Waiting for the British

4 February 2006

In this, he is undoubtedly correct. But preventing large numbers of farmers from growing opium poppies, if it is ever achieved, is going to take decades. Corruption is so rife that most diplomats and aid workers — not to say Afghans — are convinced that it goes right up to Cabinet level. In the villages outside Helmand, I was told that the money given to community leaders to distribute as compensation for eradicated poppy crops was promptly pocketed. One shop sold biscuits donated to Afghan children by the UN World Food Programme; their teacher had joined forces with the shopkeeper to make a bit on the side. A contractor confided that a large house being rented at vast expense by an American aid firm was owned by a local drugs lord. And no one disputes the crossover between tribal war lords, drugs lords, Taleban and insurgents — some of whom also hold official positions, which makes them British allies, on paper at least.

While the beleaguered Westerners in Lashkar Gar are eager for the British to succeed in transforming Helmand, they are bracing themselves for carnage. ‘They’ll get hit on the roads,’ said one veteran Afghan hand in the town. ‘It will stir things up because the folks who aren’t friendly to us will see it as another wave of Western control,’ said another.

In Kabul’s Chicken Street, dozens of Victorian bayonets and Lee Enfield rifles are on sale. The tombstones in the bleak, snow-covered British cemetery nearby recall the men who carried them into battle and, in the words of Kipling, ‘left on Afghanistan’s plains’ to go to their ‘Gawd like a soldier’. Soon there will be memorials there for brave young men cut down in Helmand. The ultimate tragedy will be if the lack of anything more than vague political optimism underpinning the mission means that those deaths have no long-term impact on Afghanistan at all.

Toby Harnden is chief foreign correspondent of the Sunday Telegraph.