A horribly plausible scenario for the future looks like this. The Afghan civilian regime disintegrates after Karzai steps down in 2014, leading to a coup by the Tajik commanders of the Army. This is followed by a counter-coup by Pashtun troops, and civil war in the government controlled areas.

       The Obama administration seems to be following in Afghanistan basically the same strategy as Moscow between the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan in 1989 and the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. That is to say that Washington is trying to build up the Afghan National Army to the point where it can hold the main towns in the Pashtun areas without the help of US ground forces, and thereby preserve the Afghan government from collapse and the US from humiliation. Most US troops will withdraw, but the US will keep bases in Afghanistan from which its planes will smash any concentrations of the Taleban aiming at capturing the cities. US aircraft and special forces will continue to target any identified groups of Al Qaeda in the country.

       The only significant difference from Moscow’s strategy is that the USSR did not keep bases in Afghanistan – it did not need to since it had them just over the border in Soviet Central Asia. And it must be said that up to a point, the Soviet strategy worked: the Afghan regime of Najibullah Khan which they left behind outlasted the Soviet Union itself. I was a British journalist with the Mujahedin at the siege of Jalalabad in March 1989, when they were indeed decimated by the government’s airpower when they concentrated to attack the city.

       For Washington, this strategy appears to meet several objectives: It would greatly reduce US numbers and US casualties in Afghanistan; it would be in accordance with Obama’s declared approach of re-orienting US strategy towards targeted operations against terrorists; it would prevent Taleban victory and scenes of US defeat like Saigon in 1975, and at the same time avoid the perceived humiliation of having to compromise with the Taleban leadership whom the US has spent years denouncing; and it would keep US bases in Afghanistan, which sections of the US security establishment see as useful to threaten Iran, raid Pakistan, and maintain US influence in the region.

       What is wrong with this strategy? Firstly, it means that the Taleban will continue their war. Their leadership has declared categorically that they will fight on as long as any US forces remain in Afghanistan. In the absence of any peace settlement giving them a share of power, the Taleban will also go on fighting against the Kabul regime.

       US air and ground raids will go on infuriating the Pashtun rural population and encouraging them to support the Taleban. Because the war will continue, so will the Taleban’s reliance on Al Qaeda as a source of expertise, and on heroin as a source of revenue. And while the Afghan Army may be able to hold the cities, it is obvious that it and the rotten Afghan state will never be able to extend real authority into the countryside.

       Secondly, will the Afghan Army even be able to hold the cities? The Soviet-backed regime after 1989 did, but it was in many ways a much more cohesive regime than the one that the US has created, with an army based on the old Afghan Royal Army, and led by a Pashtun with real authority among Pashtuns. The present Afghan civilian state is terribly weak, while the army, though large and heavily armed, is demoralised and deeply divided between Pashtuns and Tajiks.

       A horribly plausible scenario for the future looks like this. The Afghan civilian regime disintegrates after Karzai steps down in 2014, leading to a coup by the Tajik commanders of the Army. This is followed by a counter-coup by Pashtun troops, and civil war in the government controlled areas. The US is faced with the choice either of pulling out, and allowing Taleban victory in the Pashtun areas, or of sending US troops back in to take over again. This of course would also have Soviet precedents: it is pretty much the position that the Soviet Union found itself in by the autumn of 1979.

       Views expressed are of individual Members and Contributors, rather than the Club's, unless explicitly stated otherwise.