By Nick Watts, Great North News Services Correspondent

Recent events in Libya have served to distract from the UK's main defence effort at the moment, Afghanistan. This morning at RUSI General David Petraaus commander of NATO's International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) gave a presentation which served to remind the audience of the scale and complexity of the enduring Afghan campaign. In October 2009 Petraeus' predecessor Gen McChrystal gave a stellar exposition of the situation as he found it. At the time ISAF was struggling to understand the nature of the insurgency and the means necessary to deal with it. McChrystal had at least started asking the right questions.

Now the situation has moved on. The talk is of the end game and transfer of responsibility for the security of Afghanistan to its own army the ANA. To some extent Petraeus is a lucky general, just as his forebear was unlucky. He has inherited a situation which he summarised as "only recently have we got the inputs right". Only in 2010 was ISAF able to reverse the momentum of the insurgency, which Petraeus characterized as gaining momentum from 2005 onwards. He is referring not only to the uplift in troop numbers, but also to the way ISAF does business in terms of building up the governance of the country, and "getting the big ideas right". Up until then there were too many competing organizations working in silos without talking to each other. So part of the governance piece has been getting the NGOs and contractors as well as the UN and EU working together.

The NATO Lisbon summit committed ISAF to hand over responsibility for security to the Afghan government by the end of 2014. In addition President Obama has committed to the beginning of a draw-down of US forces, beginning in July this year. In answer to some questions on this aspect Petraeus made the point that both NATO and some troop contributing nations, including the UK, were discussing with the Afghan government arrangements for post 2014. He would not be drawn on specifics but mentioned that one key element of the Afghan security forces was still being developed, namely "enablers". These are the vital support functions such as artillery, medical and logistic services, as well as air lift and command and control functions. This might be taken to imply that some elements of NATO's on-going support after 2014 could involve surveillance and special operations forces.

One of Petraeus' earlier appointments had seen him re-writing the US Army's counter insurgency manual, so here was the man who wrote the book explaining how it works on the ground. He was at pains to stress that the military element was only one piece in the jigsaw of COIN. He has also previously been quoted as saying that Afghanistan "is all hard, all of the time"; so he does not see that progress is yet irreversible. He also stressed how important it is to keep our own public opinion supportive of the costly nature of the campaign.

An intriguing piece of the COIN jigsaw is what is called "reintegration" by which is meant the various strands being used to encourage members of the insurgency to lay down their arms altogether or to change sides. On this matter Petraeus was matter of fact, but opaque. There are efforts in hand to encourage both the lower echelon fighters to stop fighting, as well as the higher echelons. More emphasis is being put into tackling local corruption, which is often one of the grievances which cause people to join the insurgency.

There is also recognition by the Karzai government that the culture of patronage has to be dealt with, including his own family. On their own none of these things is a winner; but added to the improvements in ISAF's tactical situation, they all add up to reasons for wavering insurgents to remain at home, or to change sides. A British officer, Maj Gen Phil Jones is in charge of the force reintegration effort, to get ex-Taliban insurgents into the ANA.

Petraeus' presentation was much more assured than the one given by McChrystal in 2009. Back then ISAF was striving for credibility in the capitals of the NATO nations, never mind how it was doing in the campaign against the insurgents. Petraeus has managed his tenure well and things seem to be going reasonably well, although he didn't want to sound complacent. He said that there was still hard fighting ahead. It is to be hoped that should there be setbacks, as there may well be, Petraeus will not also find himself carpeted by his President, but given the top cover he needs to finish the job.

By Noor R Ampssler

Winning the "hearts and minds" of the people has become enshrined as a pivotal component of counter-insurgency warfare ever since 1952 when General Sir Gerald Templer declared it would be the key to success in fighting the communists. The Malayan Emergency is still regarded as the shining paradigm of how to properly wage a counter-insurgency campaign and Templer's emphasis on hearts and minds established in military circles a fixation with these operations. However, what if during the Emergency the hearts and minds campaign was not the crux upon which victory turned and if the evidence for the effectiveness in this area is ambivalent at best. What if other factors during the Malayan Emergency, especially the unique context in which the counter-insurgency campaign was fought, more plausibly explain the victory of the government security forces? Does one then question the established wisdom and think the unthinkable: that an overriding emphasis on hearts and minds is simply overrated and even misplaced?

By Chris Newton

The various news reports over the past weeks and months have suggested that the government has been locked in a heated debate over the future of British strategy. On the one side it appears that David Cameron and George Osborne believed that future British force structures should be geared towards the war in Afghanistan, and therefore the Army should take priority. Liam Fox on the other hand suggested that the future force structure should take a more long term view, prioritising the Navy to ensure that Britain's maritime and trading interests are protected.

The field of strategic studies is at a similar crossroads. During the first few decades since its conception, the prime concern of strategic theorists was nuclear strategy. In the 1990s, their attention primarily turned to 'peacekeeping' and peace support operations. After 9/11 the principal interest has been counterinsurgency operations. The key question now is should strategists continue to focus of COIN theory or should they now look to other forms of warfare post-Afghanistan?

Dr Robert Crowcroft, Research Associate, UK Defence Forum

Almost certainly the biggest contemporary problem for the way in which the US and its allies wage war is our curious aversion to destroying and killing the enemy. The military power wielded by the US is so great that it is difficult to see how it can be 'defeated' in anything but the long term. Surely, you would think, that once battle has been joined the priority would be crushing the enemy, no matter how it is done. This trend is especially puzzling when we bear in mind that recent conflicts have been expeditionary operations and are, in effect, wars of choice: we have chosen to designate certain people as our enemies and make war against them.

The reticence about utilising our full strength to achieve our goals – goals which are apparently so important that we committed to war – is debilitating. Doing so for 'moral' reasons – in reality, merely the need for a socially unrepresentative group of politicians and commentators to feel themselves virtuous – only reduces the prospect of victory and, usually, constitutes no solution to the problem at hand. One important point here is that military behaviour appealing to the prejudices of the cosmopolitan classes hardly ever works and should be avoided like the plague. Another point centres on the unpalatable truth that killing the enemy and inflicting violence upon him is absolutely central to a successful war. It always has been. In the West, our sheltered societies have forgotten that. The contemporary expectation for wars to be virtually bloodless is simply pathetic and says a great deal – none of it good – about the state of our civilisation.

The fact is that there is no substitute for convincing an adversary of his defeat through graphic means; of shedding the enemy's blood in adequate quantities to achieve this; of showing resolution against opponents whose cultural background means that they only respect the clenched fist; and doing all this as quickly as possible once battle is joined. The modern aversion to inflicting, and sustaining, death in large quantities means that we no longer understand war for what it is: a matter of attrition, and of killing the opponent. War is brutal, and it must be so. Moreover, as Ralph Peters argued, attrition is 'not something to be avoided – and no rule says that attrition must be fairly distributed. The well-fought war inflicts catastrophic attrition on the enemy'. Only by sustaining heavy losses will the enemy be convinced of his defeat. Additionally, a few adversaries – like many Islamists – cannot be persuaded to desist no matter what we do; and so they must be killed.