Pawns in the game: the Afghans are prey to warlords both home-grown and foreign...

This week we've witnessed a striking new take on the fog of war, one cast up by the written, spoken and, no doubt, shouted word.

But through the angry crossfire between top generals at the Pentagon, and among some of the most senior officials at the U.N., the faint outline of the next phase of foreign intervention in Afghanistan is taking shape. 

It is not a pretty sight.

The U.S. and its NATO allies, together with the United Nations, seem resigned to accepting the booby prize of the Afghan presidential elections, Hamid Karzai, as leader of the Kabul regime for another five year term.

Worse, despite Karzai and his Kabul cabal sinking deeper into corruption, the internationals intend to pour more weaponry into the glum and leaderless ranks of the Afghan National Army.

And even while the anti-western insurgency gains ground, the leaders of the world’s democracies are unwilling to direct their diplomatic and political efforts where they would have the greatest benefit - against the Afghan Taliban’s networks for recruitment and rearmament in Pakistan, and their channels of command and control, which also reach out from Pakistani territory.

There’s no real need to analyse all of this. The history of the Afghan war does the math for us.

Whenever Afghanistan sees a massive build-up of troops and armament, while the regime of the day bleeds legitimacy, the result is war. With it comes a verdant field of opportunities for militant, anti Western extremism, urged on by fringe elements of the Pakistan Army.

Confronted by this certainty, and sensing that their Afghan missions have become mired in blowback, the West’s politicians and generals have rallied around a new buzz phrase. "Protecting Afghanistan’s civilian population," they say, is the new priority.

God help the Afghans.

Any schoolgirl from Kunduz or Kandahar can tell you that the foreigners’ pledges just don’t add up with their actions. There’s no equating promises of protection with a fevered quest for an exit strategy (otherwise known as bugging out on the war and its victims).

Hopefully, President Obama will take a new and different view, along the lines of his pledge, made today, to truly earn his Nobel Peace Prize.

Rather than taking advice from the Bush-era generals, diplomats and consultants still haunting the White House and the Pentagon, he might simply ask himself this question. What point is there in creating a larger Afghan National Army if the force remains compromised from within by its own civilian leadership, and from without by an enemy headquartered in Pakistan?

It’s a recipe for perpetual conflict and spiralling violence. Without credible command, the swollen army ranks will fragment along the same ethnic, tribal and regional fault lines that have made Karzai’s kingdom a domain of warlords, carpetbaggers and thieves.

Obama’s best option is to focus his resources on the factor that pumps more fuel and ferocity into the Afghan war than any other, and which also helps sustain the al Qaeda terrorist network.

That factor is Pakistan’s support for the Afghan Taliban.

Solving the puzzle of Pakistan requires a good deal more than dispatching the C.I.A.’s drones against individual militants. A surge of smarts, not weaponry or troops, is the answer.

Obama should use technology and intelligence to fully expose Pakistan’s problem elements, then apply forceful, even combative diplomacy to reign them in.

Put another way, it’s time for the U.S. and its allies to come clean about Pakistan’s dirty war on Afghanistan, conducted by way of the Pakistan Army’s continuing support for Afghan militants and terror groups through its Inter-Services Intelligence branch, the ISI.

Western intelligence agencies have the evidence, contrary to the disinformation leaked to Washington’s mainstream press this week. Claims that the C.I.A. “doesn’t know much” about Mullah Omar’s protectorate in Pakistan’s Baluchistan province amount to little more than a smokescreen, an effort to conceal years of U.S. inaction.

Equally, allegations by Pakistani officials of Indian interference in Baluchistan cannot justify the ISI’s proxy war, via the Taliban, against the people of Afghanistan.

If Western leaders truly intend to protect the Afghans, where is their response to this week’s outrageous suicide bombing of the Indian Embassy in Kabul, the second such attack in only 15 months?

Once again, civilians paid the price: it was mainly street cleaners and passersby who were slaughtered by the Taliban’s Pakistan-based strategists.

“A call to action” is how Barack Obama graciously accepted his Nobel prize today. The president’s first action should be to share with the world all of the evidence about the violent menace which radiates each day from Pakistan.

Only the harsh light of global publicity can kick-start the process of neutralizing that menace, and turning the tables on terror.

From Kabul’s bloody streets, and from Mumbai, Madrid and London, the families of the dead cry out for genuine action to protect the living.