Britain ‘can still succeed’ after decade of Afghanistan fighting

This week marks a decade since the United States and UK launched the campaign known as Operation Enduring Freedom in the aftermath of the 9/11 terror attacks.

And the British administration is offering a cautiously optimistic assessment, while acknowledging that mistakes have been made.

A Foreign Office (FCO) spokesman said: “Progress over 10 years has been uneven.

“At times, the international community lacked a cohesive plan and adequate resources to respond to an insurgency more resilient and adaptable than anticipated.

“Development of effective Afghan security and governance capabilities was slow, with a lack of investment by the international community.”

But despite the setbacks and misjudgments, advances have been made, the Government stresses, albeit from an “extremely low base”.

The FCO spokesman said: “The strategy is now focused, the coalition strong, our Afghan partners fully engaged and we have the resources and resolve to succeed.

“Afghanistan today is unrecognisable from the Afghanistan of 2001, but addressing the damage caused by 30 years of civil war and the misrule of the Taliban will take time.”

This judgment has been borne out in the weeks leading up to this Friday’s anniversary, with a string of high-profile attacks serving as a reminder of the uphill struggle still ahead.

Chief among these was the suicide mission that killed Afghanistan’s former president, Burhanuddin Rabbani, on September 20, demonstrating what US Ambassador Ryan Crocker called “the utter disregard that the terrorists have for Afghans and the future of this country”.

President Hamid Karzai insisted it would not deter his government, but some thought his words rang hollow against a backdrop of escalating violence.

Kabul, notably, has witnessed a series of deadly assaults in the past few weeks – the CIA’s office has come under attack and one of its contractors been killed; the Taliban has targeted the US Embassy, Nato headquarters and other buildings in the heart of the city; Taliban suicide bombers have stormed a British compound, killing eight people during an eight-hour firefight.

The southern city of Lashkar Gah in Helmand Province has also been suffering, with eight Afghan policemen killed in an attack on September 28, just a day after two civilians died when a suicide bomber rammed an explosives-packed vehicle into a police truck.

The UK is set to withdraw its combat troops from the country in 2014, but in some quarters fears remain that the current strategy is flawed.

Conservative MP Adam Holloway, a former Grenadier Guards officer, warned against pinning all hopes on an unpopular Afghan central government.

“The current strategy, it’s not just that it won’t work,” he said. “It can’t work. We have to allow the Afghans to come up with their own local political fixes and not impose a central government.”

Negotiating a peace settlement with the Taliban was also unlikely to produce results, he cautioned.

“We have this idea that we can make a deal with the Taliban,” he said. “But I wouldn’t have thought there’s any danger of the Taliban wanting to make a deal.”

His outlook was stark. “The task is to undo the damage of the last 10 years,” he said.

Pakistani Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani has spoken meanwhile of “a confusion and policy disarray within the US establishment on the way forward in Afghanistan”.

The most pessimistic commentators fear civil war is a distinct possibility.

The toll in figures

Ten years of fighting in Afghanistan has taken a huge human and financial toll on Britain. Here is the conflict in numbers:

382 – number of British troops who have died since operations in Afghanistan began in 2001. This compares to 179 UK personnel who died in Iraq between 2003 and 2009.

338 – number of these 382 troops who died as a result of hostile action.

44 – number of the 382 known to have died either as a result of illness, non-combat injuries or accidents, or have not yet been assigned a cause of death.

More than £18bn - estimate of the amount Britain has spent on the war in a report by the House of Commons Defence Committee.