no military solution in afghanistan:The team that wrote President Bush's Prague speech on democracy this week have clearly never visited Afghanistan. Otherwise they would not have had the president quoting a Soviet dissident who compared "a tyrannical state to a soldier who constantly points a gun at his enemy". The guns that most Afghans see pointed at them are held by Americans, and they are all too often fired. At least 135 unarmed civilians have been reported killed over the past two months by western troops, mainly US special forces.
(...) Before 9/11 the connection between the Taliban and al-Qaida was only at the leadership level, and tenuous at best. Now it is pervasive and at the grassroots. Young Afghans are strapping on suicide belts, a technique imported from Iraq - it was never used against the Soviet occupiers two decades ago, and shocks older Afghans as a perversion of their warrior nation's traditions. But it helps to make Isaf and US special forces even more jittery, feeding into the instinct to over-react.
(...) In Kabul, some western analysts with long experience of Afghanistan are in despair. They argue that Isaf should recognise the trap it is in. Western governments and their electorates will never provide enough troops to secure the south, but the reckless use of air-power to make up for the shortage of ground troops only loses more hearts and minds. The downward spiral of anger and alienation accelerates.
(...) Pashtun tribal elders reject Taliban ideology, which they see as obscurantist, regressive, and hostile to development. They had six years' experience of it after 1995, and know what it means. But the Taliban are successfully expanding their reach by exploiting national pride and hostility to foreign occupation and the corrupt practices of Kabul-appointed governors. Removing the occupation and having locally chosen police would allow the elders to reassert control. \
(...) A key precondition for a new approach in Afghanistan has to be an end to the west's simplistic "war on terror" rhetoric and its latest incarnation, Bush's Prague talk of "freedom versus extremism". Promising "victory" in Afghanistan only risks the perception of "defeat" when the reality eventually dawns that there is no military solution.