Enough. This senseless folly in Afghanistan must stop

[CHIMO]

When something you're doing is going badly wrong, the options are always limited. You can carry on, spade sinking deeper into the mire; you can take your shovel somewhere else; or you can take heed of the solid 42% demanding withdrawal in today's Guardian/ICM poll – and just stop digging. There's no "indefinite" hope left around Afghanistan for Nato troops now. There are 184 young British lives lost, and counting. Inescapably, the long overdue moment to stop has arrived – because none of the reasons for ploughing on makes the slightest sense.

But surely this war is about destroying "an incubator of terrorism" and thus "about the future of Britain itself"? Thank you, foreign secretary. Surely "denying Helmand to the Taliban in the long term" will help "defeat this vicious insurgency and prevent the return of al-Qaida"? Thank you, prime minister. I haven't the heart to quote Barack Obama on the twin towers and "impunity" in similar vein. So much intelligent promise, such a grisly mistake.

The world is full of places where al-Qaida can hide and operate. Somalia, Sudan, twisting back streets from Jakarta to Casablanca. You don't need the full military monty to wreak death and destruction. A few deluded kids from Bradford will serve quite as well. And, anyway, to quote Gordon Brown again: "Three-quarters of the most serious plots investigated by our British authorities have links to al-Qaida in Pakistan." Downing Street's "crucible of terrorism" is somewhere east of the Durand Line. Our soldiers are fighting and dying in the wrong country – and that's the idiocy that has got to stop.

In fact, in so many ways, Afghanistan isn't a country at all: think five major ethnic groups, six major languages, and dozens of local district tongues; think an agglomeration of city states and fiefdoms that remind you of Europe's hundred years' war; think sadly about sophisticated, clever, resilient people, good at handling 21st-century weaponry in a society whose structures haven't made it past 1400 yet. It's a sideshow, a hopeless sideshow. It is also – as Farzana Shaikh makes clear in her brilliant new book, Making Sense of Pakistan – just another victim of the batty, contorted rivalry between New Delhi and Islamabad for subcontinental influence.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/jul/12/afghanistan-taliban-pakistan-al-qaida