Afghanistan conference: can it have an impact?
Updated on 28 January 2010
As ever in the noble art of diplomatic summitry, it is all about upside down news. Let me explain. This is the Afghan conference. As with all such international honcho-fests, nothing can really be allowed to go wrong on the day. Ever.
Thus it is, that all the news about what happened here today, was very likely in your papers, radios and TV screens last night and this morning. They have more or less set it all out in the round of lead-up interviews.
What is happening today is simply the actual conferencing.
It is of course, just about still possible that something might go wrong, this being Afghanistan. But since the whole thing is populated by delegates at foreign minister level, all of whose jobs depend upon not rocking the already rocky boat of Kabul, nothing much will actually happen that you have not already read about if you care.
So it is that the outside world has come togdether to answer one question. Since we are not winning the war, what is Plan B?
To nobody's great surprise, the answer in large measure seems to be: bribe the Taliban to stop killing our soldiers on the one hand and somehow force President-without-mandate Karzai to cut down the massive kleptocracy which passes for government in Kabul.
Now you might think these two things are somewhat contradictory, I could not possibly comment, but eight years into a war which the Taliban are plainly winning, whoever they are, that is what today is all about.
So we end corruption by bribing warlords from a chest containing around £300m. At the same time we send thousands more soldiers to Afghanistan in order to pull our soldiers out of Afghanistan.
Afghans themselves, not widely represented here beyond the unrepresentative Hamid Karzai, are no doubt looking on at all this with a mixture of deep scepticism, cycnicism and wonder that yet more money and soldiers being pumped into their country is going to make any difference.
The foundations of all this are also fractured and flawed. A weakened US President for whom the failing war is nothing but a vote-loser, a deeply-divided UN and Nato mission and a president of Afghanistan 'elected' by a massively-flawed poll.
And only this morning, Nato's military strategy (which is what British soldiers keep being killed for) comes under renewed attack. This time from the inside, from Kai Eade, who stands down in March as Special UN Representative to Afghanistan.
He says the entire military aproach of 'clear, hold, build' simply does not work. You cannot 'clear' the 'Taliban' from any area since one day they are civilian farmers and the next they might be fighting, like 'clearing' the Provisional IRA from South Armagh, not a goer.
Second, you cannot then hold an area because the Afghan army is not up to it, nor is the Afghan police.
And forget building because no civilian enterprise is going into an area with no real security to set about building schools for all those girls Nato wants to see educated.
And a one-day conference in sleepy old London will make an impact?
