This is a 'positive' news story about Muslims in the way that a certain kind of supremacist ideology sometimes condescends to its victims. It is also, indirectly, yet another story that venerates 'the troops', corroborating the ersatz charisma of people who are basically bureaucrats with weapons.

We have a tendency to speak of the troops either as brave volunteers or as tragic conscripts. In fact, they are more like mercenary traffic wardens with a license to kill, in that their job is to resolve administrative and territorial problems with the skilled application of violence - in this case, the problem is how to control insubordinate population groups and bring Afghanistan fully under the sovereign authority of NATO and its patrimonial client-state. The sick martial fetishism and the rituals that eulogise such evil banality, lathering on about 'sacrifice' and 'courage' and other soap-on-a-rope virtues, is intended to obscure this mundane reality. One does not evoke fascism lightly, but readers of Enzo Traverso's book on The Origins of Nazi Violence will be aware of the history of how violence under capitalism was bureaucratised and de-personalised, and part of the story of imperial nationalism is the attempt to re-invest such everyday killing with a sort of personality.

The issue of 'the troops' has, of course, long been used as a stick with which to beat Muslims, a disciplinary tool. If you don't support the troops, and if you're at all vocal about this, the media has already signalled that it is ready to treat this as treasonous conduct - 'extremist', 'fanatic', etc. So when you get a story that shows Muslims participating in rituals lionising the troops, as if it's inherently newsworthy, the temptation might be to exhale with relief. At last, there's a story that doesn't completely and outrageously vilify Muslims. At last, there's a news item that talks about Muslims which doesn't terrorise people, driving them round the twist with impotent fury about mad mullahs on benefits, or bombers who can't be deported, etc. The BBC has fulfilled its public service remit by balancing out the hysterical racist trash with an understated human interest story. But it's more problematic than that. Such news items actually reinforce the racist hysteria by playing the game of 'good Muslim, bad Muslim'. It lays out the kind of behaviour that is required of Muslims in order that they might not be subject to ritual denunciation and interrogation. It is in essence no different from the kind of antisemitic ideology that counterposed the good 'National Jew' from the malevolent 'International Jew'. The response it nakedly invites us "they're not all bad, then", which is a racist response.

In my racism article, I mentioned polls that detected higher 'identification' with Britain than among the population as a whole. Most people don't really give a damn about patriotism. It has little relevance to their lives, doesn't explain anything, doesn't get them any extra income or Nectar card points, and doesn't improve their sense 0f well-being. During the World Cup, a minority start to indulge a certain amount of flag-waving, which an even smaller minority with a nationalist agenda try to hijack, salivating about the "passion and pride" on display - attributes that certainly become more evident, if less obviously laudible, the more Tetley's bitter is consumed. But otherwise it's a minority of bullies and bigots who actually take nationalism at all seriously.

So when a majority of Muslims express identification with the UK, you know there's something up. And it's very obvious what this is. Newspapers in this country have long used push polls among Muslims to provoke certain kinds of reply that could be used to monger hate and fear. Politicians, and the scum British press, are constantly hectoring Muslims about their alleged failure to fit in, to buy into "British values" and so on. So when some polling agency comes asking stupid questions, the right answer is whatever will subvert these attempts at demonisation. Of course, Muslims shouldn't have to feel any more patriotic than I do in order to have the right to go about their business unmolested, but that's not how it works here. Obviously another aspect of the BBC's warm-hearted little story is that while reinforcing the good Muslim-bad Muslim dichotomy, and the racist ideology underpinning it, it also whitewashes the armed forces - far from being a racist mercenary force, it is a modern, multicultural, democratic army that is out to work alongside the ordinary decent people of Afghanistan and protect them from the bad Muslims who are causing such trouble. Which merely adds to the hypocritical perversity of such ostensible auntie-racism.

In entirely unrelated news, the results from last week's poll on patriotism are as follows: 44.5% of 596 readers say that patriotism can best be defined as "petty, property-obsessed egoism masquerading as social solidarity". In a distant second, 20.3% say it is "a free gift with every four pack of Carlsberg". As I explained last week though, 'the markets' would determine the result whoever you voted for. So what we're going to do is form a coalition between the remaining three answers, who have 34.2% between them, and with the first-past-the-post system they form an outright majority. Now, unfortunately the exigencies of forming a stable, governing definition in these uncertain times means that they may have to abandon some of their promises, so what's going to happen is that the definition of patriotism will now be: "A vital means of ensuring integration and civic cohesion." Don't blame anyone but yourselves. You, the public, failed to give a clear answer, and we had to sort out the mess you left us with. True story.

The latest analysis from what used to be known as the Senlis Council says that 80% of the territory of Afghanistan currently experiences "heavy" insurgent activity. 17% experiences what they call "substantial" insurgent activity. And a mere 3% of the territory, in a region called Sari Pul where the dominant language is Dari Persian and the dominant ethnicity Uzbek, experiences only "light" insurgent activity. The number of insurgents, as estimated by the US, has risen from 7,000 in 2006 to about 25,000 today, which slightly more than the total number of insurgents reported killed.

The figure offered by the US seems likely to be a sizeable underestimate. This 25,000 or so insurgents are supposed to be ranged against almost 65,000 ISAF troops, 45,000 non-ISAF American troops, 9,000 British troops and purportedly 100,000 members of the Afghan National Army (most of whose troops are probably working for the ruling pro-US warlords). The implication is that a combined army of over 200k troops armed to the teeth and with godlike aerial power to back them up can't thwart an insurgency of an eight of the size with comparatively poor weapons and no air force. There must be a substantially larger hardcore of insurgents, and a very large periphery in the supporting population. This is what is so illogical about the continued pretense by US-led forces that their foes are an unpopular rump. They may once have been, but evidently now command the loyalty of broad social layers, perhaps comprising a majority in places such as Helmand. Still, if the figures nonetheless correctly identify a trend, then the insurgency has more than tripled in size since 2006.

Not only are the insurgents growing in number, the sophistication of their attacks is increasing. For example, a recent attack on a military outpost in Nuristan killed eight American soldiers. Another attack on a UK base in the Helmand province killed a British soldier. These are just samples from the dozens of weekly attacks that strike occupation forces. Now, Obama - anxious to justify that Nobel prize, no doubt - is looking at the idea of buying off a section of the insurgency, just as Bush was able to do with a layer of the Iraqi resistance. The alternative is the McChrystal plan of sending up to 60,000 more troops, which is known to divide the Democrats and will force Obama to rely on GOP support if he wants to push it through. The assumption behind the idea of paying insurgents to fight on the American side, though, is that the majority of those fighting the US take up arms because it pays well. Perhaps that's true of some, but the reality is that what has escalated the insurgency from being a relative nonentity into a force that could (so military leaders predict) defeat the combined occupying forces is the mode of rule and repression that the US has developed. The client-state of warlords, the air war, the selective 'war on drugs' are all mainstays of the occupation, and can't easily be dispensed with. Moreover, the success of this strategy in the 'Sunni triangle' depended on the occupiers' ability to coopt the leadership of some of the disarticulated networks of military resistance that characterised the Iraqi insurgency. The leadership of the insurgency is nowhere near as divided in Afghanistan, and the 'neo-Taliban' are waging a smarter war than those fragmented groups that have been fighting in Iraq. The only realistic option for those still committed to this war is escalation. However, that then raises the question of whether America's allies are prepared to throw in more troops and money - an issue over which NATO has divided before.

You might remember Gordon Brown's batty idea to introduce weapons training into schools. There has, of course, been a sustained effort to get the kids interested in military careers, the better to make up for the shortfall as recruitment nosedived during the 'war on terror' (it's been recovering of late, though I don't know how significant this recovery is). The focus on young people makes strategic sense. In 2006, 14,000 people left the British armed forces, but only 12,000 signed up - and most of the new recruits were teenagers. Last night at a Stop the War Coalition meeting, I learned a bit more about what this effort to draft the kids now entails. For it seems that the British Army is now placing stalls at further education colleges on enrolment day. And what they do when there is offer students a £5,000 bursary to sign up for the army there and then. They do not immediately join, for they are only sixteen, but rather complete their two years of study at college, and are then committed to four years of military service. This makes Britain the only country in Europe that targets sixteen year olds for military recruitment. And they don't even necessarily stick to their own rules in this process, as it was revealed back in 2007 that the British government had sent soldiers under the age of eighteen into southern Iraq.

Now, this is not an open and accountable situation in which those kids have reasonable access to the materials they would need to make such a decision. The Joseph Rowntree Trust reported last year, following a study of what young people are exposed to by army recruiters, that potential recruits are subject to a barrage of propaganda extolling possible career opportunities, training, travelling the world, etc. Young people are just not informed of the risks of a spell in the army. These would include, but are not restricted to: 1) death or injury, since one in ten members of the British armed forces in Afghanistan end up either dead or seriously injured, while suicide levels in the army have peaked in the period of the 'war on terror'; 2) homelessness, as all the promise of a career and training results in two thirds of people under the care of Shelter being ex-service personnel, while the MoD itself estimates that a quarter of all homeless people in the UK are ex-military; 3) prison, as one in ten inmates are ex-service personnel, and more British soldiers are in prison or on probation than presently service in Afghanistan; and 4) mental illness, in which the development of PTSD among other maladies is likely to be poorly treated if at all. Somehow, being indoctrinated into a machinery of death has a propensity for damaging people, physically and mentally, ruining their lives. Who would have thought it? No one, obviously, who relied upon British Army propaganda or, at one remove, the inspiring homilies of Andy McNab and his epigones.

We have a situation in which youth unemployment is sky-rocketing. Unemployment among the under-25s was reaching a million in August, and has probably surpassed it by now, giving an unemployment rate of almost 20%. Kids who know they've got that to look forward to are being shown images of the army that tell them they can be engineers, cooks, senior office workers. Today's Metro had an advert for the British army that visualised these seductive career opportunities by depicting a series of medals shaped as a blackberry, a mobile phone, a notebook, etc. No doubt every other newspaper in Britain had similar advertisements. No doubt we'll be seeing these on the tube, and on buses. No doubt the stalls in educational establishments, freshers fayres and so on, will carry the same material. If people are desperate enough to believe this, then they immediately ratchet up their chances of dying young, being permanently injured, ending up in jail or on the streets - not to mention the fact that they will also become, quite against any better instincts they may have, accessories to murder as the reserve army of labour becomes the reserve army of conquest.

The other side of this is resistance. The NUT has been running a campaign to oppose military recruitment in schools, on the grounds that it is the job of educators to look after children, not manipulate them into joining the army. The UCU has, I hear, joined them in this. School students have themselves been campaigning on this issue. This now becomes a particularly urgent matter since, as General McChrystal has testified, the only way this war could be won for NATO would be if another 40,000 troops were poured in. The Senlis Council has recently reported that the Taliban now has a serious, permanent and active presence in 80% of Afghanistan, in addition to whatever base it has in the North-West Frontier Province. That means that the war, if it is allowed to continue, will become bloodier, and will consume more and more able bodies. Those bodies definitely look pretty in their little boxes, and the ceremonies they have for them are obviously quite moving in a certain light. But what's the point of it? To impose a client regime that even the war powers have stopped pretending is anything but a corrupt and brutal confederation of drug-dealing pro-American warlords? As miserable as life is on Job Seekers Allowance or on minimum wage, and as much as the yearning for adventure militates against such a bleak prospect, these kids would still be much better off on the dole.

Afghanistan's elections will not be the 'turnaround' that policy planners are looking for - neither on the battlefield, nor on the 'home front'. The recent spate of insurgent attacks on US troops and occupation facilities, we are told, signals a desperate effort by a hated gang to disrupt the 'democratic process' by frightening potential voters. It is also an attempt to 'weaken the will' of the 'international community'. Leaving aside the shrill rhetorical pitch of such claims, and the thought-killing cliches that they are typically expressed with, what lesson can be extracted here? As Jason Burke has pointed out, it is unlikely that the insurgents are as interested in the polling booths as the warmongers' agitprop would have us believe. In fact, the best thing going for the Taliban-led resistance is that the current government will remain in power, alongside its warlord allies. But there is clearly an attempt to prepare public opinion here. If the Taliban are seen as anxious to stop people from voting, then a reasonable turnout can be presented as a triumph - I hesitate to say 'of the will', but certainly of the tremendous, earth-pounding military force currently in use. If so, it is a rather desperate PR gambit. There can be no 'purple-finger' chicanery in these elections, and even moderate optimism - forget the contrived jubilance of February 2005 - would be a tough sell even if the elections weren't the sideshow they manifestly are.

The trouble for the war's publicity agents is that they are running out of options. Neither homecoming funerals nor electoral theatre can shift opinion. The sense of weary dissipation in the public appeals of ministers, with their paltry tributes to the troops and affirmations of pot-pourri patriotism, is very palpable. Consider the thoughts of Bob Ainsworth, the void currently known as the secretary of defence. He opens with a gently narcotising series of impressions from a recent visit to Afghanistan. He sees, or rather hallucinates, brave and compassionate troops throwing their lives in harm's way to ensure that the starving children of Afghanistan can be free, and London's public transport systems unmolested. In contrast, he depicts antiwar opinion as detached and vaguely amoral. I realise that some people find Ainsworth particularly grating, but I just find this yawn-inducing. Given that the aim of Ainsworth's piece is to persuade an audience - a relatively left-wing and antiwar audience at that - it has to be considered a crashing failure. But such guilt-tripping would be no more convincing on Question Time or Newsnight. Why is a government minister reduced to such transparent, belligerent posturing? The last time I saw politicians look this pathetic, clapped out and condescending was in the last years of the Major administration. Yet, I don't think it is just to do with the enervation of the Brown government. What has collapsed is the sustaining meta-narrative of the 'war on terror'.

The lexical armoury of the warmongers has been deprived of its most emotive props, these being in order: 1) the idea that the present war is literally a war against fascism comparable to WWII; 2) the idea that the war is part of a broader struggle not only against 'clerical fascism' or 'Islamofascism' or cognate terms, but also against 'totalitarianism', a fight to the finish in the defence of 'civilization' or 'Western values', and; 3) the idea that military conquest is an appropriate means to accomplish putative humanitarian ends. I don't mean to say that these ideas are disappearing. Far from it. The latter in particular will continue to be revisited both intellectually, in the guise of an aggressively marketed 'R2P' doctrine, and rhetorically as various 'failed states' come under the spotlight of the Obama-Biden administration. But they do not inform the idiom of empire in the way that they had for approximately seven years. The reason for this is, in part, that they didn't really work. Certain key constituencies, well-to-do liberals among them, can be mobilised by such appeals. But for most people, I think, it was just not intuitively correct to invoke the spectre of totalitarianism or fascism in relation to the various putative threats so designated. Similarly, however distorted one's impression of 'Al Qaeda' was, the idea that it was a realistic long-term challenger to liberal democracy could only ever have temporary and partial appeal. The humanitarian justification for war had the weakness that it was laced with sometimes bloodcurdling demands for, and promises of, violent revenge. Again, for a sizeable minority of people such murderous humanitarianism was a powerful motivational force, and a good reason for some to get out of bed in the morning. But the fact is that it was the sinister augury of imminent nuclear holocaust - not heartstring-plucking over the Kurds - that did the most to gain support for, or acquiescence in, the invasion of Iraq.

This conceptual overstretch has been played out, and the current managers of the American state know it, as do their coat-tailers in Downing Street. All that remains is an anaemic line about 'stability' and 'fight-them-over-there-not-here', which no one really believes. Even the imperial bunting that bedecks the Sun's pages, and the Andy McNab 'thought for the day' pieces, seem awfully wan and desultory these days. Given that this war is a long-term commitment that will consume troops and resources in abundance, the absence of a workable patter is a serious problem for war planners. They need recruits, they need cheerleaders, and they need an atmosphere conducive to such expenditure of blood and treasure. This is why they now find themselves straining for effect, in a desperate attempt to badger the public, revive some antiquated idea of civic duty, or lure the kids with fantasies of adventure on the frontline.

Last month, you'll recall, opinion polls appeared to show increased support for the war in Afghanistan. I suggested, bleakly, that if this was a trend it would boost the Obama administration's chances of maintaining the alliance necessary to succeed in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Since then, we have had polls that show that any increased support detected was certainly a blip. This is telling, given the density of sanctimonious editorials advising fickle readers not to favour 'abandoning' Afghanistan just because of some combat deaths, which are a 'cost worth bearing'. Some stories have confirmed a rise in army recruitment due to a combination of soaring unemployment and glitzy Andy McNab-style propaganda, but - though a problem - this rise is from 27 to 99 new recruits for the whole of Scotland in a period of three months. The effort to make out that this represents a generation of youths enthusiastic for the adventure of the frontline is rather poor.

The escalation and the propaganda flurry that has accompanied it (Brown has already declared 'Operation Panther's Claw' a successful operation) was designed to give the impression that the occupiers were uniting behind a new strategy with confidence. There may be some small element of truth in this. A scathing report [pdf] has just been released by the Foreign Affairs Select Committee, dominated by pro-war MPs, which is deeply critical of the way the occupation has been handled*. The report, trying to account for the failure to bring moxy n freem to Afghanistan, blames inapt tactics, poor strategising, and so on. The United States is scolded for, among other things, an excessively unilateral strategy, conflicts between the ISAF mission and that of 'Operation Enduring Freedom', cultural insensitivity toward the natives, and so on. Raimondo, with some justice, mocks this as British imperial resentment about American misappropriation of the white man's burden. Even so, this is largely criticism of Bush era policies, and the report's authors express much hope in the Obama strategy, and in the prospect of greater European cooperation on the war. It also broaches the topic of the war's unpopularity, blaming Iraq for having 'cast a shadow' over what is an altogether different kind of war. The problem, as ever, is not how governments might respond to popular will, but how the popular will might be sidelined and manipulated.

There is no doubting the British state's commitment to this venture. British officials expect the occupation to last for 'decades', long after military combat has (they hope) ceased. David Cameron is committed to further escalation, and is even proposing a 'minister' for Afghanistan, supposedly to overcome 'confusion' at the cabinet level. It is crucial to Britain's global strategy that the NATO alliance be maintained, continues to be viable for 'out of area' operations, and continues to unite the US with Europe, with Britain operating as the intercontinental bridge. There is no other explanation for ministers persisting with these clapped out chestnuts about 'terrorists', the laboured pretence that this is about 'Al Qaeda', this specious 'security' narrative of dark-skinned conspirators plotting to take over the world from whatever tiny plot of land they're permitted to inhabit in peace. Decades of commitment, troop increases, constant war, billions of dollars in expenditure (just as we're about to experience swingeing cuts in public spending), don't sell themselves for some reason. They have to keep hammering away at this 'Al Qaeda' conspiracy theory.

The next national demonstration against the war in Afghanistan takes place on 24 October.

*One arresting aspect of the report is how much it relies on journalists and writers for their advice on operational matters, on how well particular strategies have served the occupation, and so on. All of these are influential people, to the extent that they are senior reporters (Christina Lamb, James Fergusson, etc) or write regular opinion pieces. And all of them are not just tacitly backing the occupation, but actually using their experience and knowledge to assist the occupiers. Talk about embedded.