By James Kirkup
HER Britannic Majesty's Embassy in Kabul could not be further from the diplomatic stereotype of elegant cocktail parties and white-tie sophistication. A squat, brown-brick lump, privately described by one embassy employee as "disgusting", it is fronted by a small, scruffy garden and ringed by blast walls to protect against rocket attacks.
The building is far too small for the 120 or so UK personnel posted to the Afghan capital, and many are forced to work in converted shipping containers: windowless metal boxes, jerry-rigged with air-conditioning against the fierce heat.
At the end of a long, hot day, most staff have to sleep in shipping containers, too. Most are two to a box; the containers are divided into two, with each side consisting of a single bed, cupboard and en-suite toilet. More senior diplomats have a container to themselves and are given a larger bed and a sofa to make a living room of sorts. All ranks fraternise in the embassy "bar" - another shipping container.
And the final insult: the complex doesn't even belong to the British. It is rented from the Bulgarians, who have an embassy on the same patch of land.
Recently, there was talk of buying back the former British embassy, a distinguished 19th-century affair situated on the outskirts of Kabul. But it is now in the hands of the Pakistanis, who are distinctly unenthusiastic about returning it to their former colonial masters.
In all, the British complex feels distinctly improvised, almost temporary, as if the various diplomats, development advisers, soldiers and spooks that inhabit the place aren't planning to stay long.
In fact, nothing could be further from the truth, and the British mission in Afghanistan is likely only to grow in the coming years, with some even predicting it will eventually become this country's largest overseas presence.
As Sir Sherrard Cowper-Coles, the new British ambassador in Kabul, said yesterday, Britain will have to retain and expand its commitment for decades to come if a sustainable democracy is ever to take root in Afghanistan.
Christopher Langton, an analyst at the International Institute for Strategic Studies who has recently returned from Afghanistan, says the ambassador is "100 per cent right", but worries that British voters have not fully realised the scale of the challenge ahead.
"This is a longer-term project than people in this country have been led to believe by the political establishment," Mr Langton, a former British Army colonel, said. "I think the average man on the street would be surprised by many of the hard facts about the situation in Afghanistan and the sort of commitment that would be required to improve it."
And those "hard facts" are hard indeed. On every measure, Afghanistan ranks among the poorest and most deprived nations on earth. One in four children dies before their fifth birthday; more than half the population are thought to live on less than 50p a day.
After decades of war, internal conflicts and battles involving first Soviet and now NATO troops, the country is chronically weak, too. President Hamid Karzai's writ barely extends beyond Kabul, with vast swathes of the country he nominally governs in fact ruled by warlords, drug gangs and the resurgent Taleban.
But how did it ever come to this? Many will remember the 2001 US-led invasion of Afghanistan, a decisive military thrust that quickly ousted the ruling Taleban regime and installed Mr Karzai as the head of an elected government in Kabul.
"In 2001, conditions in Afghanistan were favourable for stabilisation, reconstruction and improving governance," the Afghanistan Research and Evaluation Unit, an independent think-tank in Kabul, said. "Since then, the inadequate and often incoherent application of resources, in combination with conditions beyond the control of the Afghan government and its partners, has replaced this opportunity with the current crisis."
The unit lists three main threats facing the country today - the Taleban insurgency, opium cultivation and popular discontent.
The Taleban insurgency is perhaps the most obvious sign of Afghanistan's continued troubles. Trying again to put down a movement many had thought dead, Britain now has more than 7,000 troops in Afghanistan - more than in Iraq.
Since the deployment began last year, 60 British personnel have been killed. There are financial costs, too. The Ministry of Defence spent GBP 770 million on its Afghan operations in 2006-7 - its military involvement in Iraq during the same period is put at GBP 1 billion.
British troops are in Afghanistan as part of a NATO mission to stabilise the country, an operation that runs in parallel with a US military operation aimed at hunting down and killing Taleban leaders and al-Qaeda terrorists. The two western forces are engaged in almost constant combat, and have killed more than 5,000 "insurgents" since the start of last year.
But with close-quarters fighting in urban areas and high-powered NATO air strikes, civilians are dying too - more than 1,500 of them, according to the Agency Co-ordinating Body for Afghan Relief, which represents nearly 100 aid groups.
That death toll inevitably undermines popular support for the western forces and the Kabul government they support.
Some say US-led policies on drugs are adding to the alienation. The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime estimates that last year Afghanistan produced more than 13,420lb of opium - more than 90 per cent of the world's heroin supply, and up almost 50 per cent from 2005. The US response is "enforced eradication", burning and spraying poppy fields in an effort to uproot the drug economy.
According to Brigitte Scheffer, of the Senlis Council, a drug-policy group with staff in Afghanistan, the eradication policy is simply counterproductive.
"It creates poverty and dissatisfaction among farmers and their families, without offering them alternatives," she said, "It drives them over to the Taleban side. They may not be particularly religious or even agree with the Taleban, but the Taleban will pay cash, hundreds of dollars a month, and to men who have families to support that's very hard to turn down."
So, a guerrilla enemy that refuses to die, a growing drug problem and a population increasingly disillusioned with western intervention - it's easy to see why diplomats, soldiers and analysts all talk of the "long haul". But how long is long?
This month, Ton van Loon, a Dutch army general who commanded the NATO mission in southern Afghanistan, was asked whether the West's war in Afghanistan would be over any time soon. "Look at Bosnia," he replied. "NATO has been there for 15 years and that mission was a lot easier."
And how are the British people to be persuaded to pay the physical, financial and emotional price of a prolonged mission in Afghanistan? That task will now fall to Gordon Brown, who will be confirmed as prime minister next week.
In March, as part of his preparation for the premiership, he visited British troops in the country and insisted there was "no doubt about the UK's long-term commitment to help Afghanistan".
Perhaps, as he considers how long Britain will remain engaged there, Mr Brown might want to ponder a speech made in Dalkeith by another leading politician who also wanted to persuade the electorate to stay the course and support a British role in the country.
"Remember that the sanctity of life in the hill villages of Afghanistan, among the winter snows, is as inviolable in the eye of Almighty God, as can be your own," he told his audience in an impassioned appeal. His name was William Gladstone. The date was 26 November, 1879.
