Zach Johnstone: Those seeking a power-sharing deal involving the Taleban cannot point to Northern Ireland as a blueprint

Zach Johnstone is a 20-year-old Conservative activist who is reading Politics at the University of Warwick and has previously worked in Parliament.

October is fast approaching, and with it the ninth anniversary of US and UK involvement in Afghanistan. A campaign launched to eradicate al-Qaeda and the Taleban inter alia in 2001 seems, in 2010, to have made only limited progress.

The apparent ineffectuality of entering into conflict in this mountainous pocket of the Middle East is not without considerable historical precedent; for centuries forces have fought – and lost – campaigns in the region, few ending more disastrously than the first Anglo-Afghan War in which Major-General Elphinstone led British forces to slaughter at the hands of the Ghilzai warriors of Afghanistan in 1842. Elusiveness of military victory has been the rule, not the exception, in Afghanistan and this is a mantra which looks set to continue long into the 21st century.

It is perhaps not surprising, then, that so much talk recently has focused upon the prospect of negotiating with the Taleban. In March this year, the Washington Post carried a story which revealed that David Miliband had issued calls for “early and substantive political negotiations between the Afghanistan government and the Taleban”, a call which grew out of a pre-existing desire to see “moderate” insurgents brought into talks.

What ostensibly began as a debating point regarding the merits of appeasement has made a firm impression upon politicians, not least the President of Afghanistan, Hamid Karzai. Fraser Nelson points to the words of author Ahmed Rashid, who avers that Karzai “seems to have given up on the ability of the Americans, the Brits and Nato either to defeat the Taleban or even to talk to them. This is why he has turned to Pakistan and Iran: his own freelance attempt to try to broker a ceasefire with the Taleban which would involve a power-sharing deal."

Zach Johnstone is a 20-year-old Conservative activist who is reading Politics at the University of Warwick and has previously worked in Parliament.

Zach Johnstone: Britain is broken - and those who say it isn't must look at it from a new perspective

Zach Johnstone is a Conservative activist who is reading Politics at the University of Warwick and has previously worked in Parliament.

As I made my way through the hordes of frenzied commuters last Monday morning in Victoria Station, I came across something which startled me. It wasn’t the commemorative flowers; the police presence in the station; the board appealing for information regarding the arbitrary murder of a teenage boy the night before by a gang of youths.

Rather, what shocked me was that the presence of these things did not really shock me at all. Having gone to school in Slough and grown up in London, the recurrent nature of incidents such as this has punctuated my life. A year ago, unprovoked, I found myself surrounded and subsequently beaten by a gang in a local park. Just a few months later, I witnessed the same happen to another friend, resulting in severe lacerations to his face.

Such offhand examples exist in their dozens; they have become a way of life in some areas. However, what I find to be just as alarming as the regularity of the attacks themselves is that even today, the problem is dismissed as hyperbole – the stuff of fantasy existing only in the minds of those whose lives have been disproportionately blighted by such exceptional occurrences. Britain is fine and the debate is superfluous in the context of social policy.

A recent Economist article claims just this. Even excluding the disturbingly dismissive opening subtitle to the article which claims that it has “become fashionable to say that British society is in a mess”, the piece rejects the notion that Britain has become a ‘broken’ country. The logic, whilst not acceptable, is explicable: the use of quantitative data illustrating minimal change, nay, decreases in crime levels across the UK simply do not corroborate the idea that Britain is broken.