Adam Holloway MP: My Afghanistan diary. Poppy palaces. Exhausted supermodels. A house in Kabul. And a political surge?

Adam Holloway is Conservative MP for Gravesham, a member of the defence select committee and a former soldier who has served in Iraq, Bosnia and Afghanistan.

To Afghanistan...

I am back from Afghanistan where I travelled to avoid the Conservative conference, with all its lobbyists and the latest batch of Special Advisors quite new to their subject areas.  The most comfortable way to get to Afghanistan is via Dubai.  This is where the mafia that runs Afghan politics has deposited much of the money we thought we were giving to the Afghan people.   In the uncertainty about the country’s future, they have this year exported some $4 billion through Dubai - and the value of a “Poppy Palace” in Kabul’s centre is down by nearly 50%: this suggests some lack of optimism about the future once NATO withdraws most of its troops post-2014.

...via Dubai...

Dubai stores much of the money that was meant to turn the country round - and it is the place that even some of those sympathetic to the insurgency own apartments to run to in the event of the civil war that we are in danger of leaving behind.  It is also the place in whose more quiet corners political leaders meet representatives of the Taleban, in the hope that ending the insurgency lies with them, rather than with the Pakistani military establishment – who would prefer chaos in Afghanistan to an Afghan government sympathetic to India. In a hotel lobby I briefly spot another meeting, as a well-known Afghan politician walks past with a ridiculously beautiful and over-done Russian or Ukrainian girl in her early 20s.

...And the "Axis of Evil" terminal
 
Flights to Kabul leave via Dubai’s Terminal 2, known locally as the “Axis of Evil terminal”.  Flights leave here for those places in between, and Iran, the ‘Stans – now even scheduled flights to Camp Bastion – the vast desert base in Helmand province where tens of thousands of US, UK and Afghan troops are based.  As I wait to board my flight I notice an absurd number of girls that look like exhausted supermodels: the flight from Gate 5 is about to depart for Kiev.
 
An hour and a half later I am at 30,000 feet looking down over the Helmand desert, eating a chicken sandwich and feeling chilly from the airconditioning.  Thousands feet below fly the artillery shells that mark the presence of our troops on the ground, and local tribespeople enraged by the mission our party conference classes handed out to our army. Seven years after the arrival of British troops in Helmand, they continue die in the absence of any sort of coherent US political strategy for the conflict.  Perhaps Prince Harry flies somewhere beneath us too.

Adam Holloway MP: It is too late to completely defeat the insurgency we have built against ourselves in Afghanistan

Adam Holloway is Conservative MP for Gravesham, a member of the defence select committee and a former soldier who has served in Iraq, Bosnia and Afghanistan. Last year he wrote this paper for the Centre for Policy Studies on Afghanistan.

"Strategic Failure" is no longer an option in Afghanistan, it remains the likelihood. Despite the brilliance of General McChrystal, the strategy is incomplete.

The recent Operation "Moshtarak" in Helmand is an allegory for so much that has gone wrong with the NATO deployment. The word means "togetherness" in Dari, the langauge of Afghan northern ethnic groups. The people in the south mostly speak Pashto. Dari speakers are outsiders to the deeply traditional people in these southern rural areas, as are the tens of thousands of Afghan soldiers overridingly from northern ethnic groups that range with us across the territory - and what we call the Taleban have mostly just melted back into the population.

It is almost as if the international community has come to resemble a sort of self-licking lollipop - a multi-trillion dollar machine that feeds only on itself. An alien confection that works against, not with, the grain of Afghan society. These old Bush-era mantras remain, and steely eyed killing machines obscure steely realism.

What we call "The Taleban" are in fact hundreds of groups, most of whom are no more than traditional Afghan Muslims, the sons of local farmers. The same was true when I spent time there in the 1980s, but then I travelled with what we called "The Resistance". Then as now, they are united not by Islam, but the presence of foreign troops in their areas, and hatred government external to their local areas. Deadly ideological extremists are the smaller but growing part. Somewhere around 80% of enemy dead die within 20 miles or so of where they live: does that tell you something about who we are really fighting?