Some very plain speaking on Afghanistan from David Miliband in the Telegraph yesterday, in a piece written to coincide with the commemoration of Richard Holbrooke’s life in DC.
While international forces are “suppressing” the insurgency, he notes reports that “unpublished UN security assessments [show] a marked deterioration in security. That, he continues, “tallies with extremely worrying reports of the insurgency spreading into the far north of the country”. He suggests the need for a twin-track approach:
Track one is an internal political settlement. Western influence is currently limited to ineffective and unspecified “pressure” on President Karzai. We need to be far more up front about our end game: a decentralised series of political settlements in the villages and valleys of Afghanistan, with security forces limited to holding the ring and keeping al-Qaeda out.
But this track will never get going unless track two – the track of regional political engagement – has real legs. This means agreements which recognise the divergent interests of the different neighbouring countries, from Pakistan to Iran. At the moment, it is a free-for-all – a recipe for the slide to ethnic enmity that Yvette Cooper, the shadow foreign secretary, has highlighted, and even renewed civil war that would be the most awful epitaph to Western engagement.
