‘Troops Out!’ call from leading Tory think tank

The discussion launched in London yesterday by the International Institute for Strategic Studies, the leading conservative strategic think tank, sounded like the outline of the British exit strategy from Afghanistan.

In his annual 'strategic survey', director John Chipman announced it was time for Britain - and, by implication, its partners in Afghanistan, including the US - to start scaling back their aims and get ready to leave.

He said the main purpose of the allied intervention all of nine years ago had been achieved: to rid Afghanistan of al-Qaeda and make sure it couldn't set up business there again. The main purpose of international activity now was "containment and deterrence" against international terrorist groups in the region.

Afghanistan must be left largely to its own devices pretty soon, the IISS concluded, and if necessary it may have to be divided into "loosely federated" regions and provinces.
 
Defeating the Taliban, and winning hearts and minds in a classic counter-insurgency operation, seems to have been jettisoned in the IISS plan. "The direct combat role in Afghanistan (by the ISAF international allies) is out of proportion to the threat the Taliban pose outside Afghanistan," said Dr Chipman.

The plan appears to have written off President Hamid Karzai and any notion of a strong centralised government in Kabul. The new deal would give most power to provincial and local governors, who "would have control of their destiny but pretend to be ruled by the centre".

All of which raises two questions: how close is this to official thinking in Whitehall and Washington? And could it possibly work?

The answer to the first is that the IISS has often been the stalking horse for government strategists on both sides of the Atlantic. In 2002 it published its own study on Saddam and weapons of mass destruction, which was then in turn heavily quoted in Tony Blair's so-called intelligence dossier of September 2002 as he ramped up the case for invading Iraq.

British military commanders in Afghanistan have been left in no doubt that David Cameron and Barack Obama want to start withdrawing combat troops from next year and to be closing down the ground campaign by the time Obama is campaigning for re-election in 2012.

The British want to quit because with the looming defence cuts it is feared that there will be no forces for any other operations if the UK continues with the present intensity of military operations in southern Afghanistan. Moreover, as the IISS noted yesterday, "public support for generation-length commitment is waning".

But can the IISS plan work?

It skirts around the problems of the present regime in Kabul too easily, almost envisaging Afghanistan as a new form of Polo mint state - one with a hole in the middle.

Karzai is mired in further accusations of corruption with the news this week that the central Kabul bank was about to collapse, after making questionably large loans to some 20 Karzai associates. The government faces further challenges with the increasingly bloody campaign for choosing a new parliament, in an election due to be held on September 18.

The biggest flaw is the notion that Afghanistan can be partitioned, with even the national army split on ethnic lines. This would lead to the creation of a new Pashtunistan, uniting the Pashtuns in one political entity for the first time since 1893, when their tribal lands were deliberately partitioned by the line drawn by Sir Mortimer Durand, which today serves as the border of Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Pashtunistan would rank as one of the world's greatest narco states, feeding 80 to 90 per cent of the global heroin habit. The IISS directorship, including a former MI6 boss, Nigel Ingster, seemed remarkably calm about this prospect. "There are ways of controlling and monitoring this," he implied this yesterday.

Finally, the IISS made an almost wistful call for greater involvement, help and cooperation with Pakistan.

All of which suggests that the Obama-Cameron great Afghan escape plan is still very much a work in progress, and that quitting Afghanistan is going to take much longer and be more difficult than they would like. ·