Can we beat the Taliban?

IN 2001, when he was contemplating military action in Afghanistan, Tony Blair took soundings from those who knew the country. In the aftermath of 9/11, military action was inevitable, that much was clear, but what form, asked Blair, should it take?

Few have a better strategic understanding of the country than Guy Willoughby, the director of the Dumfries-based mine clearing organisation, the Halo Trust, which has been working in the country since 1988. The former army officer gave an unequivocal warning against military action, a position he stands by despite a major victory over the Taliban in Musa Qala last week.

"I supplied a comprehensive briefing paper in 2001, and another in 2006, in which I said bluntly that Nato military action wouldn't work and would lead us into a military quagmire," says Willoughby. "I recommended that Nato disengage, that they should be very careful allying themselves with the Northern Alliance without taking into account the Pashtuns, being the largest single ethnic group in Afghanistan. I argued that the priority should be to build up a truly national Afghan army and police, and I remain as convinced as ever that a domestic resolution is the only viable option.

"Instead, what we've done is to repeat the efforts of the Russians, but without being able to use landmines for Force Protection and extensive air support for fear of collateral damage. It's finally dawned on us that while we might be able to win battles, we'll never win a war. And although it's not what we sought, that's what the current conflict has become."

In 2001, Blair, buoyed by his positive experience of intervention in Kosovo and Sierra Leone, rejected that analysis, but Willoughby's views chime with those of most Afghans and, privately, much of the British army. A battlefield like Afghanistan breeds a black sense of humour and the time-honoured national joke is that the foreigners may have the watches but it's the Afghans who have the time. No matter how well-equipped an invading army is, it will always be worn down by the harsh realities of trying to subjugate an Afghan population willing to sustain huge losses and who will take as long as it needs to repel invaders. The Russians had killed over a million Afghans before Moscow ran out of money for the war, and it became so unpopular at home – so the Red Army rolled northwards with its tail between its legs.

As Gordon Brown's fact-finding mission to Afghanistan at the start of last week and his statement to the House of Commons on Wednesday suggest, the fierce fighting in Helmand province and the gradual disengagement from Iraq mean that a political and military compromise in Afghanistan is now a domestic imperative.

Willoughby welcomed Brown's speech, adding that discussions with Douglas Alexander when he visited the Halo Trust's 3000-man operation in Afghanistan recently proved that Brown's determination to employ political as well as military means to fracture the Taliban means the government has "clearly got its brain around the issue and is finally heading in the right direction". That direction, no matter Brown's headline rhetoric, is to engage with the Taliban.

Brown is rubber-stamping a policy that Afghan president Hamid Karzai has been pursuing energetically for the past year. In an effort to stop his authority ebbing away, Karzai has been sending messages from Kabul to the 18-strong Quetta Shura, a council of elders in neighbouring Pakistan which controls the Helmand insurgents. If Karzai, who comes from the same Pashtun community from which the Taliban spring, can gain any leverage with the Shura, he will have gone some way to eroding Taliban leader Mullah Omar's power base.

It is not a strategy of which the Americans, who view the Taliban through the emotional prism of 9/11, approve. Members of the Shura include prominent ex-Taliban figures such as former Supreme Court chief justice Maulvi Noor Mohammad Saqib and the former minister for repatriation Haji Abdul Raqib – all hate figures in Washington. Nor do many of the northerners in Karzai's Tajik-dominated administration approve; any accommodation with the Pashtun Taliban would inevitably be at their expense.

Yet Karzai, like Brown, believes the war in the south cannot be won by military means alone. The whole southern border of Afghanistan lies next to the lawless tribal areas of Pakistan where the Pashtuns hold sway and even the Pakistani army no longer ventures. A large percentage of the fighters in the south are Pakistanis, and when the army monitors Taliban airwaves in the east of the country, virtually all of the combatants are from across the border. As with the Viet Cong, who used Laos and Cambodia as bases, the Taliban can always withdraw to Pakistan to replenish themselves and restock on supplies and men.

The Mujahedin don't need to fight major battles to defeat Nato. They never took a city against the Russians, yet their "shoot and scoot" guerrilla tactics won them huge popular support when the Russians replied with overwhelming firepower against fighters sheltering in civilian areas. The Taliban have already started to mix that tactic with ruses imported from Iraq: as well as roadside IEDs, suicide bombers have crossed the border to attack otherwise peaceful areas in Kabul and the north to divert men and resources.

Brown placed huge emphasis on the need for reconstruction, and he knows the war will never be won unless ordinary Afghans and the part-time Taliban fighting for £5 a day – the "tier 3" Taliban as he refers to them – can be convinced they will benefit from peace. The only way to do that is to win hearts and minds through reconstruction, yet that is extremely difficult in Helmand, not least because the Americans are the biggest donors and refuse to put in the sums needed until the Taliban have been defeated.

Brown announced that Britain will be providing £450m in aid between 2009 and 2012 on top of the £490m already spent rebuilding the country, yet it is a relatively small sum. One estimate is that in the year after Nato action started, the West spent one fiftieth of the amount it provided for reconstruction in Kosovo in the year after that conflict. And while NGOs such as the Halo Trust can function throughout 80% of the country, not all aid is welcome; anything that may win hearts and minds is particularly problematic. After the American army distributed warm clothes to children, the Taliban would come along and make bonfires of them. Infrastructure projects such as the Kabul-Kandahar highway dubbed "Baghdad alley" are endlessly sabotaged because they also have the military use of allowing troops to be moved more easily to Helmand.

Willoughby says the Afghans have "very modest expectations of the West, they don't expect big shiny schools and hospitals", but believes that the political importance of aid is huge. Although it can't be funnelled to the south, it can go to Pashtun areas, such as Herat in the west, so that southern Pashtuns begin to believe that a cessation of hostilities may benefit them rather than the Uzbeks and Tajiks who they perceive to dominate the Kabul government. Nato also needs to be more explicit about the aid it does distribute: Britain pays the salaries of 10% of Afghan teachers, but because the money comes via Kabul, few Afghans are aware of the fact.

The situation in the south hasn't been helped by the Nato allies' confused attitude towards narcotics production, which is at record levels in Helmand. Over 95% of the world's opium comes from the province and over 30% of the province is sustained by growing poppies, yet US ambassador William Wood and US co-ordinator for Afghan counter-narcotics Thomas Schweich have both pushed hard for crop-spraying, citing a recent United Nations report that found that most poppy farmers were relatively well-off. The British have looked on aghast, aware that effective counter-insurgency and the destruction of poppy production without a viable alternative are mutually exclusive.

So where to now? Again, Brown's idea of reaching out to the less committed combatants while also striking at the movement's leaders has already been enacted. The SBS assassinated the brutal Taliban commander Mullah Dadullah in Helmand in May, Mullah Akhtar Mohammad Osmani, the head of Taliban operations, was killed in a targeted air strike last year, while Mullah Obaidullah, the former Taliban defence minister, is now in custody in Pakistan.

The third arm of the exit strategy is also taking shape. The Afghan National Army (ANA) will be increased from 50,000 to 70,000 this year – not enough, but an improvement.

The importance attached to bolstering the image of the ANA was clear at the last week's siege of Musa Qala, where the allies stressed that the Afghans took the lead role in taking the symbolically important town – the last of four to be held by the Taliban this time last year. Whether the ANA can hold the town before the imminent snows arrive and the traditional fighting season stops will be vital.

The Taliban refuse to be bowed but there is no doubt that the bulk of their fighters are as tired of the conflict as ordinary Afghans and the soldiers of the British army. The lull in fighting that will accompany the crippling snows will give all sides pause for thought, not least the Nato allies and the government of Hamid Karzai. And with a change of government imminent in Washington, there may even be an accommodation between the Kabul administration and the Taliban that America could accept.

There was nothing fundamentally new in Brown's speech this week, but its tone and acceptance of some unpleasant realities was significant. "He said that we're in this for the long-haul, but I think this is the beginning of the end," said Willoughby. "We might leave 200 or 300 soldiers to train the Afghan army for 10 or 30 years, but if we still have 7,500 frontline troops there in a decade's time, then we will have failed."

Warriors of the faith

In the complicated ethnic make-up of Afghanistan, it is the Pashtuns of the south and east of the country who are leading the fighting against the Nato forces, especially in the Helmand province near Kandahar in the south.

Ironically, president Hamid Karzai is a Pashtun from Kandahar.

Like the Kurds and the Basques, the Pashtuns are a nation without a country.

Although they are often referred to as ethnic Afghans, half of the 40 million Pashtuns live in Pakistan, where they make up 15% of the population compared with 42% in Afghanistan, where they have long been the dominant ethnic grouping.

A warrior tribe whose ghazis, or warriors of the faith, expanded Islam into northern India by force, their ancient code of Pashtunwali is a traditional code of conduct and honour.

They have proved remarkably stubborn and see the current Afghan conflict as the fourth in a long line of conflicts with the British, who divided their nation when they imposed the North West Frontier between India and Afghanistan in 1893.

The Pashtuns have become well-known as the source of the Taliban, who were originally religious scholars from the madrassas of Kandahar, but became a political movement after the departure of the Russians from Afghanistan.

Although the term Taliban has subsequently become a more generic term which is used to denote any religious fighter in the country, the true Taliban are all originally Pashtun (although by no means all Pashtun are Taliban).