Yes: We've lost sight of our aims. I'm no longer sure why we're there
Peter Beaumont, the Observer's foreign affairs editor, says the terms for a satisfactory end to conflict and the purpose of our presence are so ill-defined as to be almost indecipherable
Why are we fighting in
Afghanistan? I ask because I am no longer sure. And not being sure, like a majority of Britons, I cannot conceive what victory might look like. That makes me think we should not be there. Once, I recall, the idea was to help create the beginnings of a modern, democratic state where the lives of ordinary people would be improved. Women's rights would be supported and a free press encouraged. War lords trundled off the scene. What are our aims in Afghanistan right now?
The reality is that the disappearance of the rhetoric of rebuilding since Obama became president has left a gaping wound at the core of a policy now centred on attempting to strengthen the legitimacy of a corrupt, nepotistic Afghan government and its security institutions. My views have not been prompted by the events of last week – the death of
five British soldiers shot by an Afghan policeman. For, despite the hurt for the families of the dead men, as a solitary event, it tells us nothing much we can usefully extrapolate about the meaning of war.
Instead, my disillusionment began during a month-long trip to Afghanistan last year. I came away convinced the war was failing and the claimed victories often hollow things. What bothered me most was a problem of definition of the dynamics of the conflict: the realisation that the Taliban, whether I liked it or not, were more representative of a facet of the country than any outsiders.
The question of what we are doing in Afghanistan is crucial not least because there tend to be two kinds of war. In wars of "supreme emergency", as Winston Churchill described the conflict of national survival that was the Second World War, the political is largely subordinated to military contingency. In the other category of war, the kind being conducted in Afghanistan today that falls outside of the definition of emergency, it might be expected that the military strategy should be subordinated to clearly enunciated political ambitions.
Yet when it comes to Afghanistan, not only the terms for what would be a satisfactory and honourable conclusion to the conflict but also what purpose our continuing war serves there have become so ill-defined as to be almost indecipherable.
On Friday, Gordon Brown attempted once again to define Britain's vital and necessary interest in fighting a war in Afghanistan, a performance that was striking in its incoherence and internal contradictions. On one hand, Brown argued that it was a conflict that must be "prosecuted out of necessity" to protect this country and the wider world from terrorism. On the other, he warned President Hamid Karzai that in a country that had become a "byword for corruption" and cronyism, he would no longer put Britain's soldiers in harm's way unless Karzai improved.
Brown's definition of necessity, then, is an odd one. Far from being an absolute, according to Gordon Brown and his speech writers, the war could become less necessary should Karzai not mend his ways. It is an important point because the notion of necessity is regarded by moral theorists of conflict as critical in defining whether war is justifiable. Many recognise that for a war to be necessary and therefore just, it must meet two criteria: relating to both the imminence and the nature of the perceived threat.
This raises a second important question: whether the continuation of the war in Afghanistan can be justified, in any case, when it is so narrowly framed in terms of a potential terrorist threat. For while terror is always awful and often deeply socially corrosive, in the vast majority of cases it is not something that poses an existential threat to national survival. Parsed in this way, what Brown appears to be arguing for is a conflict that serves the function of a counterterrorism strategy at long distance, conducted, despite his protestations that it is not a war of choice, with such conditions now attached to make it an elective conflict.
The cause of the war camp has not been assisted by the sense of deep paralysis over Afghanistan that has been emanating from the White House. There have, it is fair to say, been other arguments proposed for continuing with the war far more cogent than Brown's. Paddy Ashdown, the man once slated for the role of UN envoy to the country before he was vetoed by President Hamid Karzai, has framed it in terms of regional stability. If Afghanistan falls to the jihadis, Ashdown suggested last week, then Pakistan – a nuclear armed state – risks being next.
Others have made the case for continuing the war on humanitarian grounds. The consequence of the departure of foreign troops, they say, would lead to renewed civil war and a betrayal of the Afghan people who thought they had been promised so much. A fair and understandable concern.
Yet it is what we have made in Afghanistan that concerns me the most: a shabby accommodation with crooks, drug dealers and warlords, and with electoral bandits such as Karzai whose survival is only possible because of the international mission which props him up, even as it grows ever more weary of its protege. Karzai has cosied up to many of the war lords who once tore Afghanistan apart, who include his running mate and now vice president, Marshal Fahim, a man accused by Human Rights Watch of having the "blood of many Afghans on his hands". We have put police uniforms on the back of militiamen with more loyalty to tribal figures than the Ministry of the Interior, and built up a national army in which the majority Pashtuns are badly under-represented.
The consequence has been a country-wide crisis of legitimacy and authority, exacerbated by widespread feelings among Afghans that those in power, at every level, operate with almost complete impunity.
The terrible tragedy here is that in the aftermath of the fall of the Taliban following 9/11 there was probably an opportunity to transform a country so long convulsed by conflict that was squandered by incompetence, wrong-headedness and lack of attention to its problems as the war in Iraq was launched.
The difficulty is that I still can't see what victory would look like. Or even something close to it. So what are required now are the same words delivered by
Obama to US Marines at Camp Lejeune on 27 February this year that comprised a road map for the end of the conflict in Iraq. I've changed only one word. "Today, I have come to speak to you about how the war in Afghanistan will end. To understand where we need to go, it is important... to understand where we now stand."
Because without an end in sight, without the knowledge that we will be leaving soon, without clear aims the public can understand, without terms to describe what a satisfactory conclusion might look like, the war in Afghanistan is a blank cheque written in the blood of Afghan civilians and the foreign soldiers fighting there. Drawn on a morally bankrupt account.
No: It would be a betrayal of the people we promised to stand by
Jason Burke, the Observer's expert on al-Qaida, says that now we have a new strategy in place under Barack Obama, we owe it to the Afghans to do our utmost to make it succeed
It was November 1999. The winter was closing in, a sharp wind blew through the deserted streets of Kabul and a hard, cold rain drummed on battered iron roofs. There was almost no electricity, a handful of telephone lines, a single restaurant. In the city's rundown stadium, I watched a woman convicted of murdering her husband executed and two thieves have their hands amputated. In a hospital, mothers knelt helplessly beside their starving, chronically ill children. That the Afghans were abandoned by the west was taken as the normal state of affairs. No one saw any reason that this should change soon.
That view was understandable. The west had been happy to aid the Afghans' resistance in their brutal fight against Soviet occupiers in the 1980s, but had then made no serious effort to stabilise, reconstruct or develop the country after the war's end in 1989. No real effort had been made either to halt the civil war of the 1990s or help its victims. And the only foreigners who Afghans saw by the end of the decade were rare NGO workers or reporters.
The west did suddenly get interested in Afghanistan again. Not through any sudden fit of altruism but because Osama bin Laden, a Saudi, launched a successful attack in America. In the post-cold war world, Afghanistan had been a shadowy corner on the geopolitical stage. Post 9/11, it found itself blinking in the spotlight. Now, after eight years of war, the world is getting tired of this truculent, gritty country and it seems it is time for Afghanistan and Afghans to bow out once again.
That we in Britain should be debating an withdrawal of our forces from Afghanistan is healthy and right. No one wants to keep our soldiers there any longer than necessary. That we should even be contemplating a precipitate and unilateral departure is a betrayal of all those in Afghanistan who once believed, often against their better judgment, our promises to, for once, stand by them.
Events since those dark days at the end of the 1990s have brought more than many Afghans ever hoped for and more than most ever feared. The west has got some things right, but has got many badly wrong. Our actions have been marked by miserliness, misunderstandings and muddleheaded stubbornness. Even in 2002 and 2003, when Afghans of every background were optimistic about the western presence in their country, the levels of resources dedicated to what was then seen as a "peacekeeping/nation-building" operation remained among the lowest of any such intervention of recent years.
Proportional to the population, a tenth of the international troops were deployed as in East Timor, a twentieth of those in Kosovo. The aid pledged, much of which never arrived, was per capita a sixteenth of that spent in the first two years of the intervention in Bosnia.
The realisation that the Taliban were back in force changed little. Troops were dripped in piecemeal through 2006 and 2007 despite an evident need for a radical change of approach. The nature of the fighting and of the enemy was totally misunderstood. In 2007, I watched a British patrol demolish a house with heavy machine guns, mortars, anti-tank missiles and finally a 500lb bomb dropped by a jet. The result was a single (unconfirmed) kill.
In the villages, locals turned to the Taliban rather than corrupt, inefficient judges and teenagers took up arms to fight "the invader" because what their clerics told them made sense. In Britain, politicians railed against Karzai, forgetting that he owed his position almost entirely to the continued support of the west. By 2008, the situation had deteriorated so far that, with the Taliban established in outlying districts of the city, friends in Kabul who had returned in 2002 were wondering where to go if forced to flee again.
Now, finally, with Barack Obama in the White House and an American military which, for all its faults, has shown an impressive ability to learn (or relearn), we have in place the strategy that we should have had years ago. It depends on restricting the air strikes and the indiscriminate firepower, deploying troops to protect the population rather than treating them as a neutral terrain on which to hunt insurgents, training local troops, creating secure physical space for commerce, political space for some kind of process potentially leading to the eventual creation of a broadly legitimate government structure linked to broader regional initiatives. But will this strategy work?
Probably not. Even key advisers admit that chances of success are limited. Errors made are too grave, structural problems inherent in the multinational effort too great, scepticism and fatigue of western domestic populations too deep. The Afghan National Army is far from the ethnically balanced institution it is supposed to be and expanding it risks aggravating fractures rather than building a new solidarity. The police are a catastrophe, opium is turning the country into a narco-state, support for the Taliban from elements within the Pakistani security establishment continues. To complicate things further, there is the fact that this is now an American war. Two-thirds of the troops in Afghanistan are American. At Bagram airport, there are more US helicopters held in reserve than we have in the entire country. A UK departure would prompt an unseemly rush of European nations for the exit but would not necessarily change much.
It is true that many arguments for staying engaged in Afghanistan are weak. Contemporary violent Islamic extremism is caused by a matrix of different social, economic, political, cultural and religious factors going back decades, if not centuries, in the Islamic world and in the Islamic world's relation with the west. Al-Qaida, based in Pakistan, only represents one element of the threat it poses, albeit currently the greatest. The link between defending Kandahar and protecting Kensington is indirect at best. The human rights argument is weak, too. It is almost certain that any stable Afghanistan is going to be much more conservative, much more anti-western and much more authoritarian than we would like. Better than a Taliban-run state perhaps but more like Saudi Arabia than Sweden. A continued commitment will not guarantee girls the right to go to school across the entire country.
So why fight then? Why send more young men to their deaths? Why spend more money that could be used for hospitals, schools or saving banks?
For the simple reason that we owe it to the Afghans to try to make the new strategy work. Every death is a tragedy, but the price in lives and money is not an exorbitant one given the size, wealth and military history of the UK. After years of errors, we finally have a chance to do something right. In two or three years, we will know if there is a chance that the strategy can succeed. If it does, we can be proud. If it doesn't, at least we are unlikely to have made things worse. More important, we can at least honestly say to the Afghan people that we did our best. It's more than we've ever been able to say to the Afghans before.
Three in favour of withdrawal
Paul Flynn
Ministers are spinning the end game to avoid blame. Gordon is pulling on rubber levers. Corruption is the irremovable lubricant of Afghan life. Most European countries have policed Afghanistan: we have done the dying. Canada and the Netherlands have announced exit dates. We must follow suit. We must fixed the inevitable deal. We should walk out in a phased withdrawal, not run out in panic as the Americans did from Saigon. Public opinion will revolt against more soldiers dying for a lost cause. The question now is who will be the last British soldier to die for politicians' blunders and vanity?
Paul Flynn is Labour MP for Newport West
Mary Warnock
There will never be a good time to pull out. Whenever we do, we can't just say that we're doing so because keeping troops there is too expensive, in lives and resources, and too hopeless of success. Most of us knew that all along. Nor did we accept the argument from self-defence.
But things have got so dramatically worse in the past week that we could argue that it's a crisis demanding decision.
We can't drift on in the nightmare for ever. Perhaps now is as good a time as any to announce withdrawal and shut our ears to the cries of triumph.
Mary Warnock is a philosopher and crossbench peer
Maureen Shearer
It's dreadful out there and it's getting worse. Iraq was bad, but Afghanistan seems to be worse. What must the parents of those killed be thinking? I can't see any point in staying there because I can't see what good we are doing. Nobody has managed to do anything there but die and now we have a corrupt government to support. Our lads died supporting the Afghan election. What did they die for? It appears the British government has no idea of where it is heading. Our approach to Afghanistan seems to be back to front. We should withdraw.
Maureen Shearer's 26-year-old son, Richard, was killed in Iraq in 2005
Three against withdrawal
Havana Marking
The government here is a nightmare, the UN is in meltdown and there is no leadership from the international community. A disastrous combination of personalities led to this and heads should roll. But should troops pull out? Absolutely not. This is a valid mission that should and could have created a stable, friendly nation in a vital region. The majority of the population do not support the Taliban. But we need a leader (Obama, step up) to take control and let the Afghan president know what his country will lose if he doesn't clean up his act.
Havana Marking is a documentary film director working in Afghanistan
John Nichol
The time has come to put up or shut up – we have tinkered around the edges of the Afghan problem for too long. In 2001, Operation Enduring Freedom was launched to liberate the people of Afghanistan from tyranny. Eight years on, there is still little evidence of any true freedom. If we are serious, Nato and the wider world must deploy not hundreds, but hundreds of thousands more troops in order to stabilise the country and then spend billions of dollars – as was promised – to rebuild a broken state.
John Nichol is a former RAF officer and PoW in the first Gulf war and author of Medic – Saving Lives From Dunkirk to Afghanistan
Robert Fox
British troops should be reinforced slightly to about 10,000 to help bring some stability to main centres of population. Afghanistan needs a tougher security plan under one allied supreme commander. Karzai must clean his act up. There should be a plan for reconciliation within Afghanistan for local Taliban and funding at village level to break the cycle of poverty. There has to be a timetable for international forces to pull out over the next few years, but there should be no public announcement about the details. That would give the Taliban a huge tactical advantage and condemn our troops to stay even longer.
Robert Fox is a defence correspondent and writer
The long war: a time line
2001: On 7 October, Tony Blair confirms that British forces are involved in US-led military action against al-Qaida training camps and the Taliban regime in Afghanistan. A month later, Royal Marines help secure the airbase at Bagram. With the Taliban pushed out of Kandahar in December, the Afghan Interim Authority, headed by Hamid Karzai, prepares to take office in Kabul.
2002: Blair visits Bagram airfield on 7 January, speaking to troops as they prepare for the deployment of a Nato-led International Security Assistance Force (Isaf). On 9 April, Private Darren George, 23, from the Royal Anglian Regiment, becomes the first British serviceman to die in Afghanistan since the invasion.
2004: Karzai wins presidential elections with 55% of the vote.
2006: 4,500 British troops are deployed to Helmand Province and engage in some of the most intense fighting seen by the army for half a century. British casualties rise to 44.
2007: Following heavy fighting by British and Afghan forces the Afghan defence ministry announces that the key strategic town of Musa Qal'eh in Helmand province has been recaptured from the Taliban
2008: Prince Harry serves with the army in Helmand. In June, the number of British dead passes 100. The UN number Afghan civilian deaths at 2,118, a rise of nearly 600 on 2007
2009: In July, 22 soldiers are killed and scores more wounded, and by August the UK death toll reaches 200 from where it will rise to 230. Elections on 20 August are declared corrupt. On 14 October, Gordon Brown announces he will send 500 extra troops to Afghanistan, taking the total to 9,500.
James Ashton 
