From the top down the forces can’t be faulted, regardless of the cowardly attacks on the brass, when politicians like Bliar and Brown are the ones who make the rules and apportion funds.

You’ve obviously never served, though no doubt you will come back that you spent 150 years in the services etc. etc. yada yada.

In some ways the surge was a military success, but don’t forget that it first involved negotiating a deal with the Ba’athist insurgents. Once they had agreed to support the West against al-Qaida, the military side of the surge could take place.

If you want reasons to negotiate with the Taliban then actually you should look at Iraq. There was no progress until the Americans were willing to sit down and work out a deal, even if military operations were used later, to stop extremists sabotaging it.

(You have to wonder what was promised to the Ba’athists. They’ve been given money and new weapons, but were they also offered some kind of deal about Iraq’s future? The UN mandate for the occupying forces runs out at the end of 2008, and negotiations with the Iraqi government about replacing it with a treaty have been bogged down for months. I can’t help wondering if agreement will be reached just after the American election, on terms that are not to America’s liking.)

Now having been told by British military Commanders that Afghanistan was winnable, we now see them wanting to throw in the towel here as well.

Much more of this and we will be known as the ‘ cheese eating surrender monkey’s’

One can’t fault our forces on the ground who are doing an heroic job, so one must wonder where this lack of nerve comes from. The Government certainly, but you must also wonder if the old men at the top of the military have become too fearful in their old age, and wanting to avail themselves of the luxuries of the £2.3 billion refurbished MOD Whitehall offices, or looking to get a piece of the luxury £230 million hotel and travel expenses the top brass have rung up.

I believe we could extract ourselves from Iraq with our ‘honour’ intact (even if the war itself is dishonourable) in fairly short order.

We will not win in Afghanistan so we might as well stop military operations as soon as we can. It may however be worthwhile to set up a favourable trading system with the ordinary people(s) of Afghanistan and, for instance, buy up the products of their opium poppies for conversion to medical grade heroin for NHS use. Trade may in time make them less willing to support terrorism.

The War on Drugs at home is no closer to resolution and no more successful than Prohibition was. Arguably it may be better for society to supply addicts with their drugs (e.g. heroin from Afghanistan) rather than criminalise people for something they cannot easily stop doing. Not an appealing solution, but dreadfully pragmatic.

Another question is whether the Harzai government could withstand the insurgency without Western support. General Carleton-Smith’s comments seem to suggest he believes that the insurgency must be reduced if the Afghan government are to be able to manage the security situation without NATO help. This implies that an unsuccessful surge would be disaster, likely to feed the insurgency all the more, and perhaps leading to the need for an open-ended Western commitment to prop up the government in Kabul. It seems therefore we have only two choices (i) a negotiated settlement with the Taliban or (ii) to ensure that such force is brought to bear against them that their resistance will be broken. The former seems the approach that is most likely to succeed but is only viable if the Taliban really aspire to make the Sinn Féin transition from political violence to mainstream political party. I don’t think it would hurt to have discussions with them to clarify what they would settle for.

We are now warned that this may take over 10 years, so there will be boys and girls aged 10 in primary school who’s future is to be killed at 18 in Afghanistan because of decisions made now.

I think you should take a very sceptical approach, demand miles stones in the near future and hold those making the projections and decisions to account.

There are in a sense two types of insurgency. Alien and native. If we step back in time to Greece, immediately at the end of WW2, there was a Communist insurgency. It was essentially a Russian creation. Stalin agreed with Churchill that Greece was in the Allied sphere of influence, so he refrained from backing that insurgency. The Allies put a lot of troops on the ground and, to shape one of Churchills quotes to my purpose, made 90% of the country 100% safe. The insurgency could not fight effectively in the cities and so could not and did not succeed.

The key issue here is that there was no broad native base of support for the insurgency. Once defeated militarily, they were done for, gone.

This is of course in constrast to insurgencies where there are real native grievences which drive the insurgency – the Palestine and Chechnya being good recent examples. The people themselves as a mass hate and fear the oppressor and their atrocities and gross injusticies and military success is as such only temporary, because another round of insurgents will rise up over time.

In these cases, alas, I have almost never seen a negotiated solution. What actually happens is that time passes – years, decades of horrific suffering – and other events occur and eventually the conflict becomes irrelevent and passes away.

The Taliban exist because there are a considerable number of men in Afghanistan are in a situation such that the beliefs they hold lead them to support, contribute and indeed join and fight for the Taliban.

This is a native insurgency. Military victory will only ever be temporary. We are in effect attempting to impose our view, our vision of how the country should be – upon a population, a people, who hold a different view. It cannot work.

It is a tragedy it cannot work, because by my views – Thoreau, Mill, Smith, Hayek and Friedman – their beliefs are truly horrific. The State they would form – did form – is a cultural abortion. And yet it seems to me it is beyond our immediate power for things to be otherwise.

The real solution (in the sense of moving a Talibanesque society towards something which involves freedom) is economic. The country must prosper and form a middle class and the people as a whole must come to hold different views; and this takes generations.

It seems to me currently we are hoist by our own petard; having gone in, if we now go out, the Taliban will take over again, and then what will have been the point of having gone in in the first place?

And it is this which keeps us there; that leaving will mean our original effort was in error and all we have done, wasted.

Britain in NI – negotiation
Britain in Malaya – victory by isolating them from the people, however the geurillas were almost entirely ethnic Chinese among a majority of Malays
El Salvador – US support of the election of a moderate followed by negotiation
USSR in the Baltic States & Ukraine – terror
Krajina – ethnic cleansing/genocide of virtually the whole population
Greece – popular election plus Yugoslavia leaving the Soviet bloc & ceasing to supply a base

None of these give any easy answers but I would suggest 2 options:

1 we need to be able to close off the border either by an ultimatum to Pakistan or more likely & probably cheaper but still horrendously expensive – an Israel style barrier but MUCH longer.

2 ensuring the election of a new leader (perhaps the old king) & negotiations probably on the basis of a very decentralised state in which the Pathans (who are the people fighting) get almost total autonomy as do the tribes making up our allies in what used to be the northern alliance. Decentralised states tend to be less aggressive anyway because no one leader can inspire them to war.

Our media almost entirely fail to report what the fighters say they are fighting for. Presumably they consider it patriotic not to do so but it does tend to make informed policymaking difficult. My suspicion is that it is largely for tribal home rule & perhaps for the drug money, though the Taliban were opposed to drugs, & hardly at all to establish a world Caliphate.

I never realised just how many diverse tribal groups are involved and came to the conclusion that there is no “country” called Afghanistan. It is just a name for an area on maps printed in the west. The real map has a lot more boundaries on it, which are not going to change anytime soon.

After an hour or so in conversation – they all spoke English, one thing became frighteningly clear to me. Suffice it to say, if you ever find yourself in a similar bar, try not to mention the word Zionism.

I’m no expert on these matters, but it looks to me like there is an endless supply of non-Afghans that are willing to join in and fight NATO in Afghanistan. There’s even been reports of Brits going over there to fight with the Taleban.

We could probably stay there for decades shooting angry young Muslim ‘terrorists’. If the object of the war in Afghanistan is to provide a tangible front-line for NATO to fight Muslims then it is working, whether this is the same as winning I am not sure.

As a way of preventing open-ended diffuse military action against intangible opponents government should be required to submit a mission statement to parliament. It should be updated every year to avoid subsequent goalpost moving and mission creep. It should clearly state, in layman’s terms, what the aim of the operation is, what criteria need to be met for the aim to be fulfilled and troops returned home. If the campaign incurs heavy casualties it must be justified that the operation is of such importance that it should be sustained in the face of such a high human cost. Most importantly it should clearly set out why the operation is in Britain’s national interest. It’s all very well talking talking about global or EU wide solutions to economic problems. You can’t expect people to risk their lives for their European parliament or to install democracy in some far flung land.

Half measures such as we are taking at the moment only sow dragons’ teeth.

With the current shower you feel they find in Afghanistan a more justifiable scenario for the inescapable military adventurism to which Mr Blair signed us up in his emotional response to 9/11; but there is no achievable military objective (nevermind victory) for which the lives of the bravest of our people are being sacrificed, and our diplomatic influence extinguished.

By the way if you havent already read it Ahmed Rashid’s terrifying “Descent into Chaos” describes the situation from the perspective of a rational muslim intellectual, and god knows we need those. I hope William Hague has a copy.

It is a silly war in a silly place. It is also the only sort of war our opponents can fight. We should fight to our strengths, not theirs.

Get out and quarantine Afghanistan and Pakistan

We entered the Iraq campaign with little justification other than a display of support to our closest ally, and the extension of our activity in Afghanistan was described by the then Home Secretary as minor and amounting to just “peace-keeping” or some such. In both instances, the length and severity of the campaigns are far beyond that which the UK public must surely have expected. It has been expensive in the lives of our soldiers. Of course it is always hard to weigh up the value of combat in such terms—but has it been worth it?

In terms of financial cost, how much has been expended? And how much will be needed to continue? Even were it the case that we could clearly see value for money, do we have any money left? Not according to Mr Osborne, who says the cupboard is bare.

A large consideration for the government may well be the loss of face and the embarrassment, were the UK to pull out of both countries—a defeat, and a sense of having let down one’s allies. More importantly, the consequence might in the long run stoke the activities of terrorists and the drug trade, but perhaps as an alternative we should devote our energies to securing our immediate borders and rooting out the enemies within our borders.

I cannot understand how we have sufficient funds to continue with these military operations, when the nation’s debt continues to mount inexorably and we are told the UK’s finances are in such a sorry state to withstand the present economic pressures.

Is it not time to draw a line in the sand? Is it not time to withdraw from the role of one of the world’s policemen, even if only for a few years? Let’s also consider the continuing outflow of money on other international undertakings (eg aid) and desist from spreading our munificence amongst all and sundry. Perhaps we should get Alvin Hall on the job to provide us with a budget to keep within our means.

Iraq is now quite straightforward, in my opinion. As soon as we handed Basra Palace back to the Iraqis, we had no role. We might as well leave. This is true whether or not history will judge the “surge” a success.

Afghanistan is more difficult because the Taliban ran a more brutal regime than Saddam Hussein. (Hussein had done some seriously nasty things in the past, like the Halabja gas attack, but he seemed to have stopped by 2003.) However, like your military contact, I suspect that the war is unwinnable and we should therefore look for an exit. The fact that the war might be justified is not a reason to fight if we are only facing defeat.

There is no way to win in Afghanistan, speaking as ex military, without men on the ground and keeping them there. We can’t, we lack the resources and will, and also the moral capacity with the scum-bags of Labour running the show.

Besides that, why should we be sacrificing our men in this way? We missed Bin Laden, so now we should shift the resources to a more productive use. I don’t believe the people of Afghanistan are any better off, certainly not long term, and never will be until Pakistan makes a real effort to rid their country of the Taleban.

It seems to me the problem may be a muslim problem, and only they, seeing as they support any muslim regardless of their crime against non muslims, can sort the problem out, and that won’t happen.