Jason Burke: Key to ending war lies in changing the way we operate

Opinion

The best way to view Afghanistan, a senior British officer said as we got into his helicopter in Kabul, is from the air. From above, he explained, "everything looks much more straightforward. You can see the roads, the rivers, the villages. Everything is much clearer".

Sadly, the gritty reality on the ground is rather different. If anything has helped Afghanistan become the graveyard of empires - and of good intentions - it is its complexity. If the current international operation is to have the remotest chance of success, this essential characteristic needs to be turned to our advantage, not obscured beneath a welter of wishful thinking and rhetoric.

For the war in Afghanistan is not going well. The Taleban is inflicting casualties and ceding little ground. The insurgents continue to maintain a parallel administration across at least a third of the country. They do not appear to lack recruits, fighting spirit or confidence. Then there is the continuing narcotics boom, the endemic corruption, the exclusion of huge swaths of the population from politics, the myriad problems faced by even the most simple international initiative.

The military campaign has cost British taxpayers more than £5 billion. There is a limit to what countries are prepared to pay. The White House is already having trouble with growing resistance on Capitol Hill to further funding.

We are not going to win outright, certainly not within a time-scale that would be acceptable to increasingly recalcitrant Western domestic populations. What we need to do, instead, is try not to lose outright either.

Support for the West in Afghanistan is strongest among cosmopolitan urbanites, ethnic minorities and women, none of whom is likely to take on the Taleban with any great success in the near future. Though a poll in February found that 60 per cent of Afghans would support senior Taleban ministers if it meant peace, it is hard to imagine that being acceptable in the West.

Finally, we need to recognise that the election this month is not going to change a great deal. For a farmer in southern Afghanistan, Kabul is a million miles away and concerns are about what is happening in the next village or valley.

But it is these local dynamics that may eventually help, if not find a solution, then give the new strategy a much greater chance of success. The key lies in seeing our role in Afghanistan differently. Instead of being there to fight a classic counterinsurgency war, we need to see our job as providing assistance to conflict-resolution. The war did not start in 2001. It has been going on for decades. It is not a war between global jihadi Islam and "civilisation", but a civil war in which the West and groups such as al Qaeda are equally foreign.

This civil war is hugely complicated, with allegiances fragmented along ethnic, cultural, political and historical lines. It pits the Pashtun against ethnic minorities, urban modernisers against rural reactionaries and the centre against the periphery. In some instances, it is about raw power and hard cash. In others, it is about less tangible things: identity, honour, pride. In each village, there are supporters of all factions who each represent a group whose interests they try to promote and protect. The Taleban has long recognised this, exploiting the fissures of Afghan society with an outreach programme to the disaffected. We have not.

Our job before we leave should be trying to set the conditions for the resolution of at least some of the many, interlinked conflicts. Such an effort needs to be Afghan-led and will involve many people whose views on, say, gender equality, are not likely to be shared by much of the international community. This is not about "peace talks" with insurgents, but about trying to encourage the construction of something that is sufficiently inclusive to prevent an immediate collapse into dangerous anarchy the moment Western forces pull out.

Part of the Taleban's support stems from the legitimacy it has as representatives of conservative Pashtun rural values and traditions. Find other representatives and that legitimacy will disappear.

Much of the worst insurgent violence is fuelled by micro-factors that have little to do with global narratives or big ideologies. In Kunar's Korengal Valley, a squabble over illegal timber felling is the origin of the fierce fighting. In Uzbeen, the valley east of Kabul, it is smuggling rights and tribal disputes. In such places, negotiated solutions achieved through traditional jirga assemblies, deftly aided by the stick wielded by coalition military forces and the carrot of international cash, should be enough to achieve some temporary stabilisation at least.

In some places, deals will have to be done with the Taleban clerics. In others, it may be tribal leaders who can impose some kind of order.

The one condition for everybody would be the rejection of al Qaeda-style international terrorism. Given the parochialism of most Afghan commanders and constituencies, this should not be difficult to impose. Given the efficacy of drones and the new Afghan Intelligence Service it would not be difficult to enforce either.

In the best scenario, this patchwork of micro-agreements would lead to those who persisted in perpetuating civil conflict being seen as the enemies of stability. In the worst-case scenario, when domestic populations start taking to the streets against the war and Western troops pull out in three or four years' time, such an initiative may at least slow the Taleban's advance. It is worth trying. We do not have a great deal to lose.

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