Adrian Hamilton: Words and waffle over Afghanistan

It hasn't taken David Cameron long to start talking pure codswallop with an air of easy authority. I don't mean over the Saville report, which he has managed with consummate skill, or relations with President Obama over BP, on which he has said all the right things despite a media frenzy for him to "stand up for Britain". I don't doubt that he will manage with equal facility his first EU summit today.

His problem concerns what he calls Britain's "most important foreign policy and security issue" – Afghanistan. Nothing reminds one so much of Tony Blair as the new Prime Minister's visit to the troops in Afghanistan over the weekend and his statement to the Commons on Monday. There is the same air of a man who feels thoroughly at home with the job and its responsibilities. Gordon Brown always tried too hard with the troops, Blair and Cameron enjoy the sense of power and attention that coming in as effective commander brings.

Even so, to talk to the troops about wanting to "rewrite and republish the military covenant" and put soldiers "front and centre of our national life again" is so much cobblers. "I want you," he told the assembled troops at Camp Bastion, "to help me create a new atmosphere in our country, an atmosphere in which we back and revere and support our military." The men themselves, although they cheered his decision to give them more money, are far too realistic to believe this kind of talk. And right they are to dismiss it.

British governments are lucky in the sense that, after two world wars, the public do instinctively support our armed services and think (sometimes wrongly) that they are doing a good job. But this is not the same thing as backing every military venture or feeling proud that "our boys" had a part in occupying Iraq or fighting wars in far away places where we don't seem to be wanted by the locals.

And that is the problem with Afghanistan. The public don't support it and ministers have been unable to convince either them – or, one suspects, the troops – that they know what they are doing there. Cameron's Commons statement and his remarks during his Afghan visit betray all the same ambiguities and confusions that dogged his predecessors.

On the one hand he said that nobody wanted our soldiers to be in Afghanistan "a moment longer than necessary" – a view we can all agree with. On the other hand he, and his Defence Secretary, Liam Fox, declared that this could only be when the Afghans themselves were ready to take control and that is still not the case. "The Afghans," as Cameron told the Commons, "aren't ready to look after their own security. As soon as they are ready we can leave and go home."

Which rather begs the question of when that will be. He talked of this year being "vital" and of being six months into "an 18-month military surge". But he didn't spell out precisely how the success of the surge was to be judged and what would happen if it failed in its objectives. Nor did he really set out the reasons for us being there at all, other than repeating Gordon Brown and Tony Blair's increasingly desperate mantra that "this was not a war of choice, it is a war of necessity".

"Our forces are in Afghanistan," he declared in Parliament, "to prevent Afghan territory from again being used by al-Qa'ida as a base from which to plan attacks on the UK or our allies."

Well, al-Qa'ida, so far as it remains a single force, doesn't need a base in Afghanistan to do this. They manage quite well over the internet and from other places in the Gulf and North Africa. Nor does Cameron elucidate on how he sees the relationship between al-Qa'ida, who we are apparently fighting, and the Taliban, who we are supposed to be talking to. Does he believe they are one and the same?

And just what does it mean to say that we are in Afghanistan to help the people there? The British government, Cameron told the press accompanying him to Afghanistan, "didn't have some dreamy ideas" about trying to build "the perfect democracy" in the country. Fine, but both the Foreign Secretary, William Hague, the commanders on the ground and, indeed, Cameron's former adviser Sir Richard Dannatt, have talked about the current "surge" representing a civil reconstruction approach in which the troops not only re-take ground from the Taliban but attempt to build up public facilities and administration to consolidate the gains. And all in a year and a half.

One doesn't altogether blame David Cameron for his waffling on. Any British minister must talk an overwritten book on Afghanistan because they cannot admit that it is Washington, not London, which is deciding the direction. Our troops are now under US command and number palpably too few in this surge to be more than a very junior partner. It is President Obama, not the UK Prime Minister, who will decide the pace and timing of an exit.

So far, Obama has made clear his intention to start the withdrawal of troops next year. The suspicion of many, although not the publicly stated intention, is that the surge is primarily there to provide cover for withdrawal. That is what most of the region believes and one profoundly hopes is the case.

For the stated purpose of our staying in Afghanistan – to make it safe for the Afghans to take over – is basically unachievable. President Karzai isn't in control. We don't trust him. We have no effective policy for Pakistan, where it matters most. We can't make a holistic policy of redesigning the country out of a military mission. If we can withdraw with the fig leaf of an announced success in the surge, we'll be lucky. If we can't, then we're in a quagmire which could suck us in for decades.

Cameron, I think, knows this in his heart of hearts. Or, at least, I would like that to be true. It's just the nagging fear after this last week that, as with Blair, his facility with words, his obvious delight in the new job and the success he is having in finding the right tone for it, will lead him to believe what he is saying. And that would be a disaster.

a.hamilton@independent.co.uk

For further reading

'Afghanistan: A Military History from Alexander the Great to the War Against the Taliban' by Stephen Tanner (2009)

Tomorrow: Nature Studies, by Michael McCarthy