WITH each death in Afghanistan — civilian and military — it becomes more of a commonplace to say this is a war that can’t be won. The same British officers who said the Taliban had been decapitated say these days there can be no victory of the kind normally envisaged. Yet still more US and British soldiers are heading to this war.

Then what?

The answer is that no one directing the war in Afghanistan really knows. All that is on offer is the attempt to impose a military solution on a conflict which — like so many modern wars — cannot be settled by arms; which cannot be won; and which, in too many ways, has long been lost.

Part of the problem is the conceptual one that has burdened our political classes for so long with ideas about what ‘victory’ and post-conflict reconstruction mean. It is a legacy of the Second World War, when the terms of victory and capitulation were indeed total. Combined with the recent doctrine of western military-humanitarian intervention, our leaders have yet to understand how dangerous the limitations of this approach are, so convinced are they that it cannot fail.

But most wars do not end like the Second World War, or even with a successful negotiation between the two sides. Instead, they grind to a halt with a peace settlement that is incomplete, and whose partiality contains within it the conditions for a return to violence. Afghanistan, like Congo and Iraq, is one of these conflicts.

And what politicians on both sides of the Atlantic — President-elect Barack Obama included — have yet to understand is that easy victories on the battlefield and quick-fix reconstruction efforts are no answer to so-called ‘frozen’ conflicts where long lasting and pre-existing ethnic, sectarian and political competitions are either unfrozen or exacerbated by the intervention. In the case of Afghanistan the warning bells were being sounded by astute observers within 12 months of the Bonn Agreement of December 2001 that had been designed to end two-and-a-half decades of Afghan conflict.

Even then the risks were clear: a dangerous competition for power and the spoils of international aid at the new political centre; the hazard of renewed conflict that would follow the failure to mediate between Pashtu interests in the south and the new centre; and the potential for renewed social strife. Inevitably, as all dangers have come to pass — warlordism, corruption and institutional failure. They have acted as the accelerator for the renewed Taliban insurgency that began in 2006 and that has succeeded, not simply by force of arms or the existence of a haven in Pakistan’s tribal areas, but because many Afghans have been persuaded that the Taliban is a better bet than the corrupt and incompetent regime of President Hamid Karzai.

The response has been the usual kneejerk reaction in these circumstances — to bomb more, to send more soldiers and to prop up further a largely discredited government. The only real question now is whether it is too late to salvage anything from this mess.

The answer is that it may be. The lessons of recent conflicts is that there is a short and finite period for reconstruction and peace-building to gain traction. And what is most crucial is not necessarily grand structural projects. What is necessary is to identify and then mediate areas of dangerous competition — what some specialists call ‘conflictual peace-building’.

The problem is that as the conflict in Afghanistan has been escalated by all sides, the room for such strategies has been squeezed out. And with the US committed to sending ever more troops to Afghanistan in pursuit of the hubristic notion that the surge worked in Iraq in absolute terms, rather than simply freezing the lethal competitions there until after a US withdrawal, then all that seems certain is more war and further death.

—Dawn/Guardian News Service

Foreign military deaths in Afghanistan