Daniel Korski

The proverbial shoe is dropping. Following General Stanley McChrystal’s forced retirement, a consensus is forming that President Obama's Afghan strategy is not working. The Economist says: ‘Since November, when Mr Obama promised 30,000 more of his country’s soldiers to the campaign, little has gone right. General McChrystal’s plan was for a “surge” that would seize the initiative from the Taliban and create the scope for Afghanistan’s government, backed by its army and police, to take charge. In practice that has not happened.’ In the Financial Times, Ahmed Rashid makes a similar point, arguing that the military strategy in Afghanistan is "failing".

How wrong I was. President Obama, lambasted by his critics for being ponderous, has acted with lightening speed: less than 24 hours after that Rolling Stone article, General Stanley McChrystal was forced out of his job in place of the only person that could pick up where he left off, namely General David Petraeus. In acting swiftly, the US president has moved to restore the authority and respect his position as Commander-in-Chief deserves; and he has begun to re-establish the kind of civil-military relations that need to exist in militarily-capable liberal democracies like the United States.   What effect the change of commander will have in Kabul remains unclear. But it will have a long-term positive effect on US democracy.

The Taliban are expanding their area of influence, NATO allies are eager to leave Afghanistan, the forthcoming parliamentary elections are likely to be even more fraudulent than last year’s presidential election – in other words, how can it get any worse for President Obama’s AfPak strategy? Oh yeah, the man the US president has trusted to execute the strategy, the man whose name is now synonymous with the international community’s’ plan, General Stanley McChrystal gives an interview to Rolling Stone magazine (in itself a dubious choice), which paints a picture of the commander as insubordinate, unwise or simply not in control of his headquarters.

ABC was the acronym used for meetings of Madeleine Albright, Sandy Berger and William Cohen when they all worked for the President Bill Clinton. RAB will hopefully in future be an American-style acronym for the cooperation of the three people voted to chair the parliamentary committees for foreign affairs, defence and international development: Richard Ottaway, James Arbuthnot and Malcolm Bruce. If the government succeeds in welding together the different perspectives of the FCO, DFID and the MoD – a prerequisite of modern crisis management - then the three MPs will have to find new ways of working together too as parliament will have to scrutinise this new dynamic.

The Times went big on their story of Britain’s campaign in Helmand, and all the mistakes made in 2005 when the deployment was being planned. It is a good piece of reporting, which adds to the volume of stories about the war, its planning and execution. Britain’s effort Helmand, like the one in Basra, will in time need a magisterial study, a sort of multi-volume study like Winston Churchill’s The Second World War, which can weave the front-line experience together with the turning of the bureaucratic wheels. But at least the first draft of history is now being written.

Richard Holbrooke, the U.S. diplomat in charge of Afghanistan and Pakistan affairs said Washington has now publicly made clear the US government is serious about negotiating with the Taliban. Speaking at a conference in Madrid, the US envoy said: ‘Let me be clear on one thing, everybody understands that this war will not end in a clear-cut military victory. It's not going to end on the deck of a battleship like World War Two, or Dayton, Ohio, like the Bosnian war It's going to have some different ending from that, some form of political settlements are necessary ... you can't have a settlement with al Qaeda, you can't talk to them, you can't negotiate with them, it's out of the question. But it is possible to talk to Taliban leaders.

Having returned from Washington DC, where I spoke to a range of senior policy-makers about Afghanistan and Pakistan, I am struck by how much confusion there is about what President Obama meant when he said that he wanted US combat troops return home in 2011. Did he mean that 2011 would allow the first assessment of the progress and his strategy and a tokenistic reconfiguration or forces? Or did he genuinely mean that the date would see the beginning of a real, if drawn-out withdrawal? For what it is worth, I am convinced the US president meant the former. This is crucial to the UK, since so much of what the Britain does – and presumably much time was spent on this at the recent Chequers discussion – is about staying close to the US.

The Department for International Development (DFID) should forsake peaceful but poor countries and instead turn into “a world leader in tackling the problems of fragile states.” That’s what a new Chatham House report by Alex Evans, who used to be an adviser to Hilary Benn, and his colleague, David Steven, argue: 'If the UK wants to deepen its commitment to backing the challenges posed by fragile states, it needs to remodel DFID extensively, with the department concentrating on developing a coherent preventive agenda for fragile states.

I’m in Washington DC at a high-level seminar on trans-Atlantic relations with the “who is who” of Europe and the US, talking about issues of common concern. The Germans are here in force, as are the French, with high-ranking officials speaking about topics like Russia and Iran. Interestingly, the Brits are notable in their absence. It is probably a sign that the British government is still in transition mode, unable to explain any new policies, unready to stake out new positions. Or they may not be bothered with unofficial events such as these given the privileged access they have. But it is worth noticing nonetheless.