Reflections on 20 years in Afghanistan
Tory MP Tobias Ellwood has called for us to re-establish diplomatic relations with the Taliban; many think he is being fooled, but how did we get here?
I almost visited Afghanistan once. From 2006 to 2008, I was a clerk on the House of Commons Defence Committee, and at that point, Operation Herrick (the UK deployment to Afghanistan) and Operation Telic (Iraq) were both in full swing. In 2006, there were more than 5,000 UK personnel in Afghanistan, mainly in the southern province of Helmand, while troop numbers in Iraq were just over 7,000. These were substantial deployments, and the senior civilian and military leadership would come to realise that they were not sustainable over a long term. I doubt we could deploy those numbers to two separate theatres now. Our presence in Iraq was fiercely controversial, but the deployment of military force in Afghanistan had much broader support; in any event, the members of the Defence Committee made a point of visiting each theatre every year.
These “operational visits” served several purposes. It was important, of course, that the MPs who were responsible for scrutinising “the expenditure, administration and policy” of the Ministry of Defence should have been to the location of these deployments and have some sense, naturally circumscribed by security considerations, of what it was really like. They were briefed by senior commanders, both UK and allied, and local politicians, and they visited units of all kinds, down to the small scale of platoons or troops. But a significant consideration, which the chairman, James Arbuthnot, articulated a number of times, was that the soldiers, sailors and airmen down to the most junior ranks should be reassured that, in political terms, someone was thinking about them, having care for their conditions and welfare, and, on a very basic level, acknowledging their service.
This was especially important in Iraq, as it was clear that many people in the UK had opposed the initial deployment in 2003 and continued to oppose our presence in Iraq. Military personnel sometimes took the view that they had not asked to come to Iraq, but were simply doing their duty. Living in tents in the desert, often under attack day and night, the threat of injury or worse, they could be forgiven for feeling disgruntled that they were somehow held to blame for a military adventure which was now widely condemned.
I visited Iraq twice, in 2007 and 2008, but never Afghanistan, somewhat to my regret. Other members of the committee staff undertook those duties. But for a short time in 2008, because of staff availability, it looked like I might get back from Iraq, have a week in London, and then accompany the Members to Afghanistan. So I did put some thought into it. But of course the committee scrutinised Operation Herrick repeatedly, and I was involved in some of the work for that; I also talked to the Members and colleagues who had been to Afghanistan (the Great Food Poisoning of 2006 was a source of exceptional stories). And it intrigued me, because, while the two deployments were often conflated in the public imagination, they were different on so many levels, from popular support through conditions on the ground to operational goals.
Afghanistan is at the top of my brain because the current chair of the Defence Committee, Tobias Ellwood, has recently been pressing the government to re-engage with the Taliban, not least by re-opening the embassy in Kabul, while we currently only have a mission which is based in Doha, Qatar, under a chargé d’affaires, albeit a 30-year Foreign Office veteran, Hugo Shorter. Ellwood is a decent man, likeable and friendly, he is passionately committed to defence matters, and feels the reality of the “war on terrorism:, his brother Jon having been killed in the 2002 Bali bombing. (Ellwood is also a lieutenant colonel in the Army Reserves, currently assigned to 77th Brigade.) In addition, in 2009 he undertook the senior executive course in national and international studies at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, concentrating on the use of military forces to stabilise and develop conflict zones.
Ellwood proposed this new approach to the Taliban in The Daily Telegraph on Monday this week, and appeared on the BBC’s Newsnight to defend his views. But he has been sharply criticised from many sides for pandering to the Taliban and overestimating the degree of freedom which is present in Afghanistan. The veteran journalist and writer David Loyn, who was the BBC’s correspondent in the country, advised the previous Afghan government on strategic communications and is now a senior research fellow at the Department of War Studies at King’s College London, has written a strongly worded refutation of Ellwood’s views entitled Tobias Ellwood is being the Taliban’s useful idiot in The Spectator. Criticism has also come from Number 10 Downing Street and two members of the Defence Committee, former Labour defence minister Kevan Jones and the bumptious and absurd Conservative MP Mark Francois. Perhaps more unhelpfully still, Ellwood’s video from Afghanistan was retweeted, supportivey I suppose, by a spokesman for the Taliban.
I won’t offer an opinion on Ellwood’s proposal at this point; although it feels wrong, given the appalling human rights abuses perpetrated by the Taliban, Ellwood has been to Afghanistan while I never have, and I am interested that he has come up with this. Whatever else he may be, Ellwood is honest and brave, and he must believe that this is genuinely a positive way forward. But it has prompted me to revisit some of my thoughts about the campaign in general, which I wanted to put down on virtual paper at this stage in the proceedings. They are not (yet) connected in any kind of meaningful narrative, though at some point I hope to put together an assessment of Operation Herrick and try to draw some lessons from our presence there.
First, I think the initial intervention in Afghanistan in 2001 was easy to justify. There is no question that al-Qa’eda was using the country as a sanctuary and training ground from 1996 onwards. Although there was no formal agreement between the Taliban, which had taken control of Kabul in September 1996, and al-Qa’eda, the latter enjoyed the protection of the Taliban government; a base in Khost province had been attacked by US forces in 1998 in response to the bombings of the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. Al-Qa’eda also trained a unit known as 055 Brigade on behalf of the Taliban, an elite force of between 1,000 and 2,000 largely foreign fighters from the Middle East, Central Asia, South East Asia, the North Caucasus, and the Balkans. These were men who had combat experience in various parts of the world, equipped with ex-Soviet equipment left behind in Afghanistan and supplied by the government of Sudan and the Taliban themselves.
After the attacks on the United States on 11 September 2001, President George W. Bush demanded that the Taliban extradite Osama bin Laden, the leader of al-Qa’eda, which request was refused without proof of his involvement. (This is significant: even the Taliban did not dismiss the extradition request out of hand, but wanted an evidential basis. It was the sort of requirement that any country might have made, and does indicate that perhaps the Taliban were not wholly protective of al-Qa’eda nor wholly committed to the conflict against the US and the West in general. In early October 2001, it was reported that the Taliban had indicated it was willing to hand bin Laden over to Pakistan for a trial by an international tribunal under sharia law, then that they had offered to try bin Laden themselves in an Islamic court. These overtures were, not unreasonably, rejected by the United States. But one senses that President Bush did not really expect nor especially want the Taliban wholly to comply.)
NATO invoked Article 5 of the Treaty of Washington, which requires the alliance to act in mutual self-defence. It set out specifically that:
An armed attack against one or more of them in Europe or North America shall be considered an attack against them all and consequently they agree that, if such an armed attack occurs, each of them, in exercise of the right of individual or collective self-defence recognised by Article 51 of the Charter of the United Nations, will assist the Party or Parties so attacked by taking forthwith, individually and in concert with the other Parties, such action as it deems necessary, including the use of armed force, to restore and maintain the security of the North Atlantic area.
This is the only time in NATO’s history that Article 5 has been invoked—though its use has been considered on a number of occasions—and it is hard to argue that the 11 September attacks did not fall within its ambit. The North Atlantic Council, NATO’s principal decision-making body, confirmed this view on 4 October 2001, and the US began Operation Enduring Freedom three days later. Air strikes were launched by US and UK forces, while American special forces assisted the Afghan anti-Taliban Northern Alliance to take on the Taliban on the ground.
The final piece in the jigsaw, which cemented the legality as well as the moral force of the NATO operation against the Taliban, was the passing by the UN Security Council of Resolution 1378 on 14 November. This reaffirmed previous UNSCRs on Afghanistan and endorsed the coalition effort to drive terrorist forces out of the country, then supported “the efforts of the Afghan people to establish a new and transitional administration leading to the formation of a government”. That was the top cover which Bush needed. So we can argue conclusively, I think, that Operation Enduring Freedom was appropriate, justified, targeted, intended to serve as part of the liberation of Afghanistan from the Taliban and, finally but crucially, licit under international law.
The second point I would make, touched on above, is that there was a narrow route out of armed conflict if the United States had wanted it. If Bush’s single focus had been the elimination, by any means, of Osama bin Laden, he could conceivably have come to some arrangement with the Taliban and Pakistan; the latter country, bear in mind, is one of the biggest recipients of US military aid and has been since 1948. By 2001, Pakistan had received $10 billion in assistance, tied to the purchase of American military equipment, food and other goods and services, and would receive another $20 billion between 2001 and 2018, so there was considerable leverage. I freely admit that whatever solution had been found would have been imperfect, with bin Laden probably tried in Afghanistan or Pakistan, possibly under Islamic law, and perhaps imprisoned rather than executed. I also understand why the US would not accept any of these outcomes, and that President Bush had the right to resort to military force. But it is very difficult to deny that some compromise could have been agreed.
Whatever outcome had been agreed, it would probably have been less complete, less effective and less satisfactory than what actually happened—bin Laden was eventually killed by US special forces in Pakistan in May 2011—and would not have dealt such a severe blow to al-Qa’eda as a whole. Bush may even have been wise to seek to pursue a broad campaign against the terrorist group. But, looking back from 2023, one has to note that the war in Afghanistan cost the US at least $1 trillion, and more like $2 trillion if you factor in all kinds of spending in the region. There were also 2,402 US military personnel killed, another 20,713 wounded, and, with the catastrophic and chaotic evacuation of Kabul in August 2021, the reputation of the United States in military and geopolitical terms in the region was severely damaged. The course Bush chose may have been more complete, but we cannot pretend it did not come at a cost.
The next point is that Operation Herrick and its successors, the UK participation in Afghanistan, were disastrous for the reputation and morale of the British armed forces. The terrain was difficult, the enemy often fanatically committed and the resources not always adequate, but the fact remains that one of the most advanced armed forces in the world was, ultimately, defeated and forced to abandon the country by lightly equipped, lightly trained insurgents. That is hardly unprecedented; our American allies could have drawn on their experience in Vietnam to tell us how difficult it is to beat an irregular guerrilla force fighting on home ground. It is also in no way to detract from the bravery of individual soldiers and whole units. Over the two decades, 457 British military personnel and civil servants died in Afghanistan and we spent something of the order of £27.7 billion.
We also made mistakes, and, maybe more worryingly, demonstrated little ability to learn from them. The practice of “roulements”, rotating whole brigades in and out of theatre every six months (we reached Herrick XX before combat operations ceased at the end of 2014), made any kind of institutional memory or learning almost impossible, and it is notable that our tours of duty were shorter than those of US forces, which were generally between nine and 12 months. Tactically, too, we hardly adapted our procedures, instead trying again and again to dominate territory through military force, or secure strongholds from which power could (the theory went) be projected across a large area. We created so-called “platoon houses” across Helmand, in Sangin, Musa Qala, Nawzad and Garmsir, and garrisoned them with between 40 and 100 troops, but these quickly became isolated fortresses which were targets for Taliban attack and could only be supplied by vulnerable helicopters (of which we were grievously short).
The army’s argument was that the platoon houses allowed them to maintain a presence in towns across Helmand, denying the Taliban a propaganda victory by retaking the province, but, in truth, as the French found in Indochina and the Americans after them in Vietnam, controlling a strongpoint which is under heavy and sustained attack is very different from controlling the locality in its entirety. The air support often called in to support these positions caused substantial collateral damage around them. Yet, to read our most up-to-date counter-insurgency doctrine, while the language has been refined and revised and elaborated to a stage of virtual incomprehensibility, it is hard to see what we would do differently now. Shamefully, we employed the same tactics again and again, each time (presumably) hoping that they would succeed. There may be uncertainty over who, if anyone, actually said that the definition of insanity was to do the same thing over and over again and expect different results, but it might as well have been written above the desk of every British commander in Afghanistan.
That is not to say we learned nothing. The deployments to Afghanistan and Iraq taught us a great deal about mines and improvised explosive devices (IEDs), both in terms of locating and defusing them and as far as designing vehicles to be more resistant to their effects. We also developed the system of urgent operational requirements (UORs), whereby equipment needed to address new or emerging capability gaps could be procured quickly using money from HM Treasury, alongside the routine long-term procurement programmes. These were particularly effective for additional armoured vehicles, replacing the lightly armoured Snatch Land Rovers, designed in 1992 for the conditions of Northern Ireland, with much more robust and better protected platforms like the Pinzgauer Vector, the Force Protection Inc. Mastiffs, Wolfhounds and Ridgbacks and eventually the Foxhound. These undoubtedly saved lives and showed that, with compromises, vehicles could be put into service very quickly where the need was a matter of life and death.
We also learned a great deal from both conflicts about medical care for wounded personnel, especially those maimed in IED explosions. In Afghanistan, 302 individuals suffered traumatic or surgical amputations, sometimes of more than one limb, and the standards of care and the ability to treat these injuries rose significantly. Quite simply, by the end of both conflicts, men and women were able to survive and, to some extent, recover from injuries which would have been fatal at the beginning. There is no substitute for on-the-job training and experience. In addition, the heavy reliance of the armed forces on Reservist medical personnel meant that some of these lessons were able to be fed back into the NHS to benefit civilian patients in the UK. The armed forces also refined casualty evacuation considerably, understanding better the treatment priorities and the necessity of rapid intervention. While injuries and conditions can vary substantially, research from the US found that hand-off to a surgical team within the “golden hour” could reduce mortality by as much as 60 per cent.
For me, however, the great failure of the coalition operations in Afghanistan, and its reinforcement of a negative lesson, was that a clear purpose and mission are vital to any chance of success. In Afghanistan, we were never able to articulate convincingly why we were there. Or at least we were never able to do so on a consistent basis which would have allowed adequate medium- to long-term strategic planning and the formulation of a plausible narrative. This had catastrophic effects.
Our motivation was a moving target. Initially we went into Afghanistan in pursuit of Osama bin Laden and to displace the Taliban, who were sheltering and assisting al-Qa’eda. But the Taliban had lost control of most of the country by November 2001, and the Bonn Conference in December named Hamid Karzai, a charming and charismatic Pashtun from Kandahar, as chairman of the Afghan Interim Administration for an initial six-month period. Meanwhile, bin Laden had been traced to a cave complex in Tora Bora in eastern Afghanistan, and there was fighting there in November and December as US forces attempted to capture him. He escaped across the border to Pakistan in December; he would not leave the country alive.
By the end of 2001, then, when Operation Enduring Freedom was only weeks old, the coalition had removed the Taliban from power, allowed for the appointment of an interim Afghan government, denied most of the country to al-Qa’eda as a safe haven and chased Osama bin Laden into hiding from which we would never emerge. It had been a very satisfactory and low-cost outcome, for the US and NATO, at least, but it demanded the obvious question: what next? There was also the fact that bin Laden remained at large to some extent, and that the Taliban had not been involved in planning for a new régime in Kabul. But leaders in Washington, London, Brussels and elsewhere had cause to celebrate that Christmas.
It seems odd, remembering the terrible footage of Kabul airport in August 2021, to suggest that the coalition had if anything been too successful in 2001. But there is truth in it: the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) created at the Bonn Conference consisted of 130,000 troops from 51 NATO member states and partner countries, an impressive force for a theatre in which they faced no organised opposition. But what was its mission, other than to provide security while Afghan society rebuilt itself along more democratic and representative lines?
President Bush was initially very sceptical of notions that the coalition should be engaged in “nation-building”. The International Conference on Afghanistan had produced a text which laid out how the governing institutions would evolve and assue control as 2001 turned into 2002, but Karzai as chairman of the interim administration was the political figurehead, and he would be confirmed or replaced by a loya jirga, a tribal gathering, after six months. The United States, which had the political initiative in the coalition by simple weight of numbers, seems to have drifted almost accidentally into taking on nation-building as a project over the first months of 2002.
In April, President Bush gave a speech at an awards ceremony in Lexington, Virginia, which reads, more than 20 years later, like a man finding to his surprise that he has convinced himself of an unexpected task. After praising US forces involved in combat, he detailed the progress the armed forces had made against al-Qa’eda and paid tribute to the contribution of the allies in the coalition. Then he reiterated that “it’s important for Americans to know this war will not be quick and this war will not be easy”. (He was hardly going to say the opposite.) Coalition forces, he stressed, were deployed to Afghanistan not “to conquer… they were sent in to liberate”. Given that liberation had been achieved, he argued that the US had to “give the Afghan people the means to achieve their own aspirations”, and laid out three priorities:
Peace will be achieved by helping Afghanistan develop its own stable government. Peace will be achieved by helping Afghanistan train and develop its own national army. And peace will be achieved through an education system for boys and girls which works.
Bush continued that coalition forces were clearing mines, rebuilding roads, improving medical care and trying to help the Afghans design an economy that was not reliant on cultivating and selling opium; although the Taliban had banned poppy-growing in 2000-01, the country produced the basis for 75 per cent of the world’s supply of heroin, and almost all heroin in Russia, and was the world’s biggest producer, followed by Burma and Laos. Although it was profitable, poppy cultivation used less than a hundredth of Afghanistan’s arable land. It was banned again by the interim administration in January 2002, but banning it was the easy part. Shaping a post-narcotic economy would be more difficult.
By the middle of 2002, therefore, the coalition had talked itself into a nation-building exercise and the maintenance of security. This became important again as the Taliban regrouped and began to strike at its Afghan opponents and at coalition forces. The immediate need to maintain order, suppress the Taliban and keep the population safe while political processes unfolded gave the coalition an illusory sense of mission and allowed its leaders to duck awkward questions for the time being. Why was the US in Afghanistan? To help the people create their own institutions of government and move towards democratic norms and standards. But these were anything but SMART objectives: they were not Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant or Time-Bound. When would the US decide that Afghan reconstruction was “finished”? What were the standards by which the country’s development of civil society would be judged? And how much money was the US willing to spend to maintain its military footprint?
There were two major obstacles to nation-building which were never adequately addressed. The first was Afghanistan’s simple location: a poor, landlocked country with a largely agrarian population, it lay between Pakistan in the east and Iran in the west, the one quietly supporting the other to undermine US influence in the region. But tackling the problems of the West’s relations with Iran and Pakistan would have been a huge task, the kind of objective which, on its own, could have defined or sucked the life out of a whole US presidency. As a result, that status quo of tense interaction and grudging acceptance was allowed to persist. But doing that undermined, probably fatally, any chance of creating a stable society in Afghanistan.
The other issue was the type of nation the West was trying to build. Afghanistan had very little history of democratic government or modern infrastructure. As late at the 1890s, the ruler of Afghanistan, Abdur Rahman Khan, the “Iron Amir”, had regarded railways and telegraph lines as threats by Britain and Russia to undermine his rule, and had caused stasis in the country. They had stayed out of the First World War, although they had been courted by the Central Powers, and a fully independent emirate was proclaimed in 1919, the ruler, Amanullah Khan, upgrading to king in 1926.
In the 1920s, there were some elementary notions of human rights and civil society introduced, with education becoming compulsory, co-educational schools being opened and the burqa no longer being prescribed for women. The 1930s saw the beginnings of infrastructure and industry, and the creation of a national bank. A degree of political freedom was permitted in 1946 but there was soon a conservative backlash, and it was only the constitution drafted in 1964 which set out a plan towards democracy and the rule of law. These were vital and significant steps, but, compared to the West, Afghanistan was centuries behind.
A bloodless coup in 1973 abolished the monarchy and Daoud Khan became president of a republic. The democratic institutions were largely suppressed, and in 1977 Afghanistan became a one-party state. Dissent was growing within the ruling class, and a coup in 1978 deposed Khan, during which he was murdered along with most of his family. Soviet forces intervened the following year and would not leave for a decade.
That, then, is what the coalition was building on. A ten-year period of nascent democracy in a society still dominated by tribal loyalties, and still largely agrarian, with little tradition of strong central authority. Creating something resembling a functioning representative democracy would have been an enormous challenge if everything had flowed in the direction of the occupying coalition and there had been no significant opposition; but that was not the case.
If nation-building became one mission of coalition policy after 2002, it was fatally undermined from the beginning. Afghanistan had no major economic opportunities except opium, which the coalition wanted to suppress, and the latent possibilities of untapped mineral resources, especially lithium, gold, copper, iron ore and coal. Its balance of payments was disastrous and there was no significant banking system. Tribal connections made corruption endemic and it was near-impossible to construct a sustainable and ethical bureaucracy. Moreover there was little buy-in from the population, who saw no benefit in what the coalition was trying to do.
So the mission had been to get bin Laden, to oust the Taliban, to deny Afghanistan to al-Qa’eda, to build a democratic nation-state. What else? For a time, it was coalition policy to suppress the opium trade, and the UK was designated lead nation at the Bonn Conference. I heard the importance of this mission expressed convincingly and even in emotional terms by British politicians. Given that most of the world’s heroin originated in Afghanistan, the line was taken up that we, the West, either dealt with the opium crop in Afghanistan, or we dealt with it on the streets of our towns and cities. That made sense, and engaged the morality: this was killing young men and women in British cities, and we had the opportunity to cut it off at source. But in the mid-2000s, opium represented more than half of Afghanistan’s GDP and supported an estimated 3.3 million people, and there was nothing to replace it. Although poppy eradication had been moderately successful in the northern provinces, wheat was far less profitable than opium. By 2007, coalition troops were turning a blind eye to the industry, partly because the Afghan government was protecting it, and partly because it was not seen as central to the coalition’s objectives.
This muddle of missions, some more achievable than others, was never properly resolved. The inability of coalition leaders to articulate a clear and straightforward strategic narrative meant that any degree of military-political success would always be limited. It also made it more difficult for the coalition members to generate domestic support for their deployments; if you cannot answer the simple question of “Why are we there?”, it is a strong indication that something is seriously deficient in your policy planning. Instead, the coalition relied on the broad idea of “combating terrorism”, which was a motivation of diminishing power as 11 September 2001 fell further into the past. Perhaps more significant was the fact that, after the defeat of the Taliban and the ejection of al-Qa’eda within the first few months of Operation Enduring Freedom, any terrorism or violence directed against coalition forces within Afghanistan was generated by the simple presence of occupying soldiers. We created the terrorism by being there.
It will be some time before we are able to construct a comprehensive analysis of the international coalition’s 20-year commitment to Afghanistan which ended so dismally in 2021. But I hope I’ve outlined some of the issues which strike me as particularly important and worthy of examination. Despite Tobias Ellwood’s encouragement to re-engage with the Taliban, we failed. That is not to say we did no good. A generation of girls were educated who would not otherwise have gone to school, and that is no small thing. Nevertheless, our involvement in Afghanistan, certainly after the Bonn Conference in December 2001, was an object lesson in how not to project power and conduct foreign policy.