Adam Holloway is Conservative MP for Gravesham, a member of the defence select committee and a former soldier who has served in Iraq, Bosnia and Afghanistan. Last year he wrote this paper for the Centre for Policy Studies on Afghanistan.
"Strategic Failure" is no longer an option in Afghanistan, it remains the likelihood. Despite the brilliance of General McChrystal, the strategy is incomplete.
The recent Operation "Moshtarak" in Helmand is an allegory for so much that has gone wrong with the NATO deployment. The word means "togetherness" in Dari, the langauge of Afghan northern ethnic groups. The people in the south mostly speak Pashto. Dari speakers are outsiders to the deeply traditional people in these southern rural areas, as are the tens of thousands of Afghan soldiers overridingly from northern ethnic groups that range with us across the territory - and what we call the Taleban have mostly just melted back into the population.
It is almost as if the international community has come to resemble a sort of self-licking lollipop - a multi-trillion dollar machine that feeds only on itself. An alien confection that works against, not with, the grain of Afghan society. These old Bush-era mantras remain, and steely eyed killing machines obscure steely realism.
What we call "The Taleban" are in fact hundreds of groups, most of whom are no more than traditional Afghan Muslims, the sons of local farmers. The same was true when I spent time there in the 1980s, but then I travelled with what we called "The Resistance". Then as now, they are united not by Islam, but the presence of foreign troops in their areas, and hatred government external to their local areas. Deadly ideological extremists are the smaller but growing part. Somewhere around 80% of enemy dead die within 20 miles or so of where they live: does that tell you something about who we are really fighting?
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