Afghanistan

Today I joined number of leading Afghan experts, from Ahmed Rashid to Gilles Dorronsoro, in calling on President Obama to change the American strategy in Afghanistan. Based on our work in and on Afghanistan, we wanted to make a number of points just as the White House begins reviewing its strategy: First, that the cost of the war is now over $120 billion per year for the United States alone. This is unsustainable in the long run. Second, despite these huge costs, the situation on the ground is much worse than a year ago because the Taliban insurgency has made progress across the country. The military campaign is suppressing, locally and temporarily, the symptoms of the disease, but fails to offer a long-term cure.

The leak that keeps on leaking has one or two embarrassing titbits about our domestic policymakers this morning. Yet far more noteworthy are the documents on Pakistan. While they don't tell us too much that is surprising – being mostly about the duplicitous game that country is playing with the West – they do highlight some potentially worrying trends. Chief among them is the growing influence of General Ashfaq Pervez Kiyani, the head of Pakistan's army. His name is littered generously throughout the US briefings, and it is often connected with dangerous conspiracy and double-dealing. One document, for instance, suggests that Kiyani was prepared to overthrow the Pakistani President, Asif Zardari, last year.

Part of what makes the war in Afghanistan so complicated is how easily the Taliban can be supplied from over the border in Pakistan. Pakistan has been more cooperative recently but the Washington Post reports today that Pakistan has refused a US request to expand the areas in which its drones can operate. The Pakistanis are also resisting requests from the US to take a military grip on North Waziristan, a base for several of the groups fighting the US in Afghanistan. Worryingly, the Post quotes a senior Pakistani military official as saying, "You have timelines of November elections and July x'11 drawdowns - you're looking for short-term gains," the official said, referring to President Obama's pledge to begin withdrawing U.S. troops from Afghanistan in July.

General Sir David Richards does like thinking in decades, doesn't he? A year or so ago, he was warning us that "the whole process [in Afghanistan] might take as long as 30 to 40 years." Today, in interview with the Sunday Telegraph, he says that the wider battle against al-Qaeda could last around 30 years. In both cases, he deserves our attention. To hear the head of our military suggest that the West's current conflicts will stretch across generations is sobering, to say the least. More noteworthy, though, is Richards' claim that a "clear cut victory" over Islamist terror is "unnecessary and would never be achieved" – but that we can "contain it to the point that our lives and our children's lives are led securely.

Number 43 is back. And judging by his interview (£) with the Times editor James Harding – and that paper's serialisation (£) of his memoirs – he is standing defiant. As Bush himself puts it to his critics, "I ask those people to read the book. I understand that the filter can be harsh. But I think people will see someone who deliberated carefully on key issues, someone who did not sell his soul for politics, that he was willing to stand on principle and people can draw their own conclusions." "The book" is out tomorrow, so we will be able to draw our own conclusions then. But, in the meantime, here's a selection of extracts from the first part of the Times serialisation. The second part will come tomorrow, and cover 9/11, Blair and Katrina.

Russia and Nato are now allies, or birds of a feather at least. The Independent reports that the twentieth century’s opposed spheres will work together for stability in Afghanistan. The attendant irony is blissful. Two years ago, machismo raged between Nato and Russia over Georgia. Why the sudden accord? There are two schools of thought, both relating to the East’s inexorable rise. Russia can no longer determine Central Asia of its own accord: China co-opted the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, a long-time pillar of Russian power in Asia, to condemn Russia’s recognition of South Ossetia and Abkhazia - a sign, to Russian eyes at least, of China's creeping influence in Central Asian politics.