Afghanistan: A Few Words of Discomfort

In today's Observer, Peter Beaumont offers a challenging if depressing analysis of the future in Afghanistan:

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.

Beaumont's shrewd reading sets the deteriorating situation against the easy constructions of "liberal intervention":

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.

It is his conclusion, however, this is most striking and perceptive, as the US foregoes any political approach for military boots on the ground:

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.