The Economist assesses Afstan

Pretty reasonable, I'd say (nice maps and graphs):

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This shura, or tribal council, was the culmination of Operation Attal, designed to clear the Taliban from three districts in Paktika, a troubled province bordering Pakistan. Three months earlier Charbaran's district centre—a government office-cum-police station—had been torched by the Taliban and the area was said to be a training ground for the insurgents. Now it has been rebuilt with stout sandbagged fortifications and artillery for protection.

In a bloody year that has seen more Western soldiers killed than at any time since they toppled the Taliban in 2001, Operation Attal, which lasted three weeks, was uneventful. Hardly a shot was fired as the Taliban melted away before thousands of Afghan and American soldiers. But for the Americans success these days is measured less by the number of Taliban killed, and more by the number of Afghans who overcome their loyalty to the Taliban, or fear of them, to attend such a meeting. The Americans had been hoping for 200 guests; about 1,500 people came. It was billed as an Afghan reconciliation between local tribes and the central government. The choreography, however, was all American: American soldiers rebuilt the district centre, erected the tents, bulldozed new roads, brought the dignitaries by helicopter and even supplied a portrait of President Hamid Karzai...

Operation Attal was remarkable for another reason. It was the first big operation planned and executed by the Afghan National Army, with more than 5,000 Afghan soldiers supported by about 400 Americans [emphasis added] from the 1-503rd airborne infantry regiment. In the operations centre near Gardez, American officers sat in the second row, behind Afghan staff officers.

It was Afghan forces who searched homes while the Americans covered their backs. And behind the front-line troops followed lorry-loads of humanitarian supplies. The Americans delivered carpets and sound systems for the mosques; Korans, food, clothes and blankets against the onset of winter; hand-cranked radios to hear government broadcasts; doctors and veterinary surgeons. None of this is guaranteed to win support, but it helps...

The Taliban can bomb, ambush and intimidate, but cannot conquer territory held by Western forces. The question is whether they can drain NATO's will to stay on. As one senior Western diplomat admits: “Failure is an option.”

Non-kinetic energy

The mistakes of the past six years of fighting in Afghanistan—principally the Americans' decision to have only a “light footprint” and the costly diversion into Iraq—have changed the mindset of American military commanders. They now regard “kinetic” actions (ie, fighting) as a distraction, a preliminary “shaping” operation at best. “The decisive operation is non-kinetic,” says Colonel Martin Schweitzer, commander of Task Force Fury, responsible for six south-eastern provinces. His focus is training Afghan forces, building roads, schools and clinics and, above all, getting the government to “start addressing the needs of the people”...

Senior British officers, who until recently regarded themselves as experts in counter-insurgency, marvel at the speed with which the American army is learning imperial policing. “It is a case of the son surpassing the father,” says one British officer. Similar changes are taking place in the British-controlled province of Helmand. Afghan troops have been at the fore of a joint operation with British and American forces that retook Musa Qala, the only sizeable town controlled by the Taliban, on December 11th.

The operation, which involved the defection of one Taliban commander, will cheer the British after a year of intense but inconclusive fighting. Yet the army now finds itself pretty much back to where it was in 2006: parcelled out across Helmand's districts, with exposed supply lines. The British may have more soldiers, and their outpost may be better protected. But the question is whether Afghan forces are able to hold the ground on their own. One important objective in Helmand has been to reopen the road leading to the Kajaki hydroelectric plant to bring up a new turbine and increase the electricity supply, but that is still a distant prospect.

In the neighbouring province of Kandahar, Canadian forces have also struggled time and again to recapture the same ground. Fighting the Taliban, they quip, is the military equivalent of “mowing the lawn”. In contrast with the American sector farther east, where troops are fighting right up to the border with Pakistan, the British and Canadians do not have enough forces to secure their section of the frontier, and have abandoned a large swathe of the south to the Taliban [emphasis added].

This year has seen a mini-surge of Western forces, notably from America, Britain, Poland and Denmark [emphasis added]. Germany and the Netherlands have decided to stay in Afghanistan, averting a NATO split. There have been successes too, notably the killing of scores of insurgent commanders. According to the UN, this has forced the Taliban to appoint Pakistanis to replace some of them. But the Taliban have an inexhaustible supply of recruits, and a haven in Pakistan in which to organise. They are reinforced by foreign fighters linked to al-Qaeda, including Chechens, Uzbeks and Turks, who are highly motivated and surprisingly well equipped. As the Taliban have been pressed in one area, they have moved to cause mayhem elsewhere.

The Western effort is fragmented [emphasis added]. Even close military allies such as Britain and America have had rows about tactics. There are two separate but overlapping commands, NATO's International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) and America's Combined Joint Task Force 82. Most training is conducted by another American command. However, co-ordination has improved with the appointment of an American, General Dan McNeill, to head ISAF. The old distinction between “stabilisation”, done by NATO, and “counter-terrorism”, done by America, is blurring.

On the ground, though, each contingent is fighting its own separate war and promoting its separate vision of reconstruction. The fact that most countries rotate their units every six months or so makes continuity difficult. Americans currently serve 15-month tours, a consequence of the acute overstretch of the American army, but it means that commanders have time to learn and adapt.

The state of state-building

The problem in Afghanistan is not so much the resurgence of the Taliban, but the weakness of the Afghan government. The economy has grown briskly in recent years, but this has only moved Afghanistan from being crushingly poor to extremely poor. Six million children are now in school, but 2m still get no education...

Like the Greeks, the British and the Soviets before them, America and its allies are discovering the old adage that Afghanistan is easy to invade, but difficult to control. Can they defy history? Perhaps, but only if they accept that a military victory is not possible and that they will have to stay for a long time.

Western countries still enjoy an important asset: the support of ordinary Afghans who have no desire to return to the harshness of Taliban rule or to the civil wars of the past. Recent polls (see chart) show that Afghans are much more strongly in favour of foreign forces than Iraqis. However, growing insecurity and civilian casualties in air raids are eroding the West's position, especially in the south.

Western opinion is just as important. Gordon Brown, Britain's prime minister, was right to announce on December 12th his plan for “Afghanisation” of the military campaign, gradually focusing more on mentoring and training Afghan forces and economic development. He said an effort would be made both locally to recruit armed village guards and encourage Taliban to give up their weapons, and regionally to improve co-operation.

Given the shortage of Western troops, Afghanistan's best hope lies in expanding and improving its own forces. Afghan soldiers are respected both as symbols of the nation and as tough fighters; but the Afghan army, which will grow to 70,000 next year, needs to be greatly increased [emphasis added]. For years it will need to be partnered with Western units able to provide close air support, transport and medical evacuations. It makes sense to give ISAF more of an Afghan complexion, with plans to appoint an Afghan general to help co-ordinate operations. The Afghan police will need even more money and training. Once again it is America that has taken on the main burden of training the police, while Europe's effort has been half-hearted.

Above all the Afghan government—particularly in the provinces and districts—needs to be made more effective. Mr Karzai complains that he gets too much contradictory advice from the 40-odd allies in ISAF. The appointment of a strong international civil co-ordinator to energise the reconstruction effort, and even to give political direction for the military campaign, is long overdue [emphasis added].

Paddy Ashdown, the British politician and former soldier who served as the international overseer of Bosnia, is the leading candidate to become the new UN chief. He should also be “double-hatted” as the NATO civilian representative (and perhaps also as the European envoy). Some worry that such a “super-envoy” would either undermine the authority of Mr Karzai, or be ineffective because of American predominance. There are risks in a foreigner meddling in Afghanistan's intricate tribal power game. But the bigger risk is to leave Afghanistan violently adrift.

Update: A good account of the battle for Musa Qala by an embedded ABC reporter (via maz2).