Ashdown and the art of strategy

February 13, 2008 | Charlie Edwards | More on Asia, Conflict and security, Middle East | 

Paddy Ashdown is in trenchant mood in today’s FT.

With fighting in Afghanistan now entering its seventh year, no agreed international strategy, public support on both sides of the Atlantic crumbling, Nato in disarray and widening insecurity in Afghanistan, defeat is now a real possibility. The consequences for both Afghanistan and its allies would be appalling: global terrorism would have won back its old haven and created a new one over the border in a mortally weakened Pakistan; our domestic security threat would be gravely increased and a new instability would be added to the world’s most unstable region.

But then neither is continuing as we are. So what should we do?

Some say more troops should be sent and they are certainly needed. Some say those Nato members who are not sharing the burden of the fighting should do so – and they should. Some say we need more aid – and we do. We are putting into Afghanistan one 25th the troops and one 50th of the aid per head of population that we put into Kosovo and Bosnia.

Increasing resources in Afghanistan is clearly necessary, but it is not sufficient. Even if we were to provide what was necessary, and even if everyone pulled their weight, we would still find it very difficult to turn the tide, which is now running increasingly strongly against us.

Adding troops is key to this problem. But as James Travers’ argued in his regular national affairs column yesterday:

Adding 1,000 NATO troops and more air support won’t fix what’s wrong with this attempted rescue of a failing state. As Manley found and studies warn, unco-ordinated strategies countering the insurgency, corruption and the booming opium business aren’t working and demand hurried reconsideration.

And what about increasing resources? Clearly this is crucial - but let’s be realistic. The U.S. has spent the same amount on aid and development in Afghanistan over the past five years as the military burns through in Iraq every three weeks. And resources follow priorities.

So finally it begs the question: do we need a strategy? According to Ashdown:

What we lack above all is a strategy that all (including, crucially, the Afghan government and the international military) can buy into. We know well enough what the objective is – to help President Hamid Karzai’s government to govern so that we can hand over the tasks we are doing, including the fighting, to them.

And based on a strategy, we need to develop a plan - but as Ashdown notes, we haven’t agreed a single person to head up the fractured international effort, with the authority to bash international heads together and provide the support the government of Afghanistan needs to begin winning again. So what would Ashdown do?

Firstly, we (the international community) have to concentrate fiercely on the necessary and not be distracted by the merely desirable. To have too many priorities is to have none.

The first is security.

Our second priority should be governance.

The third priority, linking these two, is strengthening the rule of law, from the judiciary, to the police, to the security structures, to the penal code.

I think governments might suggest that this is what they are already doing in Afghanistan. The problem they would point to is coordinating their efforts . But I think there is also something to be said about how they go about developing and implementing policy; and here I think we need to take a very different approach. I call it Connecting the Dots - and I think it’s what we desperately need to do with complex problems such as Afghanistan’s future.

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