I realise it's very difficult to get these things right, but when we have an "Afghanistan day" like yesterday, in which Downing Street and three important departments try to reassure a doubtful public, it's the language that lets them down. Taliban "moderates" and Afghan "democracy" were all over the airwaves yesterday. Give us a break.

It's not David Miliband's fault. Read the level-headed and impressive speech the foreign secretary made to Nato in Brussels yesterday and I don't think you'll find the word "democracy" in the text once. That is progress, and reflects a realisation that we are not dealing with modern Surrey – or even Louisiana – here, but a remote and essentially feudal society. Miliband is groping for an exit strategy.

I could have kissed him (well, perhaps not) when I read the sentence: "We are not in Afghanistan militarily because girls were not allowed to go to school."

How many times have we heard reference to school attendance rates – there, not here – from well-meaning politicians and even soldiers on the ground who know they need UK public opinion behind them and have been told there are a lot of women voters – here and there?

The foreign secretary went on to say: "But helping them [girls] do so is an important downpayment to Afghans desperate for a better future for their children. Ditto health care. Ditto jobs. That is why in Helmand, to take as an example, British, American, Danish and Estonian civilian and military staff are working to help build schools, provide clean water and electricity, surface roads and support agriculture."

The trouble since 2001 has been that the development agenda has repeatedly stalled. Nato forces have been bogged down fighting the ragbag insurgency that is actively sabotaging development efforts. The Karzai government in Kabul is corrupt and ineffective over much of the country. The Americans have a bad record bombing innocent civilians – who are voters too.

So Miliband states – or rather restates, since Tony Blair, Gordon Brown, Paddy Ashdown and others have all said it too – the obvious that the west must find an effective way of including whatever Taliban factions (acres of newsprint today is devoted to deconstructing them, as Miliband attempted, too) can be persuaded that not fighting is the better option.

Since fighting is all many of them know – the Russians invaded in December 1979 and it was hardly Kew Gardens before then – that is a daunting prospect. Citing British experience in Northern Ireland, ministers make the point that the political strategy – reconciliation, inclusion and development – requires maintenance of the military strategy that persuades the Taliban (or IRA) that they can't win and that we're not going to leave soon.

That's what Barack Obama and the smart soldiers the Iraq/Afghan conflicts have finally produced (it always takes time in any war to purge dud peacetime desk generals) seem to be saying too. It helps.

The Northern Ireland experience is relevant only up to a point. It needed war-weariness all round, plus the convergent interests of Dublin, London and Washington – all three well led at the time – as well as competent local negotiators in Belfast to sign the Good Friday deal.

The process ruined the moderate (a relative word here too) signatory parties – the SDLP and the Ulster Unionist party – so that the regional government is now in the hands of the province's equivalent of the Taliban: Sinn Féin and the ex-IRA, and the Paisleyite DUP.

At a retirement bash for the Irish Times's distinguished London correspondent, Frank Millar, the other evening I couldn't help noticing that the VIPs present were all from the respectable strands – officials and politicians from Dublin, London and the SDLP/UU parties – not the old hardliners.

All the same, they have scrubbed up well enough, and first minister Peter Robinson of the DUP is a smart operator, as is Martin McGuinness. There remains outside the fold what Miliband might call "tier one" fundamentalists, the Continuity and Real IRA – local equivalents to Mullah Omar.

A lot of people don't like it for obvious reasons and there are still fractures, notably over control of policing and security, though friends in Belfast sometimes tell me that reported "sectarian" disturbances are mostly just hooliganism. But public opinion accepts the dirty compromises for peace and development. Belfast city centre now looks like most others.

All of which is a longwinded way of saying it's doable in Kabul if the will, skill and commitment is there. But is it? Elections loom because elections, always an imperfect mechanism, are what the west expects, though safe in west London my Afghan dry cleaner is always telling me they're a charade: people vote as they're told. Hamid Karzai looks like one of those Ulster Unionist leaders, not strong enough to cut the deal.

Which raises the larger question: is Afghanistan remotely a state in the sense that Henry VIII declared this country to be – "this realm of England is an empire" – when he formally broke with the Pope in 1534-35?

Between them Henry VII, his son Henry VIII, Cardinal Wolsey (why does he remind me of Peter Mandelson?), and the formidable Thomas Cromwell brought the warring feudal lords to heel, got the justice system working and filled the Treasury – though Henry VIII, having executed Cromwell, went on to waste the money fighting the French, because that was what kings of England did, wasn't it? The Taliban would understand.

It took a scary decade after his death (1547) before his younger daughter, who had inherited the Tudor brains, got a grip on things again – and another unsettled century after her death (1603) to nail down a settlement that still endures.

I'd wager that what the suffering Afghans need most is the Henry VII who won the Battle of Bosworth Field, a tough, tightfisted central ruler who could manage the warlords and promote such basics as trade, clean water, and (we've moved on since 1485) education for girls.

That's what the Russians thought they were doing when their tanks rolled in in 1979, though they didn't understand – still don't – the importance of enforceable laws. More important than votes, as even an old tyrant like Henry VIII knew. He did things by the book even if he cheated.

I am grateful to Hilary Mantel's splendid evocation of his reign, her new novel, Wolf Hall, which I have just finished, for reminding me.