The first steps towards victory in Afghanistan

• Last Updated: March 29. 2009 8:30AM UAE / March 29. 2009 4:30AM GMT

As promised, the US President Barack Obama has presented a new strategy for winning the war in Afghanistan. It comes as the United States, its Nato allies and Afghanistan’s regional neighbours prepare to meet at The Hague to discuss the status of the war-torn country. While there was some reason to be disappointed at the length of time it took Mr Obama to finish his assessment, it is comforting to see that he has not dawdled on the way to making the announcement. His speech on Friday outlined a comprehensive new strategy, which both understands the breadth of the challenge and views the conflict in more than military terms.

The central question facing Mr Obama during his assessment of the previous strategy in Afghanistan, was one of scope. Do the costs of winning the war outweigh the potential benefits of victory? While the answer appears to be no, it cannot have been an easy debate. Many in Mr Obama’s White House, including his vice president, Joe Biden, have argued for a narrower scope for engagement in Afghanistan, focusing more on finding and killing al Qa’eda and Taliban militants and leaders. That is, after all, why the US and its allies became embroiled in Afghanistan in the first place.

On the other side of the debate are the advocates of counterinsurgency (Coin) as the way forward. This group, led by Gen David Petraeus, has pushed for a holistic approach to the war. Since the publication of the US Army’s counterinsurgency manual in December 2006, Coin has become the watchword among a growing number of security experts and the officer corps. At its core, Coin is a combination of military and civilian efforts that seeks to both to win the hearts and minds of a local populace and alienate the insurgents.

The test case for Coin is Iraq where after six years of fighting, a dramatic increase in US troop levels and a focus on providing security and reconstruction has begun to have positive results. But the cost of this success has been high, thousands of US lives have been lost and hundreds of thousands more Iraqis have been killed. And even now, the country cannot be said to have recovered, nor the insurgency defeated.

Yet, merely focusing on fighting the insurgency, ignoring the security of the civilian population, while allowing reconstruction efforts to languish has not brought the Taliban any closer to defeat after nearly eight years of war. If anything, the Taliban is resurgent and more deadly than ever. Should one doubt this, they need only look at the casualty figures for 2008. The conflict has also been allowed to spread, becoming an existential threat to the government of neighbouring Pakistan.

Mr Obama’s acknowledgment that Pakistan has become part of the problem is encouraging. Militant strongholds in Pakistan present a particularly thorny dilemma. The US is hesitant to violate the sovereignty of an allied nation by sending troops across Pakistan’s borders, and the Taliban know this. Thus far, Islamabad’s efforts to combat its domestic militants has been insufficient. A combination of its unwillingness to let its guard down on its border with India, a distaste for fighting on its own soil and a lack of funds have allowed the insurgency to flourish rather than be cowed. That the US has requested well over a billion dollars in non-military aid to Pakistan will greatly bolster its ability to fight the Taliban, but it must be accompanied by a willingness to do so in Islamabad.

However, it remains to be seen whether the US and its allies will succeed where so many have failed. Afghanistan has defeated many an army, and has earned its title: the graveyard of empires.