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Taliban score a propaganda coup

The Taliban are resorting to a classic guerilla insurgency with the deadly twist of suicide bombings to try and outlast Nato

Ho Chi Minh summarised the essence of a successful insurgency when he said: "We don't need to win military victories, we only need to hit them until they give up and get out."

The Taliban appears to have adopted this maxim of the North Vietnamese leader in their fight against the west. Thrown out by a US-backed insurgency in 2001 after the September 11 attacks, the Taliban know they cannot beat Nato militarily, but they can win if they wear out the alliance. Given the historical difficulties of overcoming insurgencies, it's not a bad approach.

They appear to have learnt their lesson from the terrible hammering they took from British forces in Helmand in 2006 when they launched frontal assaults on fixed positions. The Telegraph's Tom Coghlan writes: "The Taliban appear to have settled on a strategy of outlasting rather than outmatching the west." He predicts more attacks along the lines of yesterday's spectacular when the Taliban tried to assassinate Hamid Karzai, the Afghan president, at a military parade. The new twist that Ho Chi Minh would probably disapprove is the use of suicide bombings targeting civilians.

Although the attack failed to kill Karzai, the Taliban certainly scored a propaganda coup. The attack prompts the Guardian to reflect on Karzai's shortcomings - his inability to or unwillingness to remove corrupt officials, or to crack down on drug trafficking. While the paper stops short of calling on Karzai to go, it thinks he has become a liability - although Nato has not helped his case by killing nearly 2,000 civilians last year.

"There are clear warning signs that the Afghan mission is at a turning point. Mr Karzai claims he is the only man to lead the country, but General Pervez Musharraf made similar claims for his leadership of Pakistan. And now look what his happening to him: the new civilian government proves there is always an alternative," a Guardian leader says.

The Taliban are probably not subscribers to the Financial Times, although you never know, they might read it online from their bases in the lawless tribal area on Afghanistan's border with Pakistan. If they do, they would probably read with great interest an article by Stephen Fidler, who writes of the "black mood" at the Ministry of Defence. One source goes so far as to describe the ministry as "not fit for purpose", overwhelmed by the task of organising and equipping 12,000 troops - and many more support personnel - in Iraq and Afghanistan.

On a similar theme, Max Hastings, in a column for the Guardian, says the army is having a tough time finding recruits because of the changing culture. Parents and school recoil from the warrior ethos and those teenagers who do want to join up either find the discipline unacceptable or simply lack the fitness to cope with arduous physical demands. It's not just Britain but the west in general, Hastings writes, that is struggling to find enough young men able and willing to carry rifles on the battlefields.

This an edited and extended version of the Wrap,'s digest of the papers

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