"Afghans cherish customs and abhor rules"
Where does the planned US withdrawal from Afghanistan leave the war-battered country, and the West's foreign policy more broadly?
Now we have a timetable. The US administration has announced that all of its troops will withdraw from Afghanistan by 11 September 2021 (a date of obvious symbolism). The fact itself will be of minor importance. The American forces there number only 2,500—fewer than the US has in Spain—and they have been unable to commit to any major operations for some time. But they are a quarter of the manpower available to the NATO-led hub-and-spoke Resolute Support Mission, controlling Kandahar and Laghman. Like it or not, President Biden’s decision to remove them matters.
The international presence in Afghanistan was primarily for the benefit of the US. The authorisation of the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) in December 2001 was in support of the fait accompli of America having inserted special forces into Afghanistan to retaliate for the attacks of 9/11. The lead taken by NATO remains the only instance of the Alliance exercising Article V of the North Atlantic Treaty which provides for collective, mutual defence. From the beginning, then, the war in Afghanistan was absolutely and directly linked to the terrorist attacks in New York and Washington DC, despite the fact that the Taliban, then in control of most of Afghanistan, had condemned the atrocities, denied harbouring Osama bin Laden and, in fact, volunteered to surrender him to a third country for trial if he could be found.
Now the Americans are leaving and they will draw the remnants of the international community with them. No-one imagines that a serious NATO or UN presence in Afghanistan would be possible or desirable without the participation of the US armed forces. New Zealand withdrew its forces last month, Germany has declared it will withdraw its troops by July and Australia has announced that it will be gone by September. If we had ever doubted that NATO required US resources and support to do anything meaningful, we should not do so now.
Last week I interviewed Dr Sean McFate, senior fellow at the Atlantic Council, for the podcast my consultancy produces. He has written a typically swashbuckling piece for The Hill in which he demolishes the argument that the deployment in Afghanistan has been anything other than an abject failure, pointing to the lack of real progress, the unwillingness to grasp reality (al-Qa’ida largely left Afghanistan years ago and is no longer in its old form the principal threat to US interests) and the sheer inertia to which US strategic thinking has surrendered.
One phrase Sean used really struck me. He wondered aloud, “Who will be the last man or woman to die in Afghanistan? And for what?”
It’s a question that stops you short. At some point, yes, that man or woman is going to lose his or her life and then suddenly western soldiers won’t be dying any more, and they’ll be the last one. When we look back, how on earth will we explain what happened over the preceding 20 years?
I want to look at this in the general and the particular. To take the latter first, we’ve seen that the US involvement in Afghanistan was a direct response to the terrorist attacks on 11 September 2001. In fact, the direct impetus came from the military: General Tommy Franks, at that point commander-in-chief of US Central Command, suggested to his masters at the Pentagon that 60,000 US troops invade Afghanistan after six months of preparation. The timescale was too leisurely for the politicians. The secretary of defense, Donald Rumsfeld, declared he wanted “men on the ground now”, so Franks returned with a revised plan to insert US special forces and attempt to grapple close up with al-Qa’ida.
Alarm bells must certainly have rung within the Beltway. The British had come seriously unstuck in Afghanistan in the middle of the nineteenth century, culminating in the devastating retreat from Kabul in 1842, while those with shorter memories needed only to think back to the Soviet experience between 1979 and 1989, which had seen nearly 15,000 Russian soldiers killed and thousands more injured. Major involvement in Afghanistan was in clear contravention of Field Marshal Montgomery’s ‘second rule of war’ (“Don’t fight with your land army on the mainland of Asia”), and it seemed incredible that the US military-political establishment should so easily overlook the searing memory of Vietnam.
What were the US’s strategic goals when it committed significant forces to Afghanistan? The public messaging was that al-Qa’ida must be dismantled, and in order to deny the group a safe operating base in Afghanistan it would be necessary to remove the Taliban from power.
This was already problematic. While Washington-led rhetoric allowed the Taliban and al-Qa’ida to be blended into one amorphous supervillain, the simple facts were that the Taliban had had no knowledge of the planned 9/11 attacks, had not participated in them in any way, had condemned them after the fact and had even presented options for bringing Osama bin Laden to trial for his culpability. Although bin Laden had supported the anti-Soviet forces in Afghanistan in the 1980s, the independence of the Afghan state was not his primary objective. Al-Qa’ida was dedicated to worldwide jihad, while the Taliban’s interests lay in controlling Afghanistan.
The United States therefore hobbled itself and its allies from the outside, creating strategic aims that were not only likely unachievable, but which didn’t really make a great deal of sense. Ousting the Taliban required supporting an alternative, and although Mohammed Zahir Shah, the last king of Afghanistan, was invited back to the country in 2002 and honoured as the ‘Father of the Nation’, he was never a likely candidate to head an effective, anti-Taliban régime in Kabul. He was in his 80s and frail, and instead the US supported the charismatic Hamid Karzai, a Durrānī from Kandahar, who would be in power until 2014.
Although Karzai proved to have staying power, it was lost on no-one that his authority depended on the reach of the international coalition. Early on in his presidency, Karzai exercised so little control over the country that he was mocked as the ‘mayor of Kabul’, and the institutions of Afghan statehood relied, and still heavily rely, on the hard edge of the US sword.
So in a real sense the US laid out public aims in which it could not hope fully to succeed, and yet which would become their crushing metrics for success or failure. They didn’t so much mark their own homework as set it—and still managed to flunk it.
This, however, raises a wider point about US and Western foreign policy over the last 20 years. Protection of strategic interests (as seen in conflicts like the first Gulf War, the Falklands War or countless US deployments in central America) has ceded some of its pre-eminence to intervention to prevent both humanitarian outrages and the compromising of interests: the Kosovo War in 1998-99, Operation Palliser in Sierra Leone in 2000, and, of course, the invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq.
These interventions have led the West into the fraught area of nation-building. Removing the Taliban from power in Afghanistan, for example, necessitated creating a replacement, as did the toppling of Saddam Hussein in Iraq in 2003 and the subsequent de-Ba’athification of the Iraqi state. Explicitly or implicitly, the West put itself in a position in which it needed to build new polities on the ashes of the old ones, and this was done with a remarkable mixture of bravura and inexperience.
Like God, we create in our own image. When we tried to rebuild Iraq, for example, we had in our minds a kind of liberal democracy rising from the waters of the Tigris and the Euphrates, with fully fledged and publicly accountable institutions, a broadly impartial armed forces and civil service, and an underlying market economic drive which would give Iraqis such a stake in the stability and success of their new state that they would not dare let it be challenged.
The US, at least, cannot be accused of parsimony. Exact figures are hard to calculate but it is not outlandish to suggest that the war in Iraq cost $3 trillion, to liberate and rehabilitate a nation of around 40 million people. Paul Bremer, head of the Coalition Provisional Authority from 2003 to 2004, oversaw a culture in which bricks of dollar notes were handed around, and the US largesse consolidated by free spending from Iraq’s own resources, some of them alarmingly shoddily managed. But while all of this money was swilling around, critical mistakes like the disbanding of the security services were being taken which would have fatal consequences for the creation of a stable post-war Iraq.
In Afghanistan the picture is not so very different. The US is estimated to have spent around $1 trillion, including expenditure in Pakistan, from where it directs many of its operations in Afghanistan. Again there has been an attempt to create something Westerners would recognise as a democratic state where before there never had been one, and again, like the hair transplant of a vain and vainglorious tycoon, it has failed to ‘take’.
It is not at all easy to see where Western foreign policy goes from here. If our interventionist fingers are burned by Afghanistan and Iraq, our treasure depleted and our energy drained, how will we maintain and exercise our influence on the world stage? Diplomatic sallies may be at a premium, though the US foreign service has been hollowed out by four years of President Trump and needs desperately to rebuild and recover. The UK must explore the logical conclusions of its departure from the European Union, and that will take both time and hard thinking. It is clear, at any rate, that nation-building is not the way forward, not least because we are simply no good at it. Teary-eyed invocations of the Marshall Plan and post-War Japan are not enough.
I come back to Sean McFate’s question: “And for what?” What did Afghanistan teach us over the 20 years we have spent there? Our armed forces may have learned a lot tactically—I’d have great faith in British or US forces going toe-to-toe with insurgents in terms of winning on the field of battle—but it is the broader conceptual lessons which we have to absorb and codify. Eager early-career soldiers and diplomats, tablets at the ready in their high-powered academies, must be able to take on board and answer that question: “And for what?”
There has always been a strange reluctance to spend money post the military engagement. The U.S intervention in the late 80s was primarily wielding the $ and weapon-skils, subsequent power-grabs by the Taliban were born out of the closing of the US pocketbook when the late-intervention had "succeeded".
Iraq and Afghanistan still require succour but without khaki and fatigues; these must be swapped for lab-coats and hard-hats. It shall not require Trillions but a fair few Billions wisely deployed can bring the fruits of peace to these countries to a level where our carbon -stuffed West may benefit back from the carbon credits that will sit in the silos of Afghanistan and Iraq. Indeed, the buzz acronym,ESG, could have been penned for these regions where engineers, deployed in the new raiments of peace, can create a Net Zero world far in advance of 2050 with far greater efficacy than in the sclerotic skeletons of Western regions. Marshall plan initiatives still discreetly create wealth and peace when properly directed and when "bruised arms" are "hung up for monuments". The reward for the initiative of the new 2050 militia will be carbon offset not control but we must recognise that these actions are ones born out of amity and respect not the drive to act as the town marshall.
Embrace the opportunity; the capital exists in the Trillions and see what peace-spend does better than the dollars of war...........