The campaign in Afghanistan is being let down by weak leadership, on both sides of the Atlantic, says Charles Moore
Such arguments have much more force with a conscript army, but ours is a professional one. Men volunteer to fight and they know that when you fight, you may die. The death of 229 such professionals over the course of eight years is not, by the standard of most wars, a high number. Tomorrow, the nation remembers wars where that number of dead per day was commonplace. The recent losses are extremely sad, but not shocking or even surprising. In themselves, they tell you nothing about whether the war is right or wrong.
It is, therefore, a bad idea for Gordon Brown's public interventions on the subject of Afghanistan to be responses to particular deaths. Yesterday, he spoke in the wake of the murder of five British soldiers by an Afghan policeman. One feels that his timing, though not his content, was tacitly rebuked by General Nick Parker, the new British commander in theatre, who said: "I hope we don't make strategic decisions on the basis of this low-level, terrible action."
The actual words which Mr Brown used supported the Afghan campaign, but their psychological undertow was less encouraging: "Oh dear, oh dear. Don't panic! Don't panic!"
Mr Brown is well known for being an intensely political politician, forever calculating electoral advantage, but he does not understand the political effect of wars. His original hope in Afghanistan seems to have been that people somehow would not notice it much. He was not exactly against it, but he has never, as people say nowadays, taken "ownership" of it. This is a war: why has he never set up a war cabinet?
The Prime Minister constantly resisted generals' advice to reinforce. Even today, his increases are more apparent than real. When, for example, are the promised 500 extra men actually going to arrive? His sense is that British deaths are unacceptable to the British public, and therefore he must save the military from incurring more of them by pressing too fiercely forward.
He is wrong on two counts. In the first place, deaths are more likely if our forces cannot act decisively than if they can. You do not win by holding back.
In the second place, he is wrong about public attitudes. In well-run wars, people tend to see their side's deaths as arguments for victory, because they focus on what the fighting is for. I remember, during the Falklands Conflict how the BBC grotesquely miscalculated the public reaction to the sinking of HMS Sheffield, thinking that it would produce pressure for a peace deal. It did the opposite. If men were to die, people felt, their cause must prevail: men did not go to the bottom of the ocean so that diplomats could sleep soundly in their beds.
The strongest argument against any war is this: if it is not necessary, then it is unnecessary, and unnecessary war is immoral. Mr Brown maintains that this war is necessary – "We cannot, we must not and we will not walk away." But if he is right, as he is, that the safety of the streets of Britain is at stake in this fight, why are we not pushing much harder for victory? Where is the urgency about trying to get this right? After all, the news is bad. The presidential election has been unhappy, to put it mildly, and no one really believes in President Karzai's government. It is, as Mr Brown boldly said, "a byword for corruption".The Afghan police, even without murdering its British allies, does not work.
Nor does the UN mission. Nor does the military alliance which is supposed to sustain the whole thing. It is surprising that Mr Brown does not use the word "Nato" more. That alliance, which has secured the Western world since the end of the Second World War, agreed to take on the Afghan task five years ago. Some – the Americans, of course, ourselves, the Danes, Dutch, Canadians, Australians and plucky little Estonians – have done their duty. But others have been contemptible. It turned out that the Italians were bribing the Taliban not to attack them. As for the Germans, I gather that one of their forces' biggest problems is obesity, because they hardly dare leave their Afghan base.
In Barack Obama, the continentals have at last got the US President of whom they dreamed, but they have almost completely failed to help him. He says the Afghan campaign is his foreign-policy priority, but where are the propaganda shots of gallant Jean and Fritz and Mario all assisting GI Joe's great task? Where are the common sacrifices and the common successes? The most testing military mission that Nato has undertaken is the one its members are least ready to support. "In the end," Mr Brown said, in a phrase which confirms his gloomy psychology, "we will succeed or fail together." It is almost as if some members would be happy with failure.
As for President Obama, he has a general in the field whom he appointed. General Stanley McChrystal duly tells Mr Obama what he needs – 40,000 more troops and a surge in Kandahar – but the President's favourite response is to set up a professorial working group and argue the case round Washington for months. And Pakistan remains in chaos. Our leaders maintain the rhetoric, but not the aim, the momentum, the will.
Because our leaders let the Afghan issue go to sleep politically, they are unnerved now that it has woken up. The critics sense this. The anti-war television coverage is emboldened; the families of those killed or wounded are pumped for condemnations of the fighting; the poll numbers for withdrawal creep higher. And politicians thinking of elections hedge their bets.
If we truly want to win the war in Afghanistan, we need to challenge its opponents much more fiercely. Politicians such as Nick Clegg, who congratulate themselves on asking the necessary, awkward questions, need to be interrogated about what they actually want. Do they want the first defeat of the most powerful military alliance in history at the hands of a small band of fanatics armed with little more than rifles and IEDs? Do they have any conception of what such a defeat would mean for the world order, for the stability of countries in the region, or for civil peace in every European city? Do they not understand that this fight will be seen all over the world not as a battle for control of some jagged mountains, but between values, and that, if our values do not win, they will lose?
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