Why Cameron is wrong to declare ‘mission accomplished’ in Afghanistan | Simon Tisdall

PM’s declaration is as ill-advised as George W Bush’s in Iraq and as oblivious to implications of UK and Nato actions

Ill-advisedly echoing George W Bush’s fatuous Iraq cry of “mission accomplished”, David Cameron appears determined that Britain will leave Afghanistan the same way it arrived in 2001: ignoring the complex internal realities of a desperately poor, highly ungovernable country and blithely oblivious to the dangerous strategic implications of British and allied actions.

Democracy

The internal realities include a government, led by President Hamid Karzai, whose writ barely runs beyond Kabul, and is seriously challenged even there. Once a favourite of Washington and London, the unpredictable, outspoken Karzai has become a symbol of the perceived unreliability of Nato’s Afghan “partners”.

Karzai has accepted untold billions of dollars in western aid, both military and non-military, but has proven a persistent and virulent critic of the western-led military operations that have sustained him in power – while failing to stamp out rampant corruption and the heroin trade.

Understandably, Karzai’s particular bugbear is the many civilian deaths caused in the past decade by US forces and by drone attacks. Casualties have been rising this year.

But his desire to identify with popular anger at such “collateral damage” never led him quite so far as to tell the Americans to get out.

Only now, with national elections due in April and Karzai standing down, does the Afghan leader ostentatiously balk at signing a new status of forces agreement with the US. This sudden display of political independence presages a security vacuum, but one which he, as ex-president, will not have to face.

Cameron’s self-congratulatory tone notwithstanding, Afghanistan’s democratic institutions remain fragile and highly vulnerable. If the election process falters or fails, Afghanistan and Nato will face a major crisis.

Security

Despite repeated assertions by British and US commanders, it remains entirely unclear whether the Afghan army and police are equal to the task of continually securing so vast and unruly a country, once direct Nato ground and air support are withdrawn. The recent spate of “green on blue” killings of western troops by their Afghan “comrades” has highlighted such doubts.

Nato, the world’s most powerful military alliance, failed to subjugate Afghanistan. So why the confidence that Afghan security forces – for the most part ill-educated, variably equipped and trained, and divided among themselves on geographical, ethnic, tribal and linguistic lines – can do so? The elections will present a major test of the emerging security set-up.

Women’s rights and human rights

British troops do have reason to be proud, as Cameron says. But good causes for which western soldiers bravely fought and died, such as creating and safeguarding the space for extending women’s rights, human rights in general, universal education and child healthcare, are all prospectively under threat in Afghanistan’s uncertain post-Nato future.

“The Afghan government’s failure to respond effectively to violence against women undermines the already-perilous state of women’s rights,” Human Rights Watch said in its 2013 report.

“President Hamid Karzai’s endorsement in March of a statement by a national …read more