The Darul Aman palace is a huge neo-classical pile with hundreds of rooms, set against the backdrop of the snowy mountains that surround Kabul. From a distance, it is an imposing sight. Unfortunately, as I discovered when I visited a few weeks ago, it is also a ruin. The palace was all but destroyed in the Afghan civil war of the 1990s.

Darul Aman was built in the 1920s by Amanullah Khan, a reformist king who also promoted women’s rights and discouraged the wearing of the burqa. Ninety years later, the king is long dead, his palace is a wreck and the burqa is ubiquitous in Kabul.

I thought of King Amanullah’s reforms this week, as debate flared over a law recently passed by the Afghan parliament. The statute, which applies to the country’s Shia minority, would require women to get their husband’s permission to leave the home and make it illegal for them to refuse to have sex with their husbands.

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This is Nato’s 60th anniversary and the alliance is engaged in a proper war in Afghanistan. So you might expect the mood here in Strasbourg to be a mixture of the sombre and the celebratory. Instead, diplomats and bureaucrats are fussing about their usual concerns - protocol and security.

Nato officials are aghast that their secretary-general, Jaap de Hoop Scheffer, has had to beg for an invite to tonight’s official banquet. Apparently the French originally intended to exclude him, arguing that the meeting should be heads-of-state only. Scheffer had to jump through all sorts of humiliating hoops to make it to his own organisation’s birthday party. Also Carla Bruni has been a bit lazy about looking after her fellow spouses. By tradition, since the summit is taking place in France, Mrs Sarko should have acted as chief animatrice. But Nato people claim that that she has barely lifted a finger.

The most interesting story is the controversy over who is likely to be the next Nato secretary-general. Apparently it may not, after all, be Anders Fogh Rasmussen, the Danish PM. The Turkish opposition to him is real, because he was prime minister at the time of the Danish cartoons row. Nato officials first reaction was that the Turks might not be being serious; or that they were just being awkward and could be talked round. But that thinking is changing. One senior official whispers that the Turks might have a point after all. Denmark’s embassy in Pakistan was burnt to the ground during the cartoons’ row - and Rasmussen was attacked for allegedly haughty behaviour. With Nato so heavily involved in that part of the world, people are beginning to think he might not be the most tactful appointment.

Some might regard that line of reasoning as cowardly, others would see it as pragmatic. Whatever, the search is on for new candidates. Jonas Store, the Norwegian foreign minister, is the new name doing the rounds. Continue reading "Arguing about the little things at Nato"

Troops at Nato headquarters in Kabul can buy T-shirts with a blunt message for the folks back home: “While you were chilling, we were killing.”

Over the next year in Afghanistan, there is likely to be a lot more killing – or “kinetic activity” as Nato’s top brass prefer to call it. The Americans are sending 17,000 more troops to bolster Nato’s fight against the Taliban insurgency.

But the new conventional wisdom is that, as Joe Biden, US vice-president, puts it: “There is no military solution.” Instead western leaders are talking about a “comprehensive approach” that, alongside fighting, must include economic development, improved government, regional diplomacy and peace feelers to elements of the Taliban.

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I don’t know whether Napoleon was right when he remarked that “an army marches on its stomach”. But the Nato forces deployed here in Afghanistan seem to be taking no chances. If you eat in the American canteen at Camp Alamo near Kabul, as I did yesterday, you could be in a decent diner anywhere in the States - there is fried chicken, ribs, chilli, fresh fruit and six flavours of ice cream. I would guess it is all flown in from overseas.

A friend who visited the Italian army in Herat, up near the Iranian border, had a similar experience. Despite the fact that they were in a military camp in the middle of nowhere, the Italians still served him gnocchi, washed down with an excellent Chianti. When he complimented the officers on the standard of their catering, they explained that they had sent a local Afghan back to Italy to be trained as their chef.

So who says that Nato will leave no lasting legacy in Afghanistan? Years after the coalition forces withdraw, there will still be a man in Herat who can make a perfect spaghetti vongole.

The sign over the front gate at the main training centre for the Afghan army reads - “Unity starts here.” The future of Afghanistan may depend on whether this slogan can be turned into something more than a pious hope, in a country that has traditionally been deeply divided along tribal and regional lines.

Nato’s exit strategy depends on an eventual handover over to the Afghan army. So a massive training effort is underway. The aim is to increase the size of the Afghan army from 82,000 to 132,000 troops over the next two years. But Ali Ahmad, the Soviet-trained Afghan general in charge of the training centre, admits that the army is having huge trouble recruiting in the heartlands of the Taliban rebellion - Helmand and Kandahar provinces in the south. Potential recruits are either too hostile or too scared to join up.

As a result, the ethnic balance of the new Afghan army is liable to get out of whack. Tajiks and Uzbeks from the north of the country will be seriously over-represented and the largest and most rebellious ethnic group, the Pashtuns, will be seriously under-represented. It sounds more like a a formula for civil war than national unity.

General Ahmad’s American colleagues were rather alarmed by his revelations and one attempted to suggest that there had been a “translation problem”. But the general was happy to elaborate. He told the story of a recruit from Kandahar, whose family had come all the way to Kabul to appeal to their son to pull out of the army - for fear that they would become the victims of Taliban reprisals. Continue reading "Is there such a thing as an Afghan army?"

My flight into Kabul this morning was absolutely packed. I was slightly surprised to discover that there are so many regular flights into the Afghan capital, given the security situation here. But there are, in fact, three or four connections a day from Dubai. (I also noticed that there are now several commercial flights plying the Dubai-Baghdad route.)

I flew in on Kam Air - a new Afghan carrier. The name made a French journalist travelling with me laugh - she pointed out that Kam (spelled differently) is French slang for drugs. The people on the flight were almost all foreigners - I spoke to an Irish security contractor, a Gambian aid worker and an American military man, returning to Bagram air base. Coming through the arrivals hall (a rather grandiose description), there was also a big sign for employees of Blackwater, the notorious US security company.

All this foreign traffic suggests that people are relatively calm about the security situation here - despite two big suicide bombings in the last couple of months. There was a co-ordinated attack on several Afghan ministries last month, which killed over 20 people. And five were killed in an attack on the German embassy in January. I am staying at the Serena Hotel which was itself attacked by suicide bombers about a year ago - and is now surrounded by blast walls, armed guards and security check-points.

Despite these high-profile attacks, ISAF - the Nato force here - claim that the security situation in Kabul itself is actually improving. In one of those suspiciously precise statistics, I was told that attacks in Kabul have fallen by 47% over the last year. Nato was sufficiently confident to hand over security in most of the capital to the Afghan army, a few months ago.

Certainly, the regular international flight connections make Kabul feel less like a city under siege. The Taliban may be riding high at the moment. But unlike the mujahadeen who fought the Soviets, they have not yet been Stinger anti-aircraft missiles by an outside power.

As a “foreign affairs commentator”, I am meant to follow politics all over the world. At least in theory, I have cogent views on everything from the Bolivarian revolution to Chinese land reforms. This is an interesting, if tricky, assignment.

Wednesday was a particularly head-spinning day. At lunch-time I moderated a session at the LSE on the future of the Russian economy. In the afternoon, I took part in a conference call about a seminar on China that I am going to in France next week. Then at 6.30 pm I went over to the Policy Exchange think-tank in Westminster to interview Larry Lindsey, before an invited audience. Lindsey is a former economic adviser in the Bush White House, so we were talking about the Obama stimulus package. When that was over, I walked a few hundred yards across Whitehall to go to a dinner in Churchill’s War Rooms (an underground bunker, just near Downing Street). This was dedicated to the study of the problems of Pakistan’s tribal areas - and I found myself sitting between Pakistan’s deputy defence minister and a senior Nato general.

Fascinating - particularly the last event. Except by the end of the day, all these various problems had merged into one and I was confusing my TARPs and my FATAs. Should I be more worried by collapsing Russian banks, ballooning American deficits, jobless Chinese peasants or angry Pakistani mullahs? And can I come up with some sort of global strategy which solves all of these problems, simultaneously?

The Pakistan event was organised by the World Security Network, which is masterminded by Hubertus Hoffmann, a German entrepreneur - and so the event was full of German generals. I know it was all a long time ago, but it still seemed slightly odd for them to choose to dine in the rooms where Churchill organised the war effort. But, for Mr Hoffmann, this was evidently part of the point. In a short speech, he urged the Pakistani participants to take inspiration from their surroundings and from Churchill’s dedication to freedom. And he added that we should never forget how close Churchill came to defeat “at the hands of an Austrian - as we German like to think of him.”