UN chief: Nato cannot defeat Taliban by force

All empires flounder in Afghanistan.

This should be a recognised truth. There's a dreadful irony to watching the new American "empire" come up against the reality of war in a distant land that the old empire, England, has already been defeated in.

In boasting about their quick victory in this country five years ago it was almost as if the UK and US were forgetting the lessons of the Russian invasion where Kabul fell in four days. Invading Afghanistan has always been the easy part. As the Russians and the Brits before them have found, the Mujahideen will allow you to march into their cities and they will take to the mountains from where they will mercilessly attack you.

The Russians pounded those same hills for ten long years before accepting the inevitable and leaving.

And now comes the news that Tom Koenigs, the diplomat heading the UN mission in Afghanistan, has admitted that NATO "cannot win" the fight against the Taliban alone and will have to train Afghan forces to do the job.

Mr Koenigs said that training the fledgling Afghan national army to defeat the Taliban was crucial. "They [the ANA] can win. But against an insurgency like that, international troops cannot win."

British commanders have been arguing for a long time that British troops should be moved from Iraq to Afghanistan, which is surely a strong signal that things are not going as well as they have been reported.

Nato commanders on the ground have pleaded for 2,000 more troops, helicopters and armoured vehicles, to little effect.

Des Browne, the defence secretary, made clear yesterday that the future of the alliance was now bound up with the future of Afghanistan. "The Afghan people, our own people and the Taliban are watching us. If we are indecisive or divided, the Taliban will be strengthened, just as all of the others despair," he said.

Attacks have increased fourfold this year and 3,700 people have died, mostly in the south. The US has made 2,000 air strikes since June, against 88 in Iraq.

Last week Acbar, an umbrella group of Afghan and international aid agencies, said the crisis highlighted the "urgent need" for a rethink of military, poverty-reduction and state-building policies.

It is staggering that five years on there is no Afghan army strong enough to defend itself from insurgent attacks. What have we been doing for the past five years? Why has training them been of so little importance?

NATO commanders claim that "the Taliban have been on the "back foot" since Operation Medusa, a battle which killed more than 1,000 insurgents in Kandahar in September, and talk of gaining "psychological ascendancy". "

But we heard all this nonsense during the Russian occupation. The insurgency, as Cheney famously said of Iraq, always seems to be "in it's last throes". The problem with this neo-con mindset is that victory is always seen in purely military terms. It is for this reason that invaders always fail in Afghanistan.

Koenigs seems, at least, to be aware of the problem.

However, Mr Koenigs said any claim of victory was premature. "You can't resolve it by killing the Taliban. You have to win people over. That is done with good governance, decent police, diplomacy with Pakistan, and development," he said. Otherwise the Taliban would regroup in Pakistani refugee camps and madrasas and return in greater numbers next spring.

The Romans brought roads and sanitation, the British brought education and religion. The problem with the new American "empire" is that it appears to bring nothing to the people it supposedly liberates.

For that reason it will always fail.

One of the first things that the Romans and the British established was order. It is a prerequisite to all that follows. In both Afghanistan and Iraq, the US have floundered at that first hurdle. And in both cases they have floundered because of a lack of boots on the ground.

All indications are that Bush is preparing - thank to Baker's commission - to find some way to declare victory and scuttle out of Iraq.

He may linger yet in Afghanistan, it's something empires always seem to do, but I would argue that securing Afghanistan is a far harder task than securing Iraq should have been, as in Iraq there was already a system of government, roads and sanitation.

There is little of the above in Afghanistan where only about 15% of the country is covered in concrete.

The task of building Afghanistan into a healthy, vibrant democracy was always a gargantuan mission. If we lack the ability to ensure democracy in Iraq, then establishing it in Afghanistan will be impossible.

The British army, who succeeded in establishing order in India, Africa and the colonies, found the task of doing so in Afghanistan to be impossible and were eventually driven out.

The US "empire" is about to face the same ignominy.

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tag: Afghanistan, British troops, NATO, "Stay the course", neo-cons