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There is a contradiction at the heart of the NATO strategy in Afghanistan: calendar vs. conditions. Jennifer Rubin has put the matter bluntly: “You can’t promise to be both attuned to facts on the ground and begin bugging out.” Well, former British Foreign Secretary David Miliband tried to do just that last week in a speech at MIT and an op-ed in the New York Times.

In true New Labour style, Miliband presented what Tony Blair was always demanding from his ministers: the “eye-catching initiative.” If only the alliance “stopped behaving as if there were a military solution and developed a political one,” he said, then the international conference in Bonn in December could be a “historic occasion.”

Reasonably, Miliband pointed out that NATO has an end-date but not an end-game, so he tried to provide one at MIT.

First, the UN should appoint a Muslim mediator who will, somehow, “create the confidence for and commitment to” comprehensive peace talks between all the parties.

Second, confidence-building measures—the Taliban will get “an end to night raids, safe passage to and from talks [and] prisoner releases” while we will get “localized cease-fires, security for development projects” and “a Taliban declaration of disassociation from al-Qaeda.”

Third, a new US ambassador will be appointed who has “the personality, instruction and length of mandate” to coordinate the civilian effort, work closely with Karzai on the endgame, subordinate the military strategy to the negotiations, and leverage in the “political strength of the UN.” (That’s some in-tray.)

Fourth, Pakistan will be offered an “up-front deal” in return for their support.

Fifth, there will be “a process” to “get all the neighbours talking in a serious and structured way,” create a Council of Regional Stability, and a “compact between Afghanistan and its neighbours.”

Miliband was formed politically by Tony Blair’s New Labour project. So a “can-do” spirit infuses the speech. (One can imagine an “Afghan Delivery Unit” being set up to “audit” the progress towards the “targets.”) However, the Achilles’ heel of New Labour was its tendency to bracket evidence and construct hopeful scenarios atop of false premises, wishful thinking, hypothetical and nearly-impossible-to-imagine serendipities, and wholly unexamined assumptions. (Gordon Brown for example, promised to “end boom and bust” while Defense Secretary John Reid speculated when UK troops went into Afghanistan that they may not have to fire a bullet...)

Here are three words not mentioned in Miliband’s New York Times op-ed:

(1) Iran. As 2014 looms, there is a rising Khomeinist influence in Afghanistan. Follow the money and you find Iran has been buying influence since 2003 by sending sacks of cash to Karzai (as well as arming the Taliban to keep NATO off balance). And Iran knows the West is heading for the exit doors. Yet Miliband is confident a “process” can persuade Tehran to become a responsible partner in a regional compact. Before Christmas.

(2) Jihadism. Miliband talks as if a Taliban version of the IRA’s Martin McGuinness is about to agree to power sharing. This is impossible. First, the IRA had limited secular goals. Second, McGuinness and the IRA had been defeated on the battlefield. Only when he was the leader of an infiltrated, demoralised, and defeated military force did McGuinness ring the British government to say “the war is over but we need your help to bring us in.” In sharp contrast, George Packer writing in the New Yorker about Afghanistan has pointed out that “the years since 2001 have radicalized the insurgents and imbued them with Al Qaeda’s global agenda. Tactically and ideologically, it’s more and more difficult to distinguish local insurgents from foreign jihadists.”

As for the Pakistan Taliban, they look more like al-Qaeda with each passing month. On April 3rd, they attacked the 13th-century Sakhi Sarwar shrine, near the southern Punjabi town of Dera Ghazi Khan, slaughtering 50 people. Deobandis slaughtering—as they would see it—“blaspheming Barelvi heretics.” They routinely kill Shiites at their shrines. And they massacred 93 Ahmedis in Lahore. Miliband’s claim that the Taliban are just a very “conservative” strand of Islamic thought is too sanguine by half.

(3) Victory. Terry Glavin, research coordinator of the Canada-Afghanistan Solidarity Committee, and one of the most astute commentators on the country, argues that exit-strategy fetishism is changing every calculation on the ground for the worse. It is pushing Karzai and his Popolzai cronies toward the Khomeinists, demoralizing the democrats (why take a risk if the Taliban are on their way back?), encouraging corruption (why not get what you can while you can?), and deepening antiwar feeling in the West (why should our young men die if “their killers are being wooed to come back to their comfy cushions in Kabul”?).

It is right to try to win over groups of Taliban fighters, of course. Glavin points out that Canada’s Task Force in Panjwaii has done this successfully with the tough message “Reintegrate or Die.” Many Taliban grunts are “illiterate and lumpen ruffians from the backcountry of the Pashtun belt who don’t know who they’re fighting against or what they’re fighting for.”

The problem isn’t even that Miliband wants talks. Even the main political alternative to Karzai, Abdullah Abdullah, accepts the need to “leave the door open for talks.” The problem is that a wholly artificial calendar is forcing wishful thinking on a gargantuan scale—wild hopes regarding what talks held now could achieve, uber-optimism about how actors will behave, and a willingness to give away the shop to secure those talks.

The problem, as Abdullah Abdullah has warned, is that while talks of some kind will happen at some point, by “jumping to that conclusion without looking at realities on the ground,” exit-strategy fetishism “creates circumstances that can lead to sacrificing and compromising the gains of the past few years.”

All this demoralising “endgame” talk is already changing the calculations of the democratic leadership inside Afghanistan. They believe that if Karzai proceeds on this course of “exit at any price,” and if he continues to be encouraged by exit-strategy obsessions in the West, then everyone will be headed back up to the mountains again. The critics—Fawzia Koofi, Abdullah Abdullah, Amrullah Saleh, Atta Noor, and others—are being ignored in the rush to the exits. Some fear a politically correct face is being put on what is at its core a surrender to some negotiated despotism triangulated between Islamabad and Tehran.

It would be wrong to be too hard on Miliband. The immediate contradiction between calendar and conditions in Afghanistan is only a reflection of a deeper contradiction in the West itself between, on the one hand, the short-termism of an intellectual and political culture that demands “endgames” and “exit strategies” and, on the other, the long-term requirements of winning the existential struggle against extremist Islamism. Miliband’s speech was an expression of that deeper contradiction.