Reporter’s death shows war at crossroads

The death of the Sunday Mirror's defence correspondent Rupert Hamer in a roadside bomb explosion in Helmand on Saturday came at the end of a pretty dreadful fortnight, even by the dire standards of the eight-year Afghan conflict. There is now a powerful sense that the war has reached a decisive point, a make-or-break moment for the international mission and the Karzai government.

Hamer and his photographer Philip Coburn, who was badly injured, were travelling with a US Marine road convoy in Narwa district when their vehicle was hit.

Only six weeks ago I travelled to Narwa with Helmand's governor, Gulab Mangal, to distribute rice and cooking oil to 300 poor families as part of the celebrations on the eve of the festival of Ede. The Marines in Narwa made great play of the fact that they had cleared the town's orchards and bazaar of Taliban after an operation involving artillery, 1,000 ground troops, helicopter gunships and jets last July and August. The Marines were able to walk along Narwa's main street without body armour or helmets.

So the question posed by Hamer's death is whether the international forces, even with President Obama's extra 30,000 US troops in place, can control enough of the ground for enough of the time to turn the tide against the Taliban insurgents.

Reporting the Afghan fight – even as an 'embed' travelling with military convoys – is a high risk enterprise. In the past year a Canadian and an American reporter have died from IED roadside bomb strikes in different provinces. Some editors and managers will be put off by the risk, and pull back their correspondents. This would be a mistake, because the Afghan story is so granular that it needs good reporting by journalists - not government and military spokespersons - to describe facts on the ground.

That is what Rupert Hamer was doing. He was looking at how the international and Afghan forces are beginning to implement the strategy of General McChrystal to use his extra forces to build new 'security zones' , in central Helmand and Kandahar, and open and protect strategic highways linking them.

President Obama has declared, even before the full number of US reinforcements are in place – which they won't be before April - that this plan has to show real results by the end of this summer. This deadline seems to be set by US electoral considerations for the mid-term Congressional vote next November, rather than any political reality in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Yet it is the political timetable of Kabul that should be concentrating minds right now.

First President Karzai needs to get a working government together. Only seven of his 27 nominees for ministerial and government posts were accepted by parliament, which is showing a remarkable independence of spirit. This may be the result of the charges of serial fraud accompanying his chaotic re-election as president last August.

This spring the elections for the legislature must be held under the rules laid down by the current constitution. Commanders fear the Taliban will mount another campaign of intimidation and violence to disrupt this year's poll, as they did last year. This would come as the crucial phase of the McChrystal stabilisation operation gets under way in May. Senior British officers say they believe the poll should be delayed, possibly for up to a year.

The international community in the Afghan mission - in the shape of the UN - is also facing a turning point, though this has hardly been reported at all in the media. The outgoing senior UN man, the Norwegian Kai Eide, quit his post in Kabul early last week. He had been criticised for being too weak over the record of the Karzai administration on corruption and electoral sharp practice.

Kai Eide didn't go quietly. He told his bosses at UN HQ in New York that he doesn't agree with the US troop surge for Afghanistan, nor with the McChrystal strategy. The UN now has to appoint a replacement to make sure that Karzai and McChrystal can work together and implement the new security strategy and clean-up of government. This makes it about the toughest and most important job in Afghanistan – and none of the three candidates so far mentioned has faced anything quite like this before.

But the big question now is why America and its 42 ISAF allies are fighting Afghanistan at all. The US and UK say that their troops are in Afghanistan to make sure the Taliban don't turn the country into a haven for al-Qaeda again, as they did prior to 9/11. Until two weeks ago the official line was that while the Taliban are now resurgent across large parts of Afghanistan, there is no significant presence of al-Qaeda operatives.
 
That is now past tense. Two weeks ago a Jordanian doctor, Humam Khalil Abu Mulal al-Balawi, was driven into the CIA's centre of operations at Camp Chapman in Khost province, allegedly bearing information as a trusted agent. Inside he blew himself up and took seven senior CIA officers with him. He hadn't even had a cursory body search. "It was a devastating and brilliant operation," said a senior British officer, "which al-Qaeda had planned meticulously for over a year."

Which puts al-Qaeda back in Afghanistan with a vengeance. The whole anti-terror campaign concept, and with it the strategy for Afghanistan, Yemen and beyond, needs careful reconsideration. The al-Qaeda jihadi narrative has moved on from eight years ago, and in mysterious ways. That is why reporters still need to get out on the ground – as Rupert Hamer did in Afghanistan and Iraq. ·