Where now for the comprehensive approach in Afghanistan?

By Douglas Alexander MP

In one of the bloodiest weeks of the conflict, we lost our three hundredth British casualty in Afghanistan this week, and tragically the death toll did not stop there. Our thoughts must be with their families and loved ones.

Sacrifice has been witnessed in recent days, but so too has uncertainty, in the civilian and military leadership of both UK and US efforts in Afghanistan. General McChrystal’s dismissal following his ill-judged comments to Rolling Stone magazine inevitably dominated the coverage. Yet this came only days after news that the UK’s most senior diplomat in Afghanistan, Special Envoy Sir Sherard Cowper-Coles is leaving his role, and that the UK’s most senior military officer, Sir Jock Stirrup, and the Permanent Secretary at the MoD will also shortly be leaving their posts.

The announcement of these senior British departures, coming as they do alongside continuing casualties, David Cameron’s recent statement on Afghanistan and the upcoming Kabul Conference next month oblige us to ask: where does the UK’s commitment to a ‘comprehensive approach’ in Afghanistan now rest? As Joe Klein wrote in Time magazine this week:

“Counter-insurgency and counter-terrorism sound a lot alike, but they are diametric opposites. Counter-terrorism involves killing the bad guys. Counter-insurgency requires protecting the good guys”.

Protecting the good guys in a country like Afghanistan is a complex and challenging undertaking. In the words of the US Army’s Counter-insurgency Field Manual – authored by McChrystal’s successor, General David Petraeus – it involves action to “uphold the rule of law, and provide a basic level of essential services and security for the populace.”

My personal conversations with Petraeus confirm the depth of his personal commitment to a comprehensive approach that requires more than simply military pressure.

Yet the new Defence Secretary Liam Fox has just declared: “We are not in Afghanistan for the sake of the education policy in a broken 13th century country”. Such ignorance of key tenets of strategic doctrine, even from a new Defence Secretary, is as surprising as it is worrying.

For progress to be achieved through a comprehensive approach, and so the war be ended, requires both a strengthening of the state and its legitimacy, and striving for a political settlement, as surely as weakening the Taliban militarily. Diplomatic, development and defence efforts will all play a crucial part in bringing about the conditions under which our forces can return home.

When as Labour ministers we spoke of the ‘comprehensive approach’, we meant it. This shaped our work – from Whitehall offices to the Forward Operating Bases in Helmand province: I witnessed it on numerous visits in regular, respectful and co-operative meetings in Helmand where a civilian from DfID commanded a mixed US/UK provincial reconstruction team.

I witnessed it after Operation Panchai Palang in 2009 when within hours of ground being taken by British and coalition forces, civilian stabilisation experts were able to use their specific skill sets to engage with key leaders, organise community shuras, rebuild infrastructure and begin the process of opening up basic services like health and education to local people.

This comprehensive approach also involves an inclusive political settlement. While appalling violence started this Afghan war, it is politics that will bring it to an end. Sherard Cower-Coles understood that. That is why within government he made the powerful case for military efforts to be matched by political outreach to those elements of the insurgency willing to renounce violence and accept the Afghan constitution.

Yet such a political strategy within Afghanistan needs to be matched by a regional one. It was surprising and concerning quite how little focus was given by the new Prime Minister, in his first statement to the Commons, to the political or wider diplomatic tracks of the campaign.

In recent years in government we had increasingly spoken of “AfPak” in the same breath – recognising the porous way in which weapons, ideology and insurgent forces moved back and forth across the Durand line. Pakistan should not be an afterthought in the new government’s thinking about Afghanistan: it is central to the progress of the mission of which the UK is part.

It is now almost exactly a year since I sat in a Helmand mess tent with soldiers from the Scots Guards. On the nearby TV, Sky News was running a report on the speech David Miliband, as foreign secretary, had made that day at NATO HQ in Brussels, making the case for a political surge – including engaging elements of the Taliban insurgency – to complement the military one. I asked the soldier sitting next to me whether he saw this approach as in any way disrespectful to the friends and comrades his unit had lost during their tour. Without hesitation he replied “Oh no, Sir – we can’t fight here forever…”.

In that vein, let us hope that the wisdom of matching military efforts with complementary development and diplomatic efforts will shape the approach of the new government, even after the turbulent events of the last few days.