Are we losing in Afghanistan?

Adam Holloway argues in the current Spectator that Britain cannot win the war in Afghanistan. Our presence, he believes, is causing net radicalisation: we are, bluntly, creating more militants than we kill. We should give up on our more ambitious hopes for drug eradication and multi-party democracy and women’s rights. Our best bet is to reach some sort of accommodation with the black-turbaned fundamentalists.

“The Taliban”, writes Holloway, “is not some mediaeval force born out of nowhere. In large part they are the ordinary people of the south. They need to be brought into the political process, not bombed out of it.”

Adam Holloway is by no means the first commentator to say these things. But he has more authority than others taking the same line, for four reasons, none of which will have been obvious to the casual reader of his article.

First, he knows the Taliban, having spent part of his gap year fighting alongside the Mujaheddin against the Soviet occupation. Second, he is a former soldier, who served with colossal distinction as a special forces officer in Iraq. Third, he is familiar with contemporary Afghanistan, having travelled extensively there in the past two years, largely at his own expense. Oh, and fourth, he is a Conservative MP.

Adam is a pleasingly modest man, and so mentions none of these things. But, taken together, they compel us to consider his thesis more seriously than we would if it were being advanced by a usual suspect. More