How to win a war and how to lose one

RUSH hour in Kabul is best avoided. The booming Afghan economy has packed the road with cars. But it has also made the streets safe enough to walk and created an environment where émigrés return home to set up business. It is a model of what Iraq should have been like, and the difference can be explained simply: in Afghanistan, we are learning from the occupation, while in Iraq we are not.

Since the Taliban was deposed in 2001, the Afghan economy has doubled in size, along with the average salary, and primary school enrolment is up fivefold. What little polling is possible shows 98% of Afghans saying the country is moving in the right direction (compared with 35% of Iraqis, most of whom live the Shi'ite south). The remaining battle in Afghanistan is to introduce order to its lawless regions.

Iraq, meanwhile, is now in Yugoslav-style ethnic conflict. A Shi'ite morgue recently took delivery of 70 headless bodies, and Sunni clerics are being killed. More civilians have died in Iraq than in Lebanon during the last three weeks, but slaughter has become seen as so commonplace it warrants few headlines. Oil production, the economic lifeline, is still not up to its paltry level under UN sanctions. The mission has never seemed more daunting, and peace never so distant.

The story of Iraq is not troops versus insurgents - a false narrative repeated to the British and American public - but a civil war of Sunnis versus Shi'ites, who kill each other every day. The Kurds live in relative peace and prosperity in their autonomous north. Yet the fallacy is that 'Iraqis' - the term is never split down to its ethnic components - want peace and the sooner the wicked insurgents are defeated the better.

This is why police and army rolls are seen as signs of success. The handover of power from allied troops to local police is paraded, mendaciously, as a move to the promised stability - and a step closer to the real goal, which is troop withdrawal from Iraq.

On the ground, troops and diplomats know the story. William Patey, who has just completed his tour as UK ambassador to Baghdad, admitted last week that "undoubtedly the Iraqi people have lost confidence in the police".

If this is so, then what was the point of a police force? The headlong rush to recruitment has effectively armed sectarian groups. The so-called 'Mahdi Army' controls Shi'ite areas of Baghdad and al-Qaeda is taking root in the Sunni areas. Rival Shi'ite gangs have divided the south between them.

This has happened because Iraqi lessons were not learned. One of the many flawed assumptions of the 2003 invasion of Iraq was that there would be no sectarian strife because Sunnis and Shi'ites lived together harmoniously. This was once claimed for Serb and Croat in Yugoslavia, Jew and Muslim in Palestine. By 2002, it was clear that sectarianism was back, yet to Britain or America, using the phrase "civil war" is seen as defeat in itself.

Instead of changing the mission and adapting to tackle the ethnic conflict which now seems unavoidable, the West still speaks about "Iraqi-isation" as if handing power from the military to the police is an end in itself.

But this policy paves the way for an exit strategy from Iraq. When power is handed over to the brutal, corrupt and hated police services, it can be deemed a success and a troop deployment that effectively started on a lie can end on a lie. And the army of columnists who supported the Iraq war, including this one, can take no pleasure from it.

Yet in Afghanistan, so much of this is different. Kabul has its share of roadside bombs and insurgents, but it knows more peace and prosperity now than perhaps at any other time in its recent history. Ethnic groups have worked together, the formula for power-sharing has been a broad success and the outstanding problem is in lawless provinces which have never recognised central government.

Yet a potentially huge error was made when British forces were deployed in the Helmand Province. It was to assume that eradicating poppy crops should be a goal, thereby stamping out the drugs industry - important to the West perhaps but not to Afghans, whose addiction rates are below that of London and among whom some 2.3 million rely on poppy crops to survive. If they think British troops have come to cut down their crop, they will lay on a hostile reception and back a nationalist resistance led by the Taliban. The poppy cull idea threatens the overall mission in Afghanistan.

Now this opium mission is being shelved. Ministers would never admit so in frank terms, but Des Browne, the Defence Secretary, told the Commons last week that "our soldiers are not narcotics police... they are not waging a narcotics war; they will not destroy poppy fields; and they will not fight farmers for bags of opium". This is the sound of a penny dropping.

Next the equipment. It quickly became apparent that the Snatch Land Rover was easily torn apart by roadside bombs. So Browne negotiated an extra £40m from the Treasury for 100 American-made Cougar vehicles, which can survive such attacks, for delivery in November. As defence procurement goes, it represents lightning speed and an encouraging ability to change the mission depending on what is learned.

There is another lesson, which David Cameron was told about on his Afghan trip last week. Another 'great game' is at work in Afghanistan where the main overseas enemy is not Iran but Pakistan, where the Taliban's leadership is understood to have relocated. President Pervez Musharraf protests fidelity to the war on terror but is playing a double game, knowing he is too weak to make too many hardline Islamic enemies.

The British refused for a year to acknowledge that the bombs being used to kill servicemen in Iraq were made in Iran. Conceding as much, it was feared, would be a step towards war. But ignoring the problem has only served to strengthen it. By focusing attention on Musharraf, and the flood of Taliban fighters coming across the Pakistani border, there is a better chance of getting to grips with the situation.

The Afghan mission is entering its toughest phase, as warlords are faced down and Taliban troops are reinforced while Musharraf turns a blind eye. But a military strategy which adapts stands much more success than the intransigent strategy which has had such a tragic effect in Iraq.

• Fraser Nelson is political editor of The Spectator