Troops at Nato headquarters in Kabul can buy T-shirts with a blunt message for the folks back home: “While you were chilling, we were killing.”
Over the next year in Afghanistan, there is likely to be a lot more killing – or “kinetic activity” as Nato's top brass prefer to call it. The Americans are sending 17,000 more troops to bolster Nato's fight against the Taliban insurgency.
Butthe new conventional wisdom is that, as Joe Biden, US vice-president, puts it: “There is no military solution.” Instead western leaders are talking about a “comprehensive approach” that, alongside fighting, must include economic development, improved government, regional diplomacy and peace feelers to elements of the Taliban.