Nato ”cannot win” the fight against the Taliban alone and will have to train Afghan forces to do the job, the United Nation’s top official in the country warned on Friday.
”At the moment Nato has a very optimistic assessment. They think they can win the war,” warned Tom Koenigs, the diplomat heading the UN mission in Afghanistan. ”But there is no quick fix.”
In forthright comments, which highlight divisions between international partners as Nato battles to quell insurgency, Koenigs said that training the fledgling Afghan national army to defeat the Taliban was crucial. ”They [the ANA] can win. But against an insurgency like that, international troops cannot win.”
He spoke to the Guardian as Tony Blair came the closest so far to admitting the invasion of Iraq had been disastrous.
When Sir David Frost, interviewing the prime minister for al-Jazeera TV, suggested that western intervention in Iraq had ”so far been pretty much of a disaster”, Mr Blair responded: ”It has. But, you see, what I say to people is, ‘why is it difficult in Iraq?’ It’s not difficult because of some accident in planning, it’s difficult because there’s a deliberate strategy — al-Qaeda with Sunni insurgents on one hand, Iranian-backed elements with Shi’ite militias on the other — to create a situation in which the will of the majority for peace is displaced by the will of the minority for war.”
Downing Street tried to play down the apparent slip last night.
A spokesperson said: ”I think that’s just the way in which he answers questions. His views on Iraq are documented in hundreds of places, and that [the belief that it is a disaster] is not one of them.”
However, Sir Menzies Campbell, leader of the Lib Dems, commented: ”At long last, the enormity of the decision to take military action against Iraq is being accepted by the prime minister. Surely Parliament and the British people who were given a flawed prospectus are entitled to an apology?”
British commanders have argued that United Kingdom troops should be withdrawn from Iraq to allow the military to focus on Afghanistan.
But Nato commanders on the ground have pleaded for 2 000 more troops, helicopters and armoured vehicles, to little effect. Last night Nato Secretary General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer said countries should lift restrictions on what their troops could do.”My plea to governments would be: ‘Please help us in lifting those caveats as much as possible … because in Afghanistan it is a problem.”
Des Browne, the defence secretary, made clear on Friday that the future of the alliance was now bound up with the future of Afghanistan. ”The Afghan people, our own people and the Taliban are watching us. If we are indecisive or divided, the Taliban will be strengthened, just as all of the others despair,” he said.
Attacks have increased fourfold this year and 3 700 people have died, mostly in the south. The United States has made 2 000 air strikes since June, against 88 in Iraq.
Last week Acbar, an umbrella group of Afghan and international aid agencies, said the crisis highlighted the ”urgent need” for a rethink of military, poverty reduction and state-building policies.
Nato commanders maintain the Taliban have been on the ”back foot” since Operation Medusa, a battle that killed more than 1 000 insurgents in Kandahar in September, and talk of gaining ”psychological ascendancy”.
However, Mr Koenigs said any claim of victory was premature. ”You can’t resolve it by killing the Taliban. You have to win people over. That is done with good governance, decent police, diplomacy with Pakistan and development,” he said.
Otherwise the Taliban would regroup in Pakistani refugee camps and madrasas and return in greater numbers next spring. — Guardian Unlimited Â