So, come the small hours this side of the Atlantic, President Obama will address the American nation and confirm his intention to more fully pursue The Bush Doctrine which began in Iraq, through Afghanistan. Bush surged into Baghdad; Obama will surge into Kabul.
Meanwhile here Gordon Brown has pre-surged, carefully timing his 500 reinforcements yesterday, apparently so as not to look too much like Obama’s poodle.
And both reinforcements of course, completely miss the point. Only yesterday Mr Brown repeated his mantra that sending in ever more troops to Afghanistan, in order to leave Afghanistan, will keep Britain’s streets safe.
Time therefore, for some important facts to remember. The young men who bombed the London underground:
– were British not Afghan
– were trained in Pakistan not Afghanistan
– said they did it because of our occupation of Afghanistan
So President Obama and Prime Minister Brown can send another zillion troops into Afghanistan and it may have very little effect indeed beyond hardening Afghan opinion and western opinion ever more, that it is an exercise in futility. People are aware of the above facts and yet still feel they are being defrauded. Look at the opinion polls time and time again.
Clearly there is only one possible military strategy to close the war in Afghanistan and it is to wage war in Talibanistan as well – that area nominally in north western Pakistan. The Pakistani armed forces have failed to eradicate militants from this area for generations. It is doubtful their latest piecemeal foray into South Waziristan will do so now.
Since invading and occupying part of Pakistan is a diplomatic non-starter, we are left with this half-hearted war in Afghanistan itself, where the Taliban have made it quite clear they have no quarrel with the west and do not wish to blow up our – or anybody else’s – underground or overground or any ground.
Gordon Brown simply ignores all that.
Worse, he has all but indicated a timetable to begin handing over Afghan Provinces to Afghan control. Unlike Gordon Brown or Barack Obama, I have had the privilege of actually speaking to Talibs down the years about this, both directly and by proxy.
Of course this is meat and drink (non-alcoholic) to their ears. They have long hoped that the west has no stomach for a generations-long war in Afghanistan and now all those hopes are coming to fruition.
The defence secretary told me on yesterday’s programme that this is misreading what Gordon Brown told parliament. So I went back and reviewed it.
Sorry, Mr Ainsworth, but your boss explicitly laid out to the Commons a process whereby he hoped to hand over provinces to Afghan control by a certain number, by a given date. That, to all human ears – let alone the Taliban – is the outline of a timetable.
And at 8pm Washington time, President Obama will pretty much go on TV to tell the US people the same. Forget the troop numbers. It doesn’t matter. They will be smaller there than the US military wanted, just as they are smaller here – further proof that the military effort is half-hearted.
The important point is that it will be spun as a thinly-veiled beginning-of-the-end. The outlines of a timetable to get out will be sketched up just as surely as Gordon Brown did so.
Do you seriously think Mr Brown would have said what he said without running it past Washington in the first place? I think not.
So it is, all over again, that a British government binds itself to an American war being fought along just the lines the previous Bush neo-cons would have envisaged – right down to the surge. A president incapable of closing Guantanamo, now proposes to get out of Afghanistan by getting further into Afghanistan.
We are asked to believe the beefed-up Afghan security forces will somehow take the strain as if they are not bound to all manner of tribal politics and narco-bosses who swarm around the utterly discredited President Karzai.
Then, it is spun, NATO can begin to withdraw leaving Afghanistan as some kind of latterday Sweden with fully functioning civil institutions for all to see and glow with civic pride.
You can tell neither Brown nor Obama have spent any real time in the country.
Oh – and watch for one more thing – the 8 NATO countries supposedly sending 5000 more troops: Mr Brown’s key condition for the latest British reinforcements. We don’t know which countries, when, how, what soldiers or what they will do.
“Please believe me,” pleaded our defence secretary to me yesterday.
If I were some 19 year-old sitting on the transport and heading out of the grey skies of England to Helmand, I’d want a bit more than that.