"The Fourth Afghan War is lost"

By Steve Hynd

American hawks might not realise it, but if they've lost Gerald Warner, self-described "polemical commentator" at the UK's ultra-neocon Daily Telegraph, then they've lost Britain's participation in their Afghan folly as soon as David Cameron sets foot in Ten Downing Street, if not sooner.

Warner writes today:

For us, this is the Fourth Afghan War and it has turned into every bit as much of a resounding success as the previous three. If there is one thing in which the Ministry of Defence and the British public can claim expertise, it is getting cuffed in Afghanistan.

...The significance of Brown turning to the �keep terror off British streets� claptrap is that he realises the previous claptrap, about �building democracy�, has even less plausibility after the spectacle of the Afghan elections rigged by the corrupt Karzai regime. Is that what young Britons are dying for? It is time to up sticks and exit. We know the way � we have travelled it three times before.

There is no-one more traditionally hardline conservative in the British sense than Warner. He's a bombastic, pompous, priviliged, Little Englander of the exact kind who read the Torygraph and who make up the bulk of the UK Conservative Party's most wealthy fundraisers.

Warner joins other conservative establishment stalwarts such as the editors of the Daily Mail, renowned military historian Correlli Barnett, Max Hastings, Peter Hitchings (brother of Chris) as well as leftwing publications like The Guardian and New Statesman in calling for a withdrawal from Afghanistan. Those paleocons, backed by the likes of Heseltine and Rifkin, have far more "pull" in the smoke-filled back rooms and with the "old guard" grandees of the Tory party than the neocon parvenus and Bushite exiles Cameron currently has running his shadow defense and foreign policy portfolios. Most of the British electorate is opposed to a continued presence in Afghanistan and almost two thirds think the war there can never be won. Cameron will be gently steered towards the politically advantageous policy - and Brown may have to scurry to get there first.