John McTernan: Tories send out a mixed message on Afghanistan

WILLIAM Hague, in Kabul, gave a significantly different answer to me about when our troops will leave Afghanistan as to what we are hearing from the Prime Minister.

David Cameron is resolute that combat troops will be gone by 2015. I asked Hague what conditions were required on the ground before British troops can leave. He told me: "Afghan forces must, as planned, be able to stand alone against the insurgency."

In the spirit of transparency I should admit that I was not actually part of the press pack accompanying the Foreign Secretary at the conference in Kabul. I asked him a question on Twitter - he's @WilliamJHague - and was pleased to get such a prompt and clear answer.

But the danger of the Prime Minister's timeline is that any insurgency can wait for the deadline. Or worse, they can try to bomb you to an earlier exit - particularly, if you are embarked on a staged withdrawal.

In contrast, a condition-based withdrawal is very different. The Foreign Secretary has set a pretty high bar - if it is going to be held to. It's one thing to have 130,000 Afghan troops trained, it's quite another to be able to trust that they can hold the line. Just recall how long we kept troops in barracks in Northern Ireland as we demilitarised.

For some time now, the Afghanisation strategy has been building. But just as those who argue that we should learn the lessons of the quagmire that Vietnam became, so we should remember what happened at the end of the Vietnamisation process - the Communist dictatorship over-ran South Vietnam.

The consequences of leaving an Afghanistan ultimately unable to defend itself against the Taleban are too great for us to risk. Al-Qaeda may have been driven out of the country, but it is there in neighbouring territories in Pakistan and waiting to flood back if conditions change.

The harsh truth about Afghanistan is that we are there for a generation. Experts in development say that a country needs a year of reconstruction for every year it has been in chaos. It is more than 30 years since the Soviet invasion; the rebuilding of the country will take a similar length of time. Obviously, the emphasis should - and hopefully will - shift over that time from military protection to economic and social development.

But in the classic army counter-insurgency tactic - "clear, hold and build" - the military is necessary for the first two steps: clearing the territory of insurgents and then holding it from them so that schools, hospitals and markets can be built and maintained.

There's an Afghan saying that "where the road ends, the Taleban start". That's true in two key senses. First, British troops, and those of the other 39 countries in the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF), can only secure ground if they can reach it.

But, perhaps more importantly, a road is a route to market. If you are an Afghan farmer, it is now more profitable to grow wheat than it is to grow opium - but that's no use if you can't get your crop to market nationally and internationally. Good, secure roads bring wealth to rural Afghanistan and take heroin off the streets of Britain.

It is one of the pernicious myths about our involvement in Afghanistan that no progress is being made. The achievements are things of which we should be immensely proud. When we first went there, only two out of ten Afghans had access to healthcare now it's more than eight out of ten. As a consequence, child and maternal death rates are falling.

The Taleban was - and is - opposed to education for girls and young women. They blow up schools and assassinate female teachers.

Despite that terrorism, nearly seven million children are in school in Afghanistan today - up from 1 million in 2001 and nearly a third of them are girls. The total is due to rise to eight million pupils by 2012.

Another highly prevalent myth is the assertion that "no-one has ever defeated the Afghans militarily, look at the British Empire or the Soviet Union". Omitted from this assertion is the fact that British troops are fighting side by side with Afghans, and in support of a democratically-elected government.

Now there are certainly problems with the government. Arguably, such a centralised presidential model is the wrong one for a large, ethnically and geographically diverse nation. And Hamid Karzai has not - to any great extent - grown in office. For many Afghans he is a symbol of poor and weak governance, not its solution.

It is often argued that he is the best leader we could work with. But what if he is the blockage to other talent coming through - the cork in the bottle?

Des Browne, when defence secretary, said a surefire way to get a headline was to say "we must talk to the Taleban". Today, many people are able to get coverage for saying this as it if is a hugely revolutionary proposal. But the truth is, you don't have to make peace with your friends; it's your enemies you need to negotiate with. The only question is when and on what terms. And the only plausible condition is when they have been militarily defeated.

Only then will they know that they have to lay their arms down and find a place in the new Afghanistan. This underlies the desire of General David Petraeus, the head of the international force, for a military surge. The question is how quickly can that be actually achieved? The Taleban was defeated in toe-to-toe fighting, that's why the insurgents have resorted to roadside bombs, or asymmetric warfare to use the military jargon: harder to find, harder to fight, harder to defeat.

Of course, a military surge must be followed by a successful civil surge. But we need to be realistic about how long it will take to achieve stability. That's why previous Labour defence secretaries have seen Britain's involvement in terms of decades - not because they want long-term deployment, but because they wanted long-term success.

And it's why Liam Fox and William Hague can sound at odds with Cameron. Ultimately, there is serious moral choice here. We can stay the course as long as it takes to complete the task we started - or we can cut and run at an arbitrary point, betraying the Afghan people, our values and our security.

lJohn McTernan is a former special adviser to Des Browne