THE US has, according to US president George W Bush, "renewed and revived the prospect of success" in Iraq. His professional, if loyal, Iraq commander, Gen David Petraeus, was more sanguine, admitting that "we haven't turned any corners, we haven't seen any lights at the end of the tunnel", writes Tony Kinsella.
War, to paraphrase Karl von Clausewitz, is one possible tool in the pursuit of political goals. Yet there are those who focus on the tool to the exclusion of their goal.
In January 1972 soldiers of the parachute regiment in Derry were issued rifles adapted to fire 5.56mm ammunition. This was to avoid bullets that penetrated a first body claiming a second, or even a third, victim in crowd situations.
Earlier that month Maj Gen Robert Ford had, in a secret memo, authorised these weapons to eliminate the "Derry young hooligans", in the belief that, if they could just kill a few Bogside troublemakers, the status quo could be restored. In fact, the political disaster of Bloody Sunday would doom rather than resuscitate the status quo - the tool rendering the goal unobtainable.
Washington is now engaged in an equally misguided folly - achieving peace and stability in Afghanistan by militarily defeating the Taliban.
Much of that unfortunate country's current instability tracks back to US negligence following the last Taliban defeat in 2001. As the country was beginning to emerge from decades of chaos, Washington lost interest. Baghdad displaced Kabul in the pecking order for specialists, money and troops, leaving the new Afghan government depending on leftovers.
A recent example of this surfaced in March 2008, when the US army suspended a $300 million (€190 million) contract with the AEY company of Miami for the supply of ammunition to Afghan forces. AEY is, according to the New York Times, essentially a one-man operation headed up by its 22-year-old president.
AEY is reported to have purchased more than 100 million 40-year-old, decaying, Chinese-made bullets from Albania for shipment to Afghanistan. Afghan forces are understandably reluctant to give battle with dud bullets. Lieut Col Amanuddin of the Afghan police complained that "this is what they give us for the fighting . . . junk".
There is a certain ironic justice in the fact that the absence of any lights at the end of the Iraq tunnel prevents the deployment of significant US reinforcements to Afghanistan. This has, in turn, obliged US secretary of defence Robert Gates to pressure others for more combat forces, a process that has included a public spat with Berlin.
Gates employed some decidedly undiplomatic phrases in a speech in Munich last February: "Some allies ought not to have the luxury of opting only for stability and civilian operations, thus forcing other allies to bear a disproportionate share of the fighting and the dying."
German chancellor Angela Merkel's Christian Democrat-Social Democrat coalition, although one of Washington's staunchest allies, held firm. Berlin would neither reinforce its 3,500 troops nor redeploy them from training and support missions to direct combat duties. Turkey also, albeit more discreetly, refused to boost its 1,500-strong contingent.
French president Nicolas Sarkozy was the one European leader who announced that France would dispatch an additional 1,000 troops - an announcement he rather controversially made to British parliamentarians in London. There are those who see this as just another of his semi-Oedipal "I am not Chirac" grandstanding gestures.
This clash has allowed neoconservative "expert" commentators generous space for ritual public handwringing about "spineless Europeans" and how when the chips are down it falls to American GIs, dependable Brits and loyal Canadians (with an occasional Gallic flourish) to save us all from the Taliban.
Neoconservatives have always excelled in the delivery of partisan invective as fact. Their campaign for more Nato troops in Afghanistan is the latest such exercise in a truly inglorious litany, and one that has as little connection to reality as most of its predecessors.
The bearded Taliban ("religious students") with their black clothing, Islamic fundamentalism, public executions and support for, and dependency on, Osama bin Laden, are of course as close to perfect terrorist icons as modern imagery has to offer.
While today's neo-Talibans share much of the fundamentalism of those who stormed Kabul in 1996, there are important differences. The US is no longer channelling vast amounts of money, reliable ammunition, and even Tennessee mules through Pakistan's inter-services intelligence agency.
There is a functioning, if inadequate, Afghan government in Kabul, complete with growing security forces (albeit slightly hampered by US-supplied dud ammunition). But perhaps most importantly, support for the Taliban from the country's largest ethnic minority, the Pashtuns, is now largely based on hostility to the presence of occasionally trigger-happy foreign troops.
Pakistan has also had enough of Islamist terrorism. In the 2002 elections, the Muttahida Majlis-e-Amal (MMA) alliance and other religious parties won 56 seats in the national assembly and swept the polls in the two provinces bordering Afghanistan - Baluchistan and Northwest Frontier - where they formed Islamist provincial administrations. In the recent elections, religious parties held on to just five seats in the national assembly, and the MMA was trounced in the Northwest Frontier by the overtly secular Awami National Party.
Against this background, the Nato mission in Afghanistan becomes one of assisting the country's institutions, rather than militarily defeating the neo-Taliban. While a functioning Afghanistan incorporating the country's fundamentalist strand may pose problems for Afghan citizens, particularly its women, it need not threaten others.
Clausewitz would probably approve of the discreet consultations being undertaken within Nato by the German defence minister, Franz-Josef Jung. A secret paper was quietly considered at the recent Bucharest summit on benchmarks for Afghan self-sufficiency and the consequent departure of Nato forces.
Force can, occasionally, be a necessary tool for achieving political objectives, but it is the objectives rather than the tool which really count. That is a truism Washington, in its delusional distraction, seems incapable of grasping. "Baghdad displaced Kabul in the pecking order for specialists, money and troops