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Last Sunday Karzai went one worse and said he was recognising and paying (with western money) various provincial warlords “to fight the Taliban”. This sabotaged the West’s disarmament programme and put some 120,000 militiamen under government arms. To appease western diplomats Karzai called them community policemen. One beneficiary was Sher Muhammad Akhunzada, sacked last year as governor of British-occupied Helmand for opium running. It was like sacking a Kuwaiti sheikh for selling oil. His private army is some 500 strong. British taxpayers are now financing drug runners, warlords, murderers and torturers. That’s overseas aid for you.

I see no alternative to what Karzai is doing. He was a provincial ruler and knows which way the wind is blowing. If Nato will not put 150,000 troops into Kandahar and Helmand, then he must rely on realpolitik and live with the Taliban in the south. Unlike Al-Qaeda they are Afghans, not Arabs, and their hotheads may have cooled. Karzai must cut deals with territorial power, as Afghan rulers have done since time immemorial. He can never make his country Sweden, but he might at least make it Pakistan.

Nato troops remaining in and round Kabul may be able to protect Karzai long enough for him to piece together some such confederation, sharing power with provincial leaders prospering from the booming narco-economy (now 80% of total Afghan exports). This may be beyond the tolerance of donor countries but it is the best hope of stabilising a country that will otherwise revert to civil war.

The view taken by the coalition in Kabul so far — as by the Americans in Baghdad — is that the only thing “these people understand is force”. Yet massive force has been deployed to bring Afghanistan to heel — costing $18 billion a year — and all that has been achieved is thousands of deaths. Afghanistan is now less safe than at any time since the Taliban ruled and as open as ever to the practice of terror.

The benign reincarnation of Britain’s Victorian “kings of the Punjab” as marine colonels and earnest NGOs has not worked. The British empire was for life, not for re-election. As Lawrence of Arabia wrote of these parts, “Only when we learn to rule without soldiers will we be safe.” We have not so learnt.

The one obligation that the West owes the Muslim world is rationality. Intelligence from this region all indicates that its leaders expect western soldiers to go home soon. Democracies have no stomach for a long haul. Shrewd local rulers can see that the fundamentalists are reasserting their power and they must shift allegiance accordingly. Drug and oil “protection” money is flowing towards Islamic nationalist groups, including from Gulf and Saudi “charities”. Tribes must guard their interests against whatever the future holds.

Last week in Shanghai the leaders of Russia, China, Iran, Pakistan, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan met under the umbrella of the Shanghai Co-operation Organisation. This little-reported group was intended to cement an alliance against further western intervention in Asia. So far, so understandable. But if western diplomacy allows that cement to harden into something more sinister, the “war on terror” will have been the stupidest mistake in history.

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