort of local dress, might be more willing to garrison the Province than a mixed but predominantly Tajik unit of a homogenised Afghan National Army on a Soviet or American model. But, whatever shape the Afghan security forces take, the key point is that they can only help underpin a political settlement, they cannot deliver it – at least not an acceptable one.

The third area on which the British Embassy started to do some serious thinking in the summer of 2007 was what we then called reconciliation. By that we meant efforts to bring over at local or tactical level insurgents, either individually or in small groups. Our analysis made much of the different strands in the insurgency. Many of those we were fighting were said to be motivated more by greed than by ideology. There were the ‘ten-dollar-a-day Taliban’, paid to fight; the ‘have-a-go Taliban’, opportunistically joining the insurgency in order to secure material advantage for themselves; and the ‘farmboy Taliban’, who harvested their crops by day and fought by night. On the basis more of wishful thinking than of any detailed understanding of the insurgency, we expressed the view that, given the right carrots on offer from the Afghan authorities, many or even most of the insurgents would change sides.

The papers on this that we sent to London, and Lashkar Gah, and then to Washington, excited much interest. Everyone knew that all insurgencies that ended satisfactorily did so through a political deal of some kind. Patriotic Afghans knew this too, and, with our support, some of them started to put out feelers.

But we were naive in expecting reconciliation to occur on any significant scale in the absence of an overarching political process leading to a new political settlement. Just as the fighters of ZANU-PF would not have come in from the Rhodesian bush in 1980 without the political umbrella of a Lancaster House settlement, so large numbers of Afghan insurgents would not come in, and will not come in, until they can do so as part of a wider peace process. Of course, there may be local deals. And individuals, and individual groups, may change sides. But little will happen on the wholesale scale we need without the larger political framework.

Only later did we distinguish between what we later called reintegration (bringing over lower-level fighters) and reconciliation (deals with more senior Taliban commanders). And many of us underestimated the extent to which the insurgency was driven by ideas as opposed to more mercenary motives: much the same eclectic blend of fundamentalist Islam, conservatism, nationalism and xenophobia that had propelled the anti-Soviet insurgency. And ideas had to be fought with ideas. But our instinct – that the problem was in essence political, and needed to be treated politically – was right.

^* Gareth Porter, ‘Deferring to Petraeus, NIE Failed to Register Taliban Growth’, IPS Report, 14 February 2011.

^* London: Profile Books, 2011.

† London: Penguin, 2004.

^* London: Hurst, 2010.

^* http://www.cic.nyu.edu/afghanistan/docs/gregg_sep_tal_alqaeda.pdf

† http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm201011/cmselect/cmfaff/c514-ii/c51401.htm