Ahmed Rashid: The five things that must go right for Afghanistan to prosper

 Lahore

 

From Washington to Kabul and in every capital in between, governments, armies, intelligence agencies and the media are asking what will happen in Afghanistan next year when the US and Nato finally leave after 12 years fighting a war they did not win.

Despite the enormous amount of intelligence available, the truth is that nobody knows, not even the Afghans. The best predictions can only be based on knowing what is going right, what is going wrong and what can be done to minimise the dangers of things getting worse. For more than a year we have been deluged with the so-called success story of the military transition — the handing over of security to the 350,000-strong Afghan army and police — as western forces pull out. We have been told repeatedly that as US-Nato forces step down, Afghan forces will step up. The truth is that the military transition is probably the easier part. And even that is proving difficult because Taleban attacks and Afghan government casualties have increased enormously in the past year. This highlights the vulnerabilities of the Afghan forces, which are 80 per cent illiterate and have an annual desertion rate of 20 per cent. At present there are some 87,000 western troops, down from 150,000 last year. By next spring there will be fewer than 40,000 and at the end of the year none but the tiny training force that the US is expected to leave behind. Whether a US-Nato training mission of under 10,000 troops stays on is the subject of a heated debate between President Karzai and the Americans as they battle over terms and conditions, but ultimately Karzai is likely to agree.

Afghanistan President Hamid Karzai inspects soldiers of the Afghan National Army Photo: AFP/Getty

Afghan army losses have been so high that the defence ministry no longer discloses the figures, but one official spokesman told me that a staggering 1,273 police officers and 770 village policemen were killed between March and October this year.