If you have sat in on any “shura”, or tribal meeting, in Afghanistan attended by foreign military officers,  one of the most common things you are likely to hear from the soldiers is that there was nothing noble about the Taliban and their methods.

At a recent meeting to convince village elders not to support the Taliban, a soldier instructed his interpreter to convey this : “And tell them the Taliban are not fighting a holy war! There is nothing holy about blowing people up !”

But for many of the Taliban, their fight is exactly that: a holy war.

They are fighting what they see as the “infidel occupier” in a Muslim land and want to reestablish an “Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan” based on their interpretation of Islam. To die serving the cause, they believe, whether at the hands of foreign soldiers or by strapping explosives to their chest, is to achieve the ultimate sacrifice – martyrdom – and they will be rewarded by God.

But it’s not only the Taliban who believe God is on their side …

The following was taken from a sign posted on the canteen wall at Kandahar Airfield, a large foreign military base in southern Afghanistan. The boardwalk is a raised wooden walkway in the middle of the base that runs in a square, complete with its own American pizza outlet and coffee shops. It’s where soldiers come to hang out when they’re not fighting insurgents.

“Come and join us this Sunday for a prayer walk around the boardwalk. We will walk around seven times and pray. ‘By faith the walls of Jericho (Taliban) fell, after the people had marched around them for seven days’.”

The second part is a verse in the Old Testament of the Bible, and yes, “Taliban” was written in brackets.

Not a holy war? It seems that for many it is.

(Top: U.S. service members pray at a ceremony marking Veterans Day in Kabul November 11, 2008. REUTERS/Omar Sobhani

Bottom: A Taliban fighter poses with weapons in an undisclosed location in Afghanistan October 30, 2009 REUTERS/Stringer)

As I wrote at the time, it had always been an ambitious plan to convince India and Pakistan to put behind them 60 years of bitter struggle over Kashmir as part of a regional solution to many complex problems in Afghanistan.  Had the Mumbai attacks pushed it out of reach? And if so, what was the fall-back plan?

One year on, there is as yet still no sign of a fall-back plan for Afghanistan and the tense relationship between India and Pakistan remains the elusive piece of the jigsaw.

After some attempts at peace-making which culminated in a meeting between the leaders of India and Pakistan in Sharm el-Sheikh in Egypt in July, and despite Prime Minister Manmohan Singh's own determination to try to repair relations, the two countries have descended into mutual recrimination.

India accuses Pakistan of failing to take enough action against the Lashkar-e-Taiba militant group it blames for Mumbai and which analysts believe is still in a position to launch fresh attacks, and refuses to reopen formal peace talks broken off after the three-day assault. Pakistan has put seven men on trial over the attacks but has refused to arrest the group's founder Hafiz Saeed nor, analysts say, to dismantle the infrastructure of an organisation whose original role was to fight India in Kashmir. It says it wants to resume talks with India.

As a result of the deadlock, both countries remain bitter rivals for influence in Afghanistan; while Pakistan, fighting its own battle against Islamist militants who have turned against the state, is seen as reluctant to move more troops from its eastern border with India to press home a military campaign against the Pakistani Taliban in its tribal areas. India in turn remains vulnerable to another Mumbai-style attack which could trigger Indian retaliation against Pakistan, running a risk of escalation between the two nuclear-armed countries.

"Now India and Pakistan are both playing for broke. Pakistan says it will support a U.S. regional strategy that does not include India, while India is talking about a regional alliance with Iran and Russia that excludes Pakistan. Both positions -- throwbacks to the 1990s, when neighboring states fuelled opposing sides in Afghanistan's civil war -- are non-starters as far as helping the U.S.-NATO alliance bring peace to Afghanistan," writes Pakistani journalist Ahmed Rashid in the Washington Post.

"To avoid a regional debacle and the Taliban gaining even more ground, Obama needs to fulfil the commitment he made to Afghanistan in March: to send more troops -- so that U.S.-NATO forces and the Afghan government can regain the military initiative -- as well as civilian experts, and more funds for development. He must bring both India and Pakistan on board and help reduce their differences; a regional strategy is necessary for any U.S. strategy in Afghanistan to have a chance. The United States needs to persuade India to be more flexible toward Pakistan while convincing Pakistanis to match such flexibility in a step-by-step process that reduces terrorist groups operating from its soil so that the two archenemies can rebuild a modicum of trust. "

Obama and the U.S. administration are being very careful to avoid being seen as trying to mediate between India and Pakistan -- India is sensitive about outside interference, particularly over Kashmir, which it sees as a bilateral dispute.

But in reality, the United States has been involved in easing tensions in every recent crisis between the two countries -- from the 1999 Kargil war when India and Pakistan fought a brief but intense conflict along the Line of Control dividing the disputed former kingdom of Jammu and Kashmir, to a military standoff in 2001/2002 when close to a million men were mobilised along the border after an attack on the Indian parliament. Following the attack on Mumbai, it was to the United States that India turned to to put pressure on Pakistan to crack down on the Lashkar-e-Taiba.

Will Obama be able to find a way forward to ease tensions between India and Pakistan, in turn creating a firmer regional foundation to stabilise Afghanistan? Or more precisely, is there a method to his initiatives over the last few months involving not just India and Pakistan, but also China, that in the fullness of time will be seen to be part of an overall strategy to drive a regional bargain that will underpin his plans for Afghanistan?

As discussed in this analysis, the United States faced a difficult balancing act in its relations with India, Pakistan and China.  The financial crisis had made it more economically dependent on China, while its need for support in Afghanistan made it more militarily dependent on Pakistan.

India, which was defeated in a border war with China in 1962, has always been suspicious of Beijing's role as one of Pakistan's closest allies. And since Obama's election it also became wary of what it feared was a U.S. tilt towards China which might undermine burgeoning U.S.-India ties which flourished under his predecessor George W. Bush.

The United States has tried to navigate its way through these competing rivalries by promising aid and support to Pakistan, while also inviting Indian prime minister Singh to make the first state visit of his presidency. During a visit by Obama to China, the two countries promised to work together to promote peace in South Asia. Analysts variously interpreted the pledge as unwarranted interference between India and Pakistan, a detail in a lengthy statement about U.S.-Chinese relations, and a sign that China might encourage Pakistan to crack down on Islamist militants in ways that would also reassure India. (As yet, the jury is still out on which interpretation is correct.)

When Obama unveils his latest plans for Afghanistan next week, we might get some clues as to whether he has used the long delay in announcing his strategy to build regional support for a grand bargain on Afghanistan.  Failing that, we might get an answer to the question I asked a year ago. What is the fall-back plan?

(Photos: The Taj hotel during the Mumbai attacks, the Dal lake in Kashmir; artillery at Drass on the Line of Control; the Obamas ahead of the state dinner for Prime Minister Singh)

The accusations flying through Parliament — not to mention a cartoon portraying the Prime Minister as a torturer — cannot have been what Ottawa expected when it committed 2,500 troops to Kandahar in 2005 on a mission that has turned out to be much bloodier, longer and expensive that anyone had calculated. At best, Canada’s dreams for Afghanistan are on hold: the Taliban is still strong, corruption is rampant and there is little sign of the major development that Ottawa hoped for.

Canada also stationed troops in Kandahar to underline that the old-style vision of its soldiers as peacekeepers was out. “We’re not the public service of Canada … we are the Canadian forces, and our job is to be able to kill people,” said Rick Hillier, then chief of the defense staff, describing the Taliban as “detestable murderers and scumbags” in 2005.

Prime Minister Stephen Harper took a similarly uncompromising line in 2006 when he went to Afghanistan and announced “there will be some who want to cut and run, but cutting and running is not my way”.

Fast forward three years and the government has long since stopped trying to sell the merits of a mission that has lost 133 soldiers so far and, according to Parliament’s budgetary officer, will have cost over C$18 billion by the time it ends. For all the talk of not cutting and running, Ottawa says the troops will be home by end-2011 and dismisses talk of an extension.

Indeed, you’d barely know Canada was involved in its biggest conflict since Korea. Virtually the only time the mission makes the headlines is when a soldier is killed and this, as foreign diplomats note, is a rather odd way to persuade people to support the war. A few years ago officials held regular briefings, but those have long since stopped. Ottawa is now content to issue regular progress reports which reveal precious little progress.

The government learned too late that there is no way to make killing people look pretty (especially in an era of instant communications), that counter-insurgencies are particularly vicious, and that it is hard to maintain enthusiasm for a far-off conflict when people at home don’t feel threatened by the enemy you’re fighting and see little signs of progress

“I can understand why it would be difficult to perceive any sense of success,” said Brigadier Jon Vance, who until recently led Canada’s Afghan contingent. “In the Second World War . . . the (battles) were often linear. You could measure progress by how far across the map you moved on a day, how much of the enemy army did you destroy. You could celebrate crossing the Rhine, landing on a beach, liberating a town. It’s very difficult to do that (here).”

Canada became involved in Afghanistan almost by accident, committing soldiers in 2002 . In 2005 the then Liberal government committed to a mission in Kandahar, but only for a year. The Liberals were replaced in 2006 by the Conservatives — strong backers of the military — who twice pushed through Parliamentary votes extending the mission.

Failure, as they say, is an orphan. In 2007, former top Liberal defense official Eugene Lang co-authored a book saying it had been Hillier who pushed for the Kandahar assignment. Last month Hillier denied this, saying he would have been happy to stay in Kabul. He made the comments as he promoted his own autobiography, in which he savaged NATO as a faction-ridden rotten corpse that had botched the Afghan adventure.

The finger-pointing and backbiting increased dramatically last Wednesday, when diplomat Richard Colvin testified to a Parliamentary committee. Despite widespread reports of prisoner mistreatment in Afghan jails, Ottawa has always insisted it had no firm evidence that the detainees it transferred were being abused. After all, handing over prisoners in the knowledge they could be tortured is a war crime.

But Colvin, based in Afghanistan for much of 2006 and 2007, said he had sent 17 memos warning of the danger of torture. Even though Canada’s Conservative government is notoriously attack-minded, many were startled by the ferocity of its attempts to demolish Colvin’s reputation on the grounds that his evidence was weak and he had been duped by the Taliban. Media commentators rounded on the Conservatives while cartoonists accused Canada of turning a blind eye to abuse. One even portrayed Harper as a torturer preparing to give Colvin electric shocks.

Needless to say, the mission is becoming less and less of a good news story. No one talks much about the chances of it succeeding. Harper, who was in India when Colvin testified last week, had his first chance to appear in Parliament on Monday to answer questions about detainees. He chose instead to meet the Canadian lacrosse team.

The story looks set to continue for a few weeks as the Parliamentary committee hears from others involved in the case.  One thing is clear — Canada has learned some painful lessons and it will be a long time before Ottawa again sends thousands of troops to fight abroad.

((Canadian soldiers conduct a patrol in southern Afghanistan; Reuters photo by Finbarr O’Reilly. Canadian diplomat Richard Colvin testifies in Parliament; Reuters photo by Chris Wattie))

Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh is in the United States for the first official state visit by any foreign leader since President Barack Obama took office this year. While the atmospherics are right, and the two leaders probably won’t be looking as stilted as Obama and China’s President Hu Jintao appeared to be during Obama’s trip last week (for the Indians are rarely short on conversation), there is a sense of unease.

And much of it has to do with AFPAK - the war in Afghanistan and Pakistan which is very nearly at the top of Obama’s foreign policy agenda and one that some fear may eventually consume the rest of his presidency. America’s ally Pakistan worries about India’s expanding assistance and links to Afghanistan, seeing it as part of a strategy to encircle it from the rear.  Ordinarily, Pakistani noises wouldn’t bother India as much, but for signs that the Obama administration has begun to adopt those concerns as its own in its desperate search for a solution, as Fareed Zakaria writes in Newsweek.

And that is producing a “perverse view” of the region, he says adding it was a bit strange that India was being criticised for its influence in Afghanistan. India is the hegemon in South Asia, with a GDP 100 times that of Afghanistan and it was only natural that as Afghanistan opened itself up following the ouster of the Taliban in 2001, its cuisine, movies and money would flow into the country. The whole criticism about India,  Zakaria says, is a little bit like saying the United States has had growing influence  in Mexico over the last few decades and should be penalised for it.

But what about Pakistan’s concerns, a country that was dismembered in the last full-scale war with India in 1971 with the creation of Bangladesh. The last thing it would want is a hostile regime in Afghanistan on its western flank on top of the Indian army, the world’s third largest, massed on the eastern front, not to mention the Islamist militants whom it once nurtured turning on  the State itself.

Pakistan army chief General Ashfaq Kayani told the U.S. National Security Adviser General Jim Jones earlier his month that Indian presence in Kabul would hurt the war objectives.

And what about the Afghans themselves ? The India-Pakistan rivalry is probably a sideshow in the broader battle between a resurgent Taliban and the foreign forces, but perhaps one they can do without.

[Photographs of Afghan children and Indian and U.S. flags at the White House]

It has the highest infant mortality rate in the world, 70 percent of Afghans have no access to clean water and hundreds of schools, mostly girls’ schools, have been attacked by Taliban or other insurgents.

Unfortunately the finding in UNICEF’s annual report on children comes as no surprise to people who live in the impoverished, war-torn country.

For many Afghans and foreigners in Afghanistan who are not living on the breadline, the little boys and girls in grubby clothes and dirty faces, who tap on their car windows, begging them for money or desperately trying to sell tattered maps and chewing gum, are a bit of a pest. They are such a familiar part of Afghanistan’s crumbling urban landscape that they go unnoticed or at best are actively avoided by wealthier passersby.

Throughout Afghanistan, children are very visible and are perhaps the most photographed entity in the country after foreign troops. In rural areas they stand outside doorways in clusters, greet foreign military convoys cheerily, crowd around foreigners and walk around bare footed, with matted hair.

They are part of a generation who have so far grown-up only knowing Washington and NATO’s military involvement in their country. Although they have been spared the experience of Afghanistan’s brutal civil war of the early 1990s and the reign of the Taliban, they are now at risk of being killed in foreign forces air strikes, suicide attacks and insurgent-laid roadside bombs.

Girls, despite being allowed back to school, have it particularly bad, the UNICEF report says. Again, given Afghanistan’s recent history of subjugating women and keeping them economically and socially disenfranchised, this also comes as no shock. 

They are married-off young in rural areas, are barely educated outside provincial capitals and those that do go to school are often made to feel miserable for daring to try to improve their lives.

And some girls in the Shia community face the prospect of having a husband who may legally be able to subject them to marital rape.

But there are also powerful and strong examples of young people prospering. The recent election saw thousands of teenagers volunteering to support the process, enthusiastically helping election staff at polling stations. The results of the fraud-ridden poll however probably jilted their optimism and undermined their expectations of change.

Many young Afghans are determined to do well and try to find the bright side in the conflict that has derailed their upbringings, by seeking-out opportunities where they can change Afghanistan for the better. Some of those who have been educated in neighbouring Iran or Pakistan when their families fled fighting and the Taliban before 2001 have returned to their birth country and are now active in human rights and democracy movements and are accomplished advocates for peace and change, hoping they can help improve things so their younger compatriots can have a better life.

[Top: Afghan girls carry water in Kabul (Reuters/Ahmed Masood); middle: displaced Afghan children in Helmand province (Reuters/Omar Sobhani); a mourner touches the body of a boy residents said was killed by U.S.-led troops in Kabul in September 2008 (Reuters/Omar Sobhani)]

We predicted ahead of time that we would hear positive words about Karzai this week. After all, Western governments need to convince their own voters back home that the veteran Afghan leader’s government is worth sending their sons and daughters to die for. This autumn’s election debacle made Karzai look bad – a U.N.-backed probe found that nearly a third of votes cast for him were fake — but now that’s all over and the West needs him to look as reliable as possible.

A “very strong, substantial statement,” declared British Foreign Secretary David Miliband.

“An important new starting point” that “set forth an agenda for change and reform” gushed U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

“Let’s encourage and support the president,” said EU envoy Ettore Sequi.

Well, that’s what they said when the cameras were rolling. Behind the scenes the message was: Karzai’s speech was fine, but it’s just a speech.

“We’ve heard all of these sentiments before. If you compare his last inauguration to this inauguration, you’ll see there’s almost a 90 percent overlap,” was how one Western official in Kabul put it.

President Barack Obama, who is still considering whether to send tens of thousands of extra troops to join the 68,000 Americans and 40,000 NATO allies in Afghanistan, has a hard sell to his own Democratic party. If the inauguration means it is now time to be nice to Karzai, nobody told Nancy Pelosi, the Democrat speaker of the House of Representatives. She let Karzai have it with both barrels.

“The president of Afghanistan has proven to be an unworthy partner,” she told NPR’s Morning Edition. “How can we ask the American people to pay a big price in lives and limbs and also in dollars if we don’t have a connection to reliable partner?”

[Above: Afghanistan's President Hamid Karzai inspects the guard of honour on his arrival at the presidential palace for his inauguration in Kabul November 19, 2009. REUTERS/Jerry Lampen]

Steve Coll, journalist and president of the New America Foundation, sets out four consequences of failure in Afghanistan in a blog in The New Yorker, which speak to those especially in America who question its involvement in the first place in this far-off “graveyard of empires.”

A new ABC/Washington Post poll says 52 percent of Americans don’t believe the war is worth the costs.

Coll says: 

1) If the world were to give up on Afghanistan and the Taliban were to return to power, it would mean a re-run of the Civil War in the 90s, but this time on “steroids”. It is inconceivable that the Taliban could triumph in the country completely and provide a regime (however perverse) of stability and so you could have a rump Afghan government dominated by ethnic Tajiks and Uzbeks find arms and money from India, Iran, and perhaps Russia, Europe and the United States. This would likely produce a long-running civil war between northern, Tajik-dominated ethnic militias and the Pashtun-dominated Taliban.

2) Success in Afghanistan would give momentum for a Taliban revolution in Pakistan. If the Quetta Shura regained power in Kandahar or Kabul, it would undoubtedly interpret its triumph as a ticket to further ambition in Pakistan. The Pakistani Taliban would likely be energized, armed and financed by the Afghan Taliban as they pursue their own revolutionary ambitions in Islamabad.

3) Increased Islamist Violence Against India : The probable knock-on effect of a second Taliban revolution Afghanistan would be to increase the likelihood of irregular Islamist attacks from Pakistan against Indian targets as they see to extend their influence. In time, democratic Indian governments would be pressed by their electorates to respond with military force, and the world would then have to deal with a fourth Indian-Pakistan war, this time both nations nuclear-armed.

4) Al Qaeda’s ambitions against Britain and the United States would strengthen. While al Qaeda’s capacity to launch disruptive attacks on American soil remain low, it would be absurd to argue it won’t be strengthened by a Taliban return to Afghanistan, Coll says. London may well be more vulnerable to a future attack five or ten years after an Afghan Taliban revolution, given the large Pakistani Diaspora in Britain that the “bad guys” may well use to blend in.

Finally, while the threat to the rest of the world from an unstable Afghanistan has been spelt out innumerable times, what about the risk to Afghans themselves? An Oxfam survey offers a sobering glimpse of the mood of the nation with these findings: one in five Afghans questioned said they had been tortured, one in 10 claimed to have been imprisoned at least once since 1979, when Soviet forces invaded, and one in six Afghans are currently considering leaving the country.

One of the survey’s respondents from the eastern province of Nangarhar summed up what instability in Afghanistan has led to already by saying more than 2 million people had died in decades of conflict, 70 percent of the country had been destroyed, and its economy virtually eliminated.

“Half our people have been driven mad. A man who is 30 or 40 years old looks like he is 70. We always live in fear. We are not secure anywhere in Afghanistan,” the respondent said.

[Top: A U.S. Marine passes Afghan children while on patrol in Helmand province (Reuters/Asmaa Waguih); above: Afghan children hold a banner during the celebration of Peace Day in Kabul in September (Reuters/Omar Sobhani)]

That sure was fast.

On Sunday, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton told American TV audiences that Afghan President Hamid Karzai needed to take steps to fight graft, including setting up a new anti-corruption task force, if he wants to keep U.S. support. Less than 24 hours later, there was Karzai’s interior minister at a luxury hotel in Kabul — flanked by the U.S. and British ambassadors — announcing exactly that. A new major crimes police task force, anti-corruption prosecution unit and special court will be set up, at least the third time that Afghan authorities and their foreign backers have launched special units to tackle corruption.

There are just a couple of days left before Karzai is inaugurated for a new term as president. Perhaps a few more days after that, U.S. President Barack Obama will announce whether he is sending tens of thousands of additional troops to join the 68,000 Americans and 40,000 NATO-led allies fighting there.

A fraud-tainted election has wrecked Karzai’s reputation in the Western countries whose troops defend him. Support for the eight-year-old war has plummeted over the past few months, even as the death tolls have reached their highest levels yet. For better or worse, Karzai’s Western backers know they are stuck with the veteran leader for another five years, and need to resurrect his reputation fast.

Regardless of how many extra troops Obama sends, the war in Afghanistan is the most important foreign policy issue of his presidency. If he is going to maintain support at home, he needs to show the American people that protecting the Karzai government is a cause worth sending their sons and daughters to die for. That means, after weeks of grumbling about Karzai in public, you should expect to see U.S. officials accentuating the positive in coming days. VIPs who stayed away will be heading to Kabul for the inauguration. Karzai’s new government, expected not to be much different from his old government, will nonetheless be welcomed as an improvement. Hands will be shaken and warm words spoken.

The election was the sort of travesty that can’t be easily swept under a rug. A U.N.-backed probe concluded that nearly a third of votes cast for Karzai were fake. The strong position against vote fraud taken by Peter Galbraith – a former senior U.S. diplomat sacked from his post as deputy head of the U.N. mission in Kabul – showed how deeply divided the Western contingent in Kabul was over the issue. Privately diplomats praise Galbraith for exposing the fraud, but publicly they are struggling to undo the damage to Karzai caused by the debacle.

The ultimate outcome of the election was probably fair. Diplomats say Karzai would probably have won outright in a first round if Taliban threats and rocket attacks had not forced many of his fellow Pashtun voters in the south to stay home on election day in August. He almost certainly would have won in a second round, if his opponent Abdullah Abdullah had not quit six days before it was due to be held.

But the ugly process has yielded only one real winner: the Taliban. An election whose main purpose was to shore up the legitimacy of the Afghan president has instead shredded his reputation and rattled the resolve of his allies. Exactly what the militants hoped for when they sent rockets raining down on voters three months ago.

Strengthening Afghanistan’s indigenous security forces has always been one of the main planks of the NATO-led ISAF military strategy. But the Afghan police have a lot of problems. The are often accused of endemic corruption, colluding with Taliban insurgents, being poorly trained and badly organised. In some areas, we have reported before, their criminal behaviour has actually turned the communities they are meant to serve toward the Taliban, unwittingly empowering the insurgency.

The United States and its allies have spent billions of dollars on the Afghan police, but as this July report, funded by the European Commission states, “sustainable returns on investment seem very limited”. The report is still one of the most forthright and frank accounts of the problems facing the Afghan police.

The report points to five major problems facing police: 1) forced to take on military responsibilities sometimes such as engaging militants in gunfights, 2) lack of trust by Afghans 3) lack of training and equipment 4) a very high level of illiteracy and 5) allegations of endemic corruption.

In the field they do sometimes look like a bit of a motley crew. It is not unusual to see police on patrol wearing casual shoes or sandals with no socks. They like to customise their uniforms with unusual jewellery and quite a few like to decorate their Kalashnikov rifles with stickers, flowers and colourful tassles.

These few anecdotes do not of course accurately reflect the entire 80,000 and more individuals who make up the force. But with a target to recruit another 80,000 Afghans, the Interior Ministry really have their work cut out, considering the rather limited human resources Afghanistan has to offer.

There is no shortage of unemployed young people in Afghanistan and as one of the world’s poorest countries it is not difficult to recruit people en masse here. Government recruitment can also be a means of deterring the poor from joining the insurgency. But finding healthy and educated young men and women who want to do one of the most dangerous jobs in the world for little more than $100 a month, is another matter entirely.

Decades of conflict and the subjugation and exclusion of women from education and the workforce during the Taliban government have severely retarded infrastructure, the economy and literacy levels in Afghanistan.

Just under one third of Afghans are educated, that’s about 10 million people. And while women are allowed to join the police force they still represent a tiny minority because in many parts of Afghanistan it is still a cultural taboo for them to work. Potential recruits also must have a spotless criminal background and be aged between 17 and 25 with proof that they graduated high school. By and large only Afghans in the country’s handful of urban centres would have gone to high school. In remote, dangerous, insurgent-riddled districts where populations are largely uneducated, schools are scant and where the overlap between law enforcement and counter-insurgency is most acute, it is difficult to find  enough people to match the police’s employment criteria.

Other jobs in the myriad NGOs and foreign companies which have mushroomed in Kabul since the war started in 2001offer safer and better paid opportunities to literate Afghans than law enforcement. Those who speak English also have an incentive to work as translators for U.S. and other NATO-contributing military forces by the tempting offer of a visa and eventual U.S. citizenship after at least two years of good service. There is no such carrot dangling before aspiring police trainees.

Afghan police are working in a war zone, where they are often the first target of insurgents, something which worries their commanders who say their policemen are forced to act as paramilitaries and adopt the posture of an offensive army. Given the weakness of the rule of law in Afghanistan because of the insurgency and effects of war, perhaps the idea of an effective and law-abiding police force is, for now, just wishful thinking.

[Top: An Afghan policeman filming with his camera phone in Tarin Kowrt, southern Uruzgan province/Tim Wimborne (Reuters); Above: An Afghan policeman takes a nap in Zhari district, southern Kandahar province/Stefano Rellandini (Reuters)]

Reluctant to destabilise Pakistan, then under former president Pervez Musharraf, the United States turned a blind eye to the training camps and poured money into the country. In return, Pakistan hunted down al Qaeda leaders -- among them alleged 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, captured in 2003. "For the Bush administration, the priority was al Qaeda," writes Bruguiere. "The Pakistan Army and the ISI would focus on this - external - objective, which would not destabilise the fragile political balance in Pakistan."

But for Bruguiere, one of the major lessons was that Islamist militants can't be separated into "good guys and bad guys", since they were all inter-linked. 

This new style of international terrorism was quite unlike militant groups he had investigated in the past, with their pyramidal structures. "After 1994/1995, like viruses, all the groups have been spreading on a very large scale all over the world, in a horizontal way and even a random way," he said. "All the groups are scattered, very polymorphous and even mutant."

Gone were the political objectives which drove terrorism before, he writes, to be replaced with a nihilistic aim of spreading chaos in order to create the conditions for an Islamic caliphate. For the hijackers on the Algiers-Paris flight, their demands seemed almost incidental. "We realised we faced the language of hatred and a total determination to see it through."

Many have argued against this view of international terrorism as a new and nebulous Islamist network without obvious political objectives, which found its most powerful expression in al Qaeda. Just as Lashkar-e-Taiba grew out of rivalry between India and Pakistan over Kashmir, the GIA sprang from anger about the annulment of elections in Algeria that an Islamist group was poised to win. Its attacks on Paris in the mid 1990s were seen as a reprisal for France's role in supporting the government in its former colony. Many of those who support al Qaeda and other Islamist groups are driven by anger over the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and other perceived injustices across the Middle East. 

Yet if he is right that the United States and its allies are facing a loose international network of Islamists with no clear pyramid structure, then it would suggest that no amount of drone bombing of al Qaeda and the Taliban leadership of the kind promoted by counter-terrorism supporters would work. Nor would it be enough, alone, to address political grievances at a national level without taking account of a network which operates globally and does not recognise the validity of the nation state. Rather, you would need a sophisticated and comprehensive strategy which went far beyond the kind of focused counter-terrorism first used by the Bush administration.

Browsing through the New Yorker profile on U.S. special envoy Richard Holbrooke, I noticed the same argument was raised there:

"A pure counter-terror approach had, in fact, been the Bush Administration’s policy for years: kill or capture terrorist leaders, with minimal support for political institutions in Kabul and Islamabad," it said. "It had created the mess that (President Barack) Obama inherited, with two countries under threat from insurgents and Al Qaeda’s strength increasing.

"'Al Qaeda doesn’t exist in a vacuum," it quoted former CIA officer Bruce Riedel, who led Obama's first review of strategy, as saying.  “They’re part of a syndicate of terrorist groups. Selective counterterrorism won’t get you anywhere, because the bad guys don’t stay in their lanes.”

(Photos: Jean-Louis Bruguiere; Pervez Musharraf, the Taj in Mumbai, the Marriot in Islamabad)