George Galloway

Surveying the media on the 10th anniversary of the war on Afghanistan yesterday left little doubt - the war is lost, was ill-conceived and all that is left is to limit the damage.

How different it all seemed a decade ago - the Taliban were routed, women's rights were coming to Afghanistan along with democracy and Kabul was to be redeveloped as the jewel in the crown of a country now rescued from decades of neglect and war.

Some of us said at the time that it was bunkum. We said it again five years ago when British forces were deployed in Helmand - to Helmand, of course, because the much-routed Taliban had regrouped across the Pakistan border and were now firing an insurgency across the south and east.

We said it when US troops surged under Barack Obama, thus increasing many times over the number of Afghan doors that are kicked in each night leaving every occupant and their extend family even more embittered at the occupation.

Now it is echoed from the comment pages of every serious paper to the musings of diplomats and generals retired and serving. US General Stanley McChrystal now says that the US, Britain and its allies "had a frighteningly simplistic view" of Afghanistan and how things would turn out 10 years ago.

The US state under George Bush and Dick Cheney Cheney could be expected to hold such childish illusions. But in Britain, surely somewhere in the recesses of the Ministry of Defence and the Foreign and Commonwealth Office there was some collective memory or even folkloric wisdom about just how treacherous military adventures have turned out to be in Afghanistan and along the "North West Frontier"?

It seems that there was, according to a former British ambassador to Moscow earlier this week, who is the latest to reveal the forebodings at the time. But they were all brushed aside by the messia-maniac in Number 10 with the full support of the two other establishment parties - lest that be forgotten.

The results are there for all to see. Billions have gone into reconstruction alright but in Dubai with the greenbacks flown out daily from Kabul. The insurgency is growing, bringing gung-ho calls from US ambassador to Kabul Ryan Crocker for the Taliban to be made to suffer more before they see the value of negotiating. It would be laughable were it not for the tragedy of who is suffering.

Countless - or at least uncounted - Afghan dead and getting on for 3,000 dead for the US and its allies. At the time of writing 382 British forces personnel had been killed.

More and more of their families and of those who have to serve in now extended tours of duty are asking, why?

To that question comes the ugly management-babble answer - we must now look forward not back - we are where we are.

Let's leave aside the case that the anti-war movement made before the invasion that treating the criminal mass murder of 9/11 as a cause for a global "war on terror" would certainly bring widened war but would not end terror. Let's leave aside the alternatives at every stage over the last 10 years that might have left us somewhere other than where we are now.

Let's just look at where we are and where we are going. Because the frightening and deadly reality of the whole imbroglio is, when it comes to British public life, bathed in haze of chloroform. Few public figures speak of it, certainly not politicians.

When we do hear from the government and Her Majesty's Official Opposition it is usually to talk about progress in handing duties over to the Afghan security forces - the ones riddled with corruption, loyalties to rival warlords and who occasionally open fire on our troops - and always to emphasise that the whole thing will come to an end with the drawdown of troops in 2014.

That is two bloody years away. More importantly, it is two years during which there is every indication that matters are going to get even worse.

Take the strategy of talks with the Taliban. The first problem is that US policy, divided along its own tribal/departmental lines, appears to be taking a tilt towards more and more "targeted assassinations" through the use of drone attack planes. The number of drone attacks on targets in Pakistan is increasing.

The assassination of a US-born al-Qaida figure in Yemen seems to have reinforced Obama's and the Pentagon's penchant for the weapon. But - and putting to one side the soaring civilian casualties in Afghanistan and Pakistan - a policy of taking out the hierarchy of your opponent cannot sit with seeking stable negotiations with them.

The Taliban and others who are fighting the occupation have responded likewise. No less than five of Hamid Karzai's top aides and negotiators have been assassinated in the last few months. The latest, Burhanuddin Rabbani was the warlord responsible for the execution of president Najibullah when Kabul fell to the US-backed obscurantists a decade and a half ago.

So it was little surprise that the clotheshorse kleptocrat Karzai announced a few days ago that he was no longer seeking talks with the Taliban. But it was to achieve those talks, we are told, that young people from our country have to go to kill and be killed in Afghanistan - there is no longer the pretence that this is about something called "victory."

The endgame seems further away than ever. Worse than that, the instability is spiralling outwards. It seems clear that the divisions in Washington over what to do about Pakistan are deepening. The Pentagon shot out a deafening blunderbuss last month claiming that Pakistan's ISI intelligence service was directly supporting the Haqqani network which spectacularly seized a tall building in Kabul and kept the US embassy under fire for 20 hours.

The already cool relations between Washington and Islamabad became glacial. They must now be heading to absolute zero at the news that India has signed a security and military agreement with Karzai, thus giving Pakistan's regional rival a foothold to its west and north.

Fanciful, was how Labour ministers responded when I and so very few others in parliament raised exactly this spectre of Afghanistan being turned into the epicentre of a regional power-struggle. We were moving towards and era of greater co-operation between states, you see, hampered only by residual anti-liberal, anti-modern ideologies - principal among them, given the collapse of the Soviet Union, Islamism.

Instead, what we are seeing in Afghanistan and across the globe is a resurgence of something just as much part of modern, liberal capitalism as the boom and bust cycle and class inequality - rivalry between competing nation-states economically and militarily.

The fact the US has declined as the global hegemonic power means that far from less rivalry, it is intensified as Washington attempts to shore up its position in the face of an economic balance that is shifting towards the east.

The local satraps jockey for position as the overall hierarchy can no longer be kept firmly in place by a weakened overlord. The Pakistani military, so long an American ally, from the days of the Baghdad pact on, now finds itself at loggerheads.

The US would like to draw back and reposition. The financial cost of these failed wars is now a serious factor in these straitened times. The Pentagon does not have infinite largesse - what it has it wants to focus in the Pacific to ensure that the system of power and states that was put in place at the end of the second world war remains in place, compensating with military bases and aircraft for rising Chinese trade and commercial influence.

So there are powerful pressures to withdraw. But on the other side is an increasingly vocal lobby that says, as so many generals before have cried, one more push, extend the front to the enemy across the border, give us just a bit more time.

How all of this plays out, nobody knows. What we do know is that it is playing out badly on every front. The seductive illusion in the media, in collusion with most the Westminster, is that despite the setbacks and disappoints, this is moving towards some kind of planned ending. It won't be perfect, they say; but then nothing ever is.

It is another great lie. They have no idea exactly where this is leading. They are battered by events. Every week that passes brings more problems and dangers.

And so the message from Trafalgar Square, where the anti-war movement is rallying today to mark the anniversary, must ring out over the months to come.

It is not only that we must get out of Afghanistan as a foolish and bloody catastrophe. It is that we must fight for a change of course. It is recognised - at least in rhetoric - that the economic model of the last 30 years has failed.

So too has the neo-imperialist model of the last 20 years. It is time to end it.