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Prior to this past weekend, British troops in Afghanistan could be forgiven for nursing a suspicion that their civilian masters are dissembling, incompetent pretenders to Winston Churchill’s brand of wartime leadership.
Then Gordon Brown paid his surprise visit to Helmand province - and emphatically put the matter to rest. As a statesman, he is delusional and quick with double talk, both qualities well suited for a NATO leader forced to put a brave face on disaster.
With the wreckage of the Afghan presidential election smouldering on the horizon, the Prime Minister proffered not one but two preposterous claims about the prospects of improvement in Britain’s fortunes of war.
First, Brown looked his battle-weary squaddies in the eyes and told them that the floundering project to build the Afghan National Army was capable of adding 50,000 additional troops over the coming year, a necessary precursor to the withdrawal of international forces.
By all accounts, he said this with a straight face, despite knowing full well that after an investment of more than $16 billion over seven years, the U.S.-led ANA project has yet to field its first legion of 50,000 combat-ready Afghan soldiers.
In truth, the ANA’s numbers have been inflated so extravagantly for so long by Western officials that no reliable estimate of the army’s size exists (please see Afghan Army At Grave Risk, Nov. 2007, on page 9 of Recent Stories; and Crunch Time from April of this year on page 3).
The second of Brown’s weekend fairy tales came courtesy of his mandarins, safe and sound at home in their Whitehall offices, and eager to convince the British public that moves are afoot to defang the Taliban by inviting them to tea.
“A large part of the Taliban are not really committed to their agenda,” the Times quotes one official as saying: “they are just fighting for tactical reasons and can be brought back into mainstream life.”
The functionary fails to mention that for many years the Kabul government has offered amnesty for Taliban commanders and fighters through its reconciliation program, but with only modest results (please see the video report Meet the Taliban from March, 2007 on page 35 of Recent Stories…)
The contention that uncommitted, “moderate” Talibs make up a strategically significant portion of Mullah Omar’s guerrilla force might just as well be founded on the hope that scores of black-turbaned Paddington Bears will one day emerge from darkest Baluchistan, armed only with instructions from their Pakistan Army sponsors to let bygones be bygones, and make peace.
Neither Brown nor his ministers appear to have noticed that the Taliban are winning in Afghanistan. It's not amnesty they crave. It's victory.
The reasons why are as clear as the lines on Gordon Brown’s worried brow. The U.S.-led NATO mission remains hostage to Bush-era thinking, with the Obama administration still relying upon the same failed advisors, carpet-baggers and Afghan-American “experts” who have done so much, over the past seven years, to distort the West’s initiatives.
The country’s civilian population, the Afghan people, survey the dwindling authority of their would-be international saviours, and they despair. The foreigners seem incapable of seeing things as they really are.
Faced with failure, foreign leaders, the most famous politicians in the world, are ready and willing to lie, and not only to Afghans but to their own people, their own soldiers.
All this might prompt Afghans to wonder: who stuffs the West's ballot boxes, to send abroad such faithless fools...
