By James Blitz, the FT’s defence and diplomatic editor

The collapse of the second round of the Afghan election will be viewed by some western governments as a fiasco, one that raises questions about how legitimate Hamid Karzai really is as the country’s leader and partner to the US. But many in Nato will also be relieved today that the long Afghan election saga has finally come to an end. Clearly, there are huge questions about Mr Karzai’s standing after the election debacle, the allegations of voter fraud and the evident US frustration with his leadership. But the second round of the election, was always going to be a severe test for Afghanistan - with fears about yet more violence and fraud, and the spectre of a low turnout. Many will breathe a sigh of relief that another chapter in this electoral nightmare has been avoided. Continue reading "Afghanistan’s election: Relief the saga has ended"

The British foreign secretary spoke to my colleague George Parker about Afghanistan, Russia and the prospect of president Blair. Continue reading "FT video: David Miliband interview"

Back when the Obama administration took power, we were told that they had made a great intellectual breakthrough. They had realised that the problems of Afghanistan and Pakistan had to be treated as single issue - hence the ugly acronym, AfPak. And, of course, this is right. The Americans and their allies are not going to win the war in Afghanistan, while the Taliban enjoy safe havens in Pakistan. And it may not be worth “winning” in Afghanistan, if in the process you gravely destabilise Pakistan - a much bigger and more important country.

So much for the theory. But, in practice, we seem to have gone back to thinking about Afghanistan and Pakistan as two separate issues. So, on the one hand, there are the constant reports of the White House’s agonising over whether to send more troops to Afghanistan. And on the other, news of an upsurge in terrorism and fighting in Pakistan. But nobody seems to be connecting the dots.

Continue reading "Whatever happened to AfPak?"

My FT colleagues here in London, Kabul and in bureaux across the world have produced a detailed interactive graphic on Nato’s civil reconstruction in Afghanistan. The graphic shows the reconstruction efforts of the US, UK and other leading members of Afghanistan’s international assistance force, highlighting nation-building, security and counter-narcotics activities across the country.

The graphic looks at the work of the Provincial Reconstruction Teams (the groups of soldiers and civilians working on development missions) run by the nine leading nations in the International Security Assistance Force, to assess their activities and establish indicators of success.

The big question: is any of this working? Click on the image to see the graphic. Leave your comments below.

Related reading:

US focuses on Taliban’s ‘post office’ at border

McChrystal outlines ‘maximalist’ Afghan option

Civilian Goals Largely Unmet in Afghanistan

I am in Manchester at the last Conservative Party conference before the next British general election. The Tories should be jubilant because they are all but certain to win and return to power, after thirteen years in the wilderness. There is certainly a buzz about the place. But the party is trying to avoid any hint of triumphalism. Champagne has been banned from the conference hotel, to avoid television pictures of champagne-swilling toffs, celebrating prematurely in the midst of a recession. My colleague Phillip Stephens attempted to buy a bottle of champagne at bar at the Midland Hotel (purely in the interests of research) and was turned away. Frankly, he was lucky not to be handcuffed.

While most conference-goers are understandably focussing on the British political battle, people from all over the world are drifting through Manchester this week, to get a sense of Britain’s government-in-waiting. Last night I went to a dinner with Boris Nemtsov, the former deputy prime minister of Russia, and now a leading figure in the opposition. I was fascinated to hear what Nemtsov had to say about the Putin-Medvedev relationship. American officials I have spoken to are very intriuged by what they see as a nascent power struggle between the Russian president and prime minister. They point to Medvedev’s recent published critiques of lawlessness in Russian society and interviews with the independent press, as a sign that he is pushing back against Putin. The Americans even think that Medvedev might run against Putin for the presidency in 2012. Continue reading "Russians, Pakistanis and Tories in Manchester"

Over the next month or so, Obama is going to have to make a big decision about whether to commit more troops to Afghanistan. My guess is that, with a heavy heart, he will follow the advice of the military and “double down” - sending even more troops into Afghanistan.

But not only is the situation in Afghanistan itself looking increasingly unpromising. The domestic politics of the war have also shifted against Obama. His natural supporters among centre-left opinion formers are beginning to back away from the war. I thought it was significant that over the weekend, the New York Times’s two main foreign affairs columnists - Tom Friedman and Nicholas Kristoff - both wrote highly sceptical columns about the war. Kristoff argues for fewer troops and a pull-back to the cities. Friedman is highly sceptical of the possibility of nation-building in Afghanistan and hints strongly that the US should pull back - although he won’t quite say it.

It is not just the columnists who are having second and third thoughts. So are the heads of the leading American foreign-policy think tanks. Richard Haass, the president of the Council on Foreign Relations, has taken issue with Obama’s description of Afghanistan as a “war of necessity” - and argued that it is a “war of choice”. In other words, the US can choose to get out. Strobe Talbott, the head of the Brookings Institution, has been openly sceptical about the prospects for the war for a while.

These people are not only elite opinion-formers. They are natural Obama sympathisers. If even they are turning against the war, he’s got a big problem.

Gordon Brown has given a speech this afternoon defending Britain’s military mission in Afghanistan. Although the speech was scheduled before Eric Joyce, a junior defence minister, resigned over the war, there is no doubt that Brown is responding to a growing mood of disquiet about mounting violence and casualties and an unconvincing election.

The trouble is that that Brown doesn’t have much new to say. He makes the link to terrorism and claims that - “A safer Afghanistan means a safer Britain.” He talks about training up the Afghan army and he stresses that the war must be “won on the ground and not in the air”. (This, on a day, when it seems as if Nato may have killed a great many Afghan civilians in a bombing raid.)

All of this echoes the counter-insurgency plans laid out by the new Nato commander in Afghanistan - Stanley McChrystal, an American general. McChrystal’s “new” strategy emphasises not just clearing but “holding” ground and concentrating on providing security for local Afghans. There will be less bombing and more boots on the ground.

All of this is being presented as some sort of intellectual and strategic breakthrough. But it doesn’t feel that way to me. Last March, I sat in the Kabul office of McChrystal’s predecessor, David McKiernan and heard him explain his strategy. It was the same stuff: train up the Afghan army, concentrate on the protection of civilians, less bombing. Like McChrystal, McKiernan wanted more troops. (A western diplomat in Kabul groaned to me, “the military always want more troops.”)

The sense of deja vu is compounded, in a childish sort of way, by the fact that all commanders of Nato in Afghanistan seem to be called Mac something. The first time I visited Kabul in 2008, the head of ISAF was an American general called Dan McNeill. He wanted more troops as well. McNeill, McKiernan, McChrystal. Plus ca change…

The British news at the moment is dominated by the sad sight of coffins returning from Afghanistan. For the first time for ages, there is a sign of the political consensus behind the mission beginning to fracture. The Conservative line is that the war is still essential, but that the military are being under-resourced. It has been left to the Liberal Democrats, the third party, to question the underlying rationale of the mission. But Nick Clegg their leader cannot quite bring himself to call for a pull-out. Instead he is arguing that the mission is over-ambitious in seeking to create a democratic Afghanistan. I sympathise with his desire to open up debate about the war. But it seems an odd criticism for Clegg to make. First, its an out-of-date argument - both the Americans and the Brits have already adopted a more “realist” security-based approach. Second, if there was any party that I would expect to stick up for human rights and democracy, it would be the Lib Dems.

But there is a broader peculiarity to the British debate. We are so (understandably) fixated on the losses of UK troops, that there seems to be very little attempt to understand how what Britain is doing fits in with the broader coalition strategy. Continue reading "Britain’s peculiar Afghanistan debate"