UK gov ministers offer online Q&A on Afghanistan

re Pakistan - the real issue

I doubt either Milliband or Ainsworth will be able to offer any reasonable answers, as they have yet to ask themselves the hard questions needed to understand the Afghan war

Pakistan has always been the real problem since long before Sep 11 2001, the ideological and logistical driver for the Taliban, although the American willingness to deal with 'the devil they know' on Pakistan's terms has greatly exacerbated the problem since then with their acceptance of Pakistani assurances at face value. At the time of the WTC attacks, Pakistan was (and arguably still is) a failed state, with only 750,000 USD of foreign currency reserves, an imploding economy and proxy wars and low level conflict with India it could no longer afford. Musharraf sat up and made the right noises to the US and was given money and piles of weapons in return - including a large arms deal that had been blocked by Congress for 5 years.

America dug the country out of that hole but got nothing at all substantial in return. The ISI (Inter Services Intelligence) continued to burn the candle at both ends by funding, arming and sheltering Islamists in both Afghanistan and India and providing them with intelligence and logistical support. The ISI and the military are essential schizophrenic and internally at perpetual war with themselves. Pakistani society also has factions galore, a virtually feudal political system and is broadly ungovernable without the support of the Islamist factions - who Musharraf happily supported on the quiet while publicly claiming to clamp down.

America and Britain have got it wrong in Afghanistan in part because they have entirely failed to understand or engage with Pakistan as it really is, preferring a simplistic and superficial cold war interpretation of the country and the wider region, which appears to include the fantasy that "democracy" is defined in the same way in Islamabad or Kabul as it is in London or Washington.

If Pakistan is now fighting a genuine war with its various tribal and Islamist factions it is only because the government/ISI were finally forced to try reigning them in, eight years after the US first insisted they do so. Trustworthy allies indeed.

If the US and Britain had started by looking beyond their own ideological prejudices, they might have seen that there were better allies to be had that more directly shared their objectives and concerns for Afghanistan - Russia, India and most especially Iran come to mind, as does China to a lesser extent. And while they were at it, they might have taken a far harder look at what their "friends" the Saudis were up to. What makes it worse is that Britain really should have been in pole position to understand the ins and out of the regional politics.

I wouldn't fancy being Milliband or Ainsworth, but it is a hole of their own making, although those who are really paying the price are ordinary Afghans and Pakistanis.