The latest post by Observer correspondent Jason Burke, who is with the British Army in Afghanistan. Read part one here.
There are certain clichés that are more or less accurate. One is the fighting soldiers living and sleeping in appalling conditions while the staff officers sip fine wines and eat off neatly pressed linen back at headquarters. Well, the conditions for the company of Royal Marines I spent the weekend with in Kajaki were not appalling, merely pretty tough, and, though there was wine on the staff officers' tables last night, it was far from fine.
It would be wrong to carp at the hospitality of Nato headquarters in Kabul. I reached the Afghan capital the day before yesterday in the dark and a decent meal surrounded by generals and brigadiers was welcome.
In the morning, the sheer beauty of the city, with its limpid egg-shell blue sky, the row of snow-clad hills that line the high plateau and its wide open rows lined by slim beech and ash trees, reminded me where I was and what I was doing there.
Within hours I was drinking tea with an old Afghan friend, a journalist with whom I have been working on and off for almost a decade.
Ekram was more optimistic than the last time I saw him when, six months ago and with the Taliban insurgency at its violent height, he had been genuinely worried for the future of his country. Now, things are better apparently. The problem is not that the Taliban are strong, Ekram said with his customary perspicacity, but that the government is weak.
This is not something that has gone unnoticed in the West of course. I spend an hour with General David Richards , the outgoing commander of the Nato force in Afghanistan. He tells me that Coalition forces will launch a major "spring campaign" aimed primarily at securing the country's porous eastern border with Pakistan and reinforcing ongoing operations by British troops in the southern province of Helmand.
An urbane, intelligent man, a "thinking general", Gen Richards admits that the threat from the Taliban insurgency could only be "contained" for the moment but said that the 31,000 coalition forces under his command had gained a crucial 'psychological ascendancy' over their opposition after a victory last autumn in a pitched battle in the south.
The killing fields of the south do however seem distant from his headquarters, an enclave in the centre of Kabul with several bars, a vast mess hall, a small garden cafe, a volleyball and a hockey court, a gym and block after block of accommodation for all the administrators and planners that make up the staff of a large army. All human life is here: Romanians, Germans, Spaniards, Estonians, Americans and British with more regional accents than I have ever heard. I say all human life but there are very few Afghans.
Indeed the contact between the ISAF contingent and the locals appears limited. "Force Protection" is the watchword meaning that personnel move around Kabul in armoured land-cruisers or mini-tanks, live in compounds protected by barbed wire and rows and rows of walls of oversized sandbags. There is of course a threat but you have to wonder if it is as great as it appears. I am walking around Kabul and taking local cabs as I have always done since first coming here when the Taliban were in charge a decade ago. OK, I appear to be virtually the only Westerner doing so but I certainly have not yet felt threatened.
There are various problems with retreating behind the wire. By not engaging with local people, you learn nothing, make mistakes, and develop a strong idea that outside the gates is "bandit country". And worse, you send a strong message to the locals that you mistrust and fear them.
An hour with Gen Richards, with his talk of pragmatic deals with the Afghan tribes, winning consent, strengthening local government and so on, proves that he at least has not fallen into this trap. But his successor, an American, General Dan McNeill who has been dubbed "Bomber McNeill" by his critics, may yet do so.
