Afghanistan,- Gorbachev says it like it is.

On the subject of prospects in Afghanistan former Russian leader Gorbachev is bluntly saying it like it is. There is no possibility of a military victory for the US and UK, just as there was none for the Russians before them or the British last time round in the Afghan wars of the 19th century. If anyone could speak from the grave, those on the British retreat from Kabul to Jalalabad over a hundred years ago could have told told us-and our current leaders ,- that for nothing.If anyone missed it, or is rusty on the history and wants a good read , Flashman offers excellent insights. Thanks to not listening to history or taking even a short flight over the spectacular and rugged country to see what it looks like, billions have been spent and hundreds of brave young lives have been wasted. Thousands more young people with their lives ahead of them have been maimed and devastatingly disabled in the quest for a militarily achieved, terrorism, fear and corruption-free democratic state. Visions of a Westminster style parliament in which the Hon Member for Kandahar South will ask questions of the Hon Member for Helmand Central must have flitted before some of our politicians eyes, or we would never have been there. Presumably they still do as we continue to deploy large amounts of money, men and machines on the quest.

In the real world this democratic parliamentary vision simply isn't going to happen. Afghanistan isn't like that. The only thing that unites the multitude of factions in the country is the presence of a foreign force. Even the most benign will be seen as an invader against which all, for their many and hotly expressed disagreements, will join together. We are wasting out time and the sooner we accept this and leave the better for all concerned. In the short term the Afghans will suffer terribly. A period of hardline rule, probably via the Taleban,is almost inevitable during which those who cooperated with the west will at worst be slaughtered and at best be made highly uncomfortable. We will rightly feel guilty , although impotent,because we created this state of affairs.Our credibility as a protector will be-literally-shot and that gives our diplomacy and influence a problem from here on.

The case for occupying the country to rid it of extremist training bases from which graduates will return to menace our streets is weak. They can easily be trained in one of several other countries even if they are wiped out in Afghanistan. Are we going to invade each possibility in an update and contortion of the Vietnam era domino theory? Modern electonics and remote controlled drones can anyway remove training camps, people we don't like and the rest much more cheaply and surgically than can a large army with problematical mobility and always at risk of very effective of low tech attack. These new developments will also do the job at a fraction of the price. The next problem we will have created is what happens when "the enemy" get their hands on even a few of these new weapons, especially if they can launch them in or close to the invaders homes? Whose photographs will they be carrying in their target finding equipment? The chain of events we have unleashed by invading Iraq and Afghanistan looks more dangerous and never ending by the day. How do we put the cork back in the bottle? Can we? Gorbachev's comments make as good a start point as any.

Kirkaldy Man Found,- in Kirkaldy.

In a followup to their "Where is Gordon?" item yesterday ,The Times today,in a short item by Sam Coates, Chief Political Correspondent, promises us that G.Brown MP will be back on the domestic political scene six weeks from now. Meanwhile it confirms what we already knew,- that he has spent most of his time at home working on his book which it seems will be some sort of manual on how he saved the world from economic meltdown when the banks came off the rails a couple of years ago and it will one suspects go on to tell the world how it should proceed from here. Blame for the past will lie with "globalisation",wicked bankers ( acting within government guidelines)and the like. Profligate spending and huge borrowing by national Finance Ministers,Prime Ministers and others of that ilk will presumably either be ignored or said to have nothing to do with the economic rocks onto which, amongst others, the good ship UK, if not already beached like an expensive submarine, was heading.

Whatever the merits or otherwise of the book and whether it is a best seller or a substantial donation to the nation's paper recycling plants, since we,- yes,all of us,- are paying him for the job of MP he is meant to be doing in our behalf but from which he is seemingly absent without leave (or has nice Mr, Bercow given him an "off work" chit?), can we assume he will be repaying the Exchequer for the weeks spent not fulfilling this function?

Parliament- Absenteeism from the workplace.

In the private sector it is usual that repeated or continued absence from his or her place of work results in the employee being given written warnings, possibly attendance counselling and, if there is no improvement,a P45.

For Members of Parliament it is reasonable to assume that the their normal workplace is The House of Commons, failing which the Palace of Westminster complex,and that regular attendance would come with the job.

It is increasingly conspicuous that at least one member,- on full salary,- has appeared in the Commons only twice since the General Election and did not even display the courtesy or interest to turn up yesterday to hear what the new government proposed to do to deal with Labour's pre-May spending habits.

Step forward the member for Kirkaldy, one Mr Gordon Brown. Where is he? What is he doing? Why is unable to find his way to Edinburgh Waverley station or Airport to make the short journey to Westminster? Does he intent to continue to work from home and if so for what adjustment to salary? Or is it P45 time?

Cuts- Snip, Castration or Revitalisation?

Tomorrow the past few months of media speculation frenzy over cuts, cuts, cuts, gives way to speculation as to what it all means. That should give editors an easy ride until they can get into the "How could they do this just before Christmas?" mode. After that they go off into the New Year and can have fun start digging for coalition splits again.

So far, most have missed the big question, partly because the government spinners appear not to have understood it either.This should not all be about less money=less people = less goods and services. It should be about doing more with less and how to do that, an exercise which many private industries and businesses have have been going through frequently for years, while the state sector has sailed on obliviously adding more people and costs whenever it takes on every new task and abandoning none. There was an internal belief that everyone was working flat out and there was no capacity of man or machines to cram more into the day. Random observation would say this is not always or even often so For example waiting lists for hospital scans ran for months while equipment ran 9-5 five days a week leaving huge amounts of unused capacity which could have been shared or contracted out to the private sector. Such flexibility ranged from unusual to unthinkable.

The "cuts" are not simply about taking money and activity out of the public sector. They are about restructuring the British state economy and the way benefits and subsidies are seen. Yes, commuter train fares will go up, but for example why should the economics of ability to work in London but live in the countryside be
distorted by commuters not paying the real price of providing morning and evening trains with low daylong utilisation? They also distort the price of property by taking the pressure off the London market and transfering it out of town. Why should well off people be paid to have children? Why should anyone be paid to have more than say a maximum of four children? Why should well off pensioners have their bus fares paid for? On and on goes the list. Since the arrival of the (largely uncosted) Welfare State in 1948 we have all been seduced and hooked on subsidy. The cost to the Exchequer and ultimately ourselves has been enormous. The money, including the huge North Sea oil windfall could have been spent on the really needy, providing the things to really raise their skills, living standards and lift them out of long term and repetitive poverty, or on massive investment in future infrastructure. The Victorians saw the need and desirability of that , as did some wartime planners looking at postwar needs. What happened? Where did all the money go? Why have we very little, nothing even, to show for it? The reality is that successive governments used it to indulge ourselves and effectively poured most of it down the drain.Kuwait has an oil-based modern infrastructure and a "Future Generations Fund". UK Plc does not.

There are three main areas of public spending:
-The annual ongoing cost of running the government departments, busonesses and state provided services.
-The cost of capital projects which can validly be classified as investments for the future with appropriate benefits and returns.
-The cost of interest on the (rapidly increasing) national debt.

The first and last are of immediate concern. The second requires urgent evaluation of the value of the projects and whether their contracts are tightly specified and have achieved the right quality at the right price. The state sector has a poor reputation as a negotiator,-eg the Nimrod Mk 4 contracts, the new deal for GPs and many others. Are contractors uncynically delivering good value or are we collectively being taken for a ride, particularly by large and near-monopoly suppliers?

Ideally Wednesday's presentation in the Commons by the Prime Minister would first take us through simple good old fashioned graphs and pie charts showing us who spends what on what share of the cake and then where the money goes. Lower level presentations would then do the same, department by department, giving a clear view of what is being done for us, why and at what cost and how it compares to previous years. This should be the same in every year's annual budget. Unfortunately the Commons chamber does not allow for audio-visual presentations and explanations and the format of government statements has changed little over the centuries. There will be a long verbal statement followed by the Opposition's instant assembly of its prefabricated sound bites " Too much" "Too little", "Too fast" ,"Too soon", "Diabolical" "Attack on....""the bankers (not us) caused this" into some semblence of order. After that there will be the big story book with all the detail and anything the government hopes we won't notice until it's so late that they can say that by our silence we accepted it. The book, its lines and between them, all require close reading with a powerful magnifying glass.

Will it all be a recipe for a new, forward looking Britain with good value government spending with it all under control and imparting new sense of challenge and purpose all round ? Or will it be seen, especially by the usually pessimistic media as another shock, horror harbinger of doom and, yes, economic castration of the British people? The genuinely sad story is that the discomfort, difficulty and upheaval all this is now going to cause real people is the accumulation of mismanagement of the economy and government business by its elected representatives for at least the last ten years, and in terms of manpower intensive, expensive and often very slow and inefficient processes a lot longer than that. Complacency,negligence, inadequacy and incompetance are all in the mix.