Some analysts are more upbeat about the Petraeus strategy, arguing that, in military terms, Afghanistan has been pulled back from the brink. They had better be right. The general has only weeks to prove his plan’s success before the relative calm of winter ends. “This is the last throw of the dice,” says one observer.  Praise for Petraeus in Washington and London is outweighed by the lack of progress towards a political solution. With President Obama under pressure at home, no game-changing American figure has emerged to seize the initiative on the ground. That vacuum grows more alarming, as the 2014/15 deadline for withdrawal agreed by Obama and David Cameron approaches. While it is generally agreed (except by our Government) that reorganising the organogram of the NHS in a similar timescale is a recipe for chaos, it is deemed possible to pluck a secure future for a war-torn country from the ether.  The reality of this endgame is that corruption remains rife, the handover to Afghan security forces is way off timetable and President Karzai, a needs-must leader, is approaching the end of a second and final term with no succession plan in prospect. Behind the bland comments issued after Ed Miliband’s weekend visit, it is possible to detect disquiet. Douglas Alexander, the shadow foreign secretary who accompanied Mr Miliband, told me yesterday: “It is absolutely vital that the military effort is matched by political and diplomatic efforts. Given the service and sacrifice of our troops, Britain must play a key role.”  In the normal run of foreign policy, Britain punches at bantamweight. The turmoil sweeping Egypt and most other global convulsions will not be stilled by any word from Downing Street. Yet the UK does have an Afghan bargaining chip, dearly bought with British investment and British blood. US inaction makes it imperative that we use that influence.  Mr Karzai was the first international leader to meet Mr Cameron at Chequers, where the PM told him that “Afghanistan is our top priority in foreign affairs.” What happened? Behind the scenes, Foreign Office officials are working as diligently as ever. Front of house, the war has faded from the headlines. Such is the dearth of political leadership that it is possible to imagine that Afghanistan has been obliterated from the global map.  No one explains, or knows, what a peace deal would even look like. A comprehensive settlement drawn up by the charity The Oxford Research Group and others went unheeded at the last Nato conference. The multiple local deals that some think preferable to any grand compact agreed by thugs and warlords go unstruck.  But the most dangerous omission may lie not in the failure to match a military surge with a political one, but in what one analyst calls the “criminal neglect” of economic progress. When children emerge from school at 11, many are creamed off by the Taliban, or the madrassahs, or by the criminals exploiting Afghanistan’s vast wealth.  The country is a treasure trove of gold, copper, iron ore and lapis lazuli worth between one and three trillion dollars. The British Government should be demanding a cost-free Marshall plan to exploit that wealth and free Afghanistan from its dependency on foreign aid. As Clare Lockhart, head of the Institute for State Effectiveness, says: “One of the most important aspects of peace-building is enabling the youth of the country to acquire skills and jobs.”  In Afghanistan, where Twitter revolutions are rarely mentioned and where the Rudyard Kipling caricature of a savage and intractable populus is still invoked, the roots of dissent have many parallels to the forces of modernity that rock the Middle East. When between 60 and 80 per cent of young Afghans are unemployed, the temptation to become a warlord’s apprentice or a would-be jihadist can be compelling.  Time trickles away. In Mr Alexander’s words, “the coming weeks and months are critical”. It is too late to ponder the merits of this war, too late to regret the wasted years of botched reconstruction. We are where we are, in a deepening bloodbath. The deputy governor of Kandahar has just been killed in a suicide attack, and assassinations tripled in 2010, the grimmest year in a protracted war.  Soon the coffins, harbingers of the spring fighting season, will be arriving at Wootton Bassett. There is a choice. Either Britain can tacitly acknowledge that hundreds of military personnel died for a mistake and that this conflict was a misbegotten crusade, dubious in conception and catastrophic in execution. Or the Government can seize the initiative and work with others, not least the UN, to secure the economic and political future that is slipping out of reach.  The general inclination of the Coalition is to settle for bilateral foreign policy deals and a smaller role on the world stage. But we have made Afghanistan our theatre. The drama entering its final, bloody act is in many ways our production. Political leaders like to say this is not “a war without end”, but this show will not be over when the curtain falls.  Afghanistan is, as Mr Cameron has said, “about our national security back in the UK.” It is a battle for our safety. For the Afghan people and for British citizens, Mr Cameron and William Hague must seize the political initiative. History will not forgive their silence.
The jobless rate is far worse than that of Egypt &ndash; but the country is rich in    natural resources, says Mary Riddell.