Today’s NATO leak highlights the need for more realism over Afghanistan

Today’s leaked NATO report on ‘the state of the Taliban’ has generated the predictable responses: excessive attempts by the media to hype it up, and excessive attempts by NATO and the Pakistani government to play it down.

What is its true significance? It’s a good scoop, but there is little or nothing in it which really counts as ‘news’ to anyone who has been following the debate. The report is the latest in a series going back several years (I remember reading earlier versions during my time in government), which summarises thousands of interviews with captured insurgents and others, in an attempt to build up a picture of the state of the insurgency to inform strategic and operational decision-making. The BBC, which has the report, tells us that it ‘exposes for the first time the close relationship between Pakistan’s intelligence service, the ISI, and the Taliban’; that it shows ‘widespread collaboration between the insurgents and Afghan police and military’, ‘widespread support for the insurgency among the Afghan population’; and indicates that ‘Afghan civilians frequently prefer Taliban governance over the Afghan government, usually as a result of government corruption.’