In Helmand I learned that while the Afghans want us there, it is so that we provide precisely that reconstruction and security. We the British talk a good plan in terms of development and governance.
The only problem is that we are not delivering our "comprehensive approach". The Department for International Development's contribution has been woeful.
"They sit in their office in the British base and write reports for London," said one local.
Only a few months ago the Taliban were a remote force, but now, as one person put it, "they are not in the mountains - they are in the houses." Not a mile from the British base fly white Taliban flags.
A friend of mine narrowly missed abduction recently just the other side of the river from Lash Kar Gar, the provincial capital. Some families are said to be sending a son to work with the Taliban - to protect the poppy fields, and for $10 a day. Our Royal Engineers have built checkpoints on the edges of Lash Kar Gar, but the Afghan army are said to be too afraid to man them at night - so security, even in this centre of an "Afghan Development Zone", remains an aspiration. Other checkpoints merely provide cover from view for Afghan police to rob road users. The Afghan government's department of health is reported to ask Taliban permission before carrying out child inoculations in most rural areas: this is "peace through reality".
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Of course my knowledge is based on imperfect information, but I think we are contributing to the insurgency. While Afghans have cheered our troops following engagements with the Taliban, there seemed to be a widespread feeling amongst the people I spoke to in Lash Kar Gar that we are killing a lot of people through bombing, that there are many thousands of displaced people from the north, that people in the north are angry with the British, and that the Taliban are the only people who can protect poppy crops. In a sense it does not matter whether or not this is true. What matters is that they have come to think this, and that the Taliban exploit this and so are winning the information war.
Most families in Helmand are in some way involved in opium production. While the US wants mass eradication programmes, the Royal Marines believe that eradication fuels the insurgency, and that unless you have some sort of alternative lifestyle for people you should not destroy poppy. The UK might be the "lead" nation on drugs, yet we continue to help with eradication and recently supplied - via the Royal Logistics Corps base in Kandahar - 80 tractors for the purpose. So we are effectively throwing resources at a policy that results in increased violence against our troops. One official told me that we had to do some eradication, otherwise the US would steam in and do a lot more - so our eradication is a means of managing the US, not a means of managing insurgency.
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We are in Afghanistan for the right reasons. Ministers rightly point to the many good things that are happening beyond the military activity, and you don't change a society like this in seven days. Our troops are keeping their side of the bargain and performing with great heroism, buying time for development and governance initiatives to take hold. But the Armed Forces are being let down by the absence of these things.
A major reason that Iraq has not been a success is because, as a coalition, we failed to get to grips with the most basic need of the Iraqi people: security. Our Government needs to wake up to the real possibility of another strategic failure in Afghanistan if we do not turn words into action very, very soon. We can still do something about it, but there's not much time. If we do not, it will not only be the Afghan people who will be in greater danger: Britain will be as well.
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