Brit civilian surge for Afstan

First the US plans, and now the UK's; a common approach seems being coordinated:

Britain to join 'civilian surge' in Afghanistan
Britain is to join a "civilian surge" in Afghanistan that will result in more diplomats and aid experts joining the fight against the Taliban alongside combat troops.

The details of the civilian surge were agreed last week by David Miliband, the foreign secretary, and John Hutton, the defence secretary, who travelled to Washington to meet their opposite numbers, Hillary Clinton and Robert Gates.

Under plans agreed as part of a White House review, Nato teams will try to peel away reconcilable Taliban supporters, many of whom are fighting Nato for money.

Local village elders will receive financial support for small scale local reconstruction projects and training for local security forces to convince militants to lay down their weapons. The move is designed to lessen Western reliance on the central government of President Hamid Karzai, which is widely regarded as irredeemably corrupt.

Britain has been asked by the Americans to use its experience in Afghanistan to convince other Nato nations to send their own civilian reinforcements to the Provincial Reconstruction Teams (PRTs) which will lead the reconstruction work.

A British diplomat said: "We are already practising some of what we are preaching. Our PRT in Helmand province has 80 civilians in it at the moment. Other comparable sized PRTs have just three or four civilians. That's out of about 200 people [perhaps Canada could help in that convincing; the Canadian PRT has quite a few civilians--more here and here].

"There are discussions about rebalancing those and seeing how we can improve the civilian component. It's good to get development, security, economic policy and infrastructure under the umbrella of one coordinating body."

The Foreign Office is also working on how to bolster its own contribution alongside 300 new US civilians.

President Obama is expected to sign off on the strategy review, being drawn up by former CIA officer Bruce Riedel, this week before he travels to Britain for the G20 and Nato summits. The review will also detail plans for driving al-Qaeda and Taliban forces from the tribal areas of Pakistan, with controversial proposals for more intensive drone missile strikes across a broader area of the border region.

Both Britain and America have abandoned hope for securing any significant increase in combat power from the rest of Nato [emphasis added, more here] and are focusing instead on shaming other Nato nations into joining the soft power offensive.

But Britain also hopes to learn from the Americans. In a frank briefing after his meeting with Mr Gates, Mr Hutton admitted that the British armed forces have had to concede they have lesssons to learn from the US in conducting counterinsurgency operations [emphasis added], in which UK was once regarded as a world leader...