Guardian - Polly Toynbee - Talk of time to turn and flee is wrong - as long as Nato is given a boost

The unannounced dash to Kabul by Condoleezza Rice and David Miliband yesterday was designed to repair the damage done on both sides. British newspaper indignation at President Karzai's refusal to accept Paddy Ashdown as the UN envoy and, worse, his contemptuous remarks about British fighting in Helmand seriously risk public willingness to stay in Afghanistan.

The "out now" clamour includes those who take a Kissinger realpolitik view - let foreigners rot and sort out their own problems; do nothing unless it's in our own interest - and those who regard all intervention as latter-day colonialism and anything the Americans do as always fatally tainted.

Opinion polls suggest he reflects the same understandable ambivalence shared by his people: they want the foreigners gone, but they don't want civil war and the return of the Taliban that would follow within days of Nato retreat.

The real question is: how do you judge success? This poorest, most desolate and ungoverned place will take years to improve a bit - just enough to be an improving rather than a failing state. Again : What counts as success here? Realpolitik might say that it is simply denying the ground to fanatics who will turn it back into a training ground for 9/11 attacks.

Common decency says we can't walk away now, not until this stricken country can survive alone, but unless Nato does more now, unless there is more money, more effort, more help, then it cannot. That's what the reports warn.

But one great blundering mistake may in the end destroy all the good done elsewhere. The opium economy will always be stronger than the real economy. Only 8% of GDP comes from commerce: the rest is aid. Off the books the real economy is all opium, more and more by the year. The US wants to spray and impoverish the poorest farmers, causing hatred. The US drives the disastrous prohibition policy imposed by the UN. Unless and until the drug is given as a medicine to registered addicts, cutting demand and cutting drug-driven crime in the west, illegal opium growing will always distort and corrupt everything else here in Afghanistan. Buy it to use for morphine, buy it to destroy, but buy it at a price above the relatively low price the narco barons pay to poor farmers. Agriculture in the EU and the US has always been a strange subsidised distorted market. But there never was a better reason for buying a crop than to bring Afghan farmers in from the world of crime that risks keeping the country lawless indefinitely.

These are the facts on the ground as it were and the politics driving them. Then Toynbee moves to address the breast beating which defines the current politico-military discusion

As Nato defence ministers gathered in Vilnius yesterday, Robert Gates, the US defence secretary, grew increasingly contemptuous of the feeble contribution of many Nato members to Afghanistan.......

Europe replies thus: The world would be in a less perilous state now if only America had listened to us. Without the Iraq disaster, how different now Afghanistan would look. If those trillions wasted in Iraq had been invested in Afghanistan aid, this poorest place on earth might already have moved up a few notches on the development charts. The Taliban would not now be resurgent. The people of Europe would be far more willing to send troops and money had America and Britain not set out on a mindless "war on terror". One way or another, both sides need to recognise their own past failings with a little humility.

One might suggest that the trillions wasted in Iraq would never have gone to Afghanistan anyway, we've seen enough of this American administration to know that much at least, but still the question is, what is success ? Adrian Hamilton asks a similar question, can the NATO mssion achieve anything mistakable for success ?

Independent - Adrian Hamilton - Nato should not be fighting this war in Afghanistan

While the defence ministers of Nato meet in Vilnius, and Condi Rice and David Miliband descend on Afghanistan as part of their effort to shore up the Nato campaign in the country, someone ought to be asking the question: "What the hell is a North Atlantic alliance doing in a north Asian country at all?"

Maybe it was (asked) during the initial stages (of Afghanistan), or maybe someone should have asked at the beginning whether the whole concept of "out-of-theatre" ventures was right for an alliance that had plenty on its plate in the Balkans. But nobody did think about those questions because all the pressure was on to do something in support of the US after 9/11, and Nato seemed convenient as an answer.

But it isn't any longer. What might have seemed a relatively straightforward military venture to overthrow a government and rid the country of al-Qa'ida and its protectors, the Taliban, has now taken on a quite different hue. Having forced regime change, Nato is now there as occupiers, charged with not just fighting the resurgent Taliban, but ensuring security, rooting out drugs production and supporting local civilian rulers whom the alliance favours and removing those it disapproves of.

When President Karzai rounded on the British actions in Helmand recently and rejected Britain and America's candidate for the post of UN representative in Afghanistan, his objections were treated as just the outpouring of a local politician fearful of the loss of his own power (Helen - guilty as charged). He should have been listened to. What he was saying was that Britain's intervention to remove the local governor - however unpleasant and corrupt he may have been - had changed the rules of the game.

If the object of the exercise was to defeat the Taliban, then the Western alliance should have kept with the local chieftains Kabul knew could manage security in a country where central control barely extended beyond the capital. Once we started to intervene in local politics because of the Western desire to suppress the opium trade and to create a "clean" democracy in its own image, and once we decided to impose a UN representative tasked with ordering political governance in the country, then you made the West part of the political game not an umpire of it.

The argument over the rightness or otherwise of local warlords in Afghanistan is a real one. But Karzai's central point is right. Nato is now there as an army of occupation, tasked with reshaping the country, not a military venture dedicated to seeking and destroying a defined enemy. If this is what we want - and that is what Rice and Miliband seem to be seeking on their latest visit to the country - then let us be honest about it.

Whatever the objectives, however, Nato is the wrong instrument to achieve it.

It is a good point well made. It is the similar situation to the one created in Iraq; there is a moment when liberators become an occupying colonial power. It was a trap the allies avoided in Germany and enables their huge and largely pointless presence there even today, but the moment you go into a country and start making demands on laws and governance you cross a line. Militaries operate best when under a civilian control that defines the army as existing for the external protection of the citizenry, not for internal control. A military is necessarily an authoritarian hierarchy which cannot promote the "anarchy" of free speech and democracy. Countries where the military feel they have a duty or perhaps a right to interfere in civilian governance invariably suffer needless destabilisations because of this tension.

So, Afghanistan needs a civilian governance. If the West is to do this then, as Hamilton says, let us be honest about the mission of becoming a new colonial project and organise a Civil Service to administer it. But if we are embarrassed at such reversion to Imperial Grandiosity, then we must agree that our mission is to fight the external Taliban threat. Only. And to move to fighting it with political cleverness instead of the bovine military stupidity currently evident.

However, now we have the worst of all possible worlds with evolving military missions, creeping imperialism, squabbles between allies about culpability for the mess as merely the most blatant of our problems. And they all add up to a sense of frustration back home, Toynbee is not kidding when she implies that Afghanistan could be the rock on which NATO fractures. There is a genuine sense of grievance over the US/UK-led Iraqi/(Iranian?) distractions which led to ignoring the genuine threat that failure to rebuild Afghanistan would bring. Domestic pressures in Europe could end up with a belief that Afghanistan is unwinnable, however "winnable" is measured, because the mission has become too diffuse to be achievable by  military activity alone. So, the view will develop that if something cannot be won, why carry on fighting : Then the troops will come home and NATO will shatter.

Yet Toynbee is correct to point out that Afghanistan needs help and the West would be both morally wrong and politically short-sighted to abandon it. And Hamilton is equally correct when he says that NATO is the politically wrong vehicle to control the mission because it is a military rather than a political entity and the problems being addressed are greater. But, for Afghanistan to have a chance of progress, that would imply a UN mission and that would require the USA to cede control. Something that I think we all know is never gonna happen; not now, nor even a year from now.

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By the way, the title is an Afghan saying in response to invaders, they always win in the end.