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Afghanistan catastrophe: Lessons from a wasted sacrifice

The Tablet - 28 August - Mon, Aug 30th 2021

A tiny dot appeared in the clear blue sky as a giant American Air Force jet climbed away from Kabul airport on Monday. It was a falling man, who had been clinging to the outside of the aircraft fuselage. This horrific image, as one American TV commentator remarked, was almost a visual echo of the jumpers who fell from the burning Twin Towers in New York that September day 20 years ago.pinterest sharing buttontwitter sharing buttonfacebook sharing buttonemail sharing button

It tragically symbolised the abandonment that millions of Afghans felt as the United States withdrew not just its personnel but its political and moral support from the Afghanistan it had itself created in those 20 years. The Americans went there only because the 9/11 attack originated on Afghan territory, where the international terrorist group al-Qa’ida had its main base, but they stayed in the hope that they could mould Afghanistan into a replica of a modern democratic nation.

Al-Qa’ida’s terrorists were Arabs, but they had been hosted by the Taliban. They are from the Pashtun tribe which borders Pakistan, the largest of more than 16 ethnic groups which make up the Afghanistan population, and they were ousted as rulers of the country by the international US-led campaign, in which Britain participated. The diverse tribal nature of Afghanistan means the Taliban is more or less unwelcome to the rest, but it also means that these attempts to turn Afghanistan into a self-sustaining Western-style democracy were almost certain to fail.

Before 2001 the Taliban governed by terror, claiming the unchallengeable authority of its interpretation of the Quran and sharia law for its barbarism. There is every reason to fear it will attempt to do so again. Its ideological hallmark is the total rejection of Western values including, naturally, equal rights for women. The 20-year American experiment at nation-building showed little comprehension of the different shades of Islam in Afghan society, where urban areas tend to be more liberal and therefore more open to Western values such as rights for women, and rural ones deeply conservative and patriarchal, and therefore hostile to them.

So the seeds of the present disaster were sown long ago. Successive American leaderships deluded themselves that Afghanistan had a stable government acceptable to the people, and that its army of 300,000 trained and well equipped soldiers were more than a match for any Taliban insurgency. But they also failed to acknowledge that these forces were unduly reliant on American technical, logistical, financial – and moral – support. Their motivation and morale were fatally undermined when President Trump negotiated with the Taliban, who had already regained control of half the countryside, in order to secure a complete American withdrawal in 2021.

In his television address on Monday, President Biden was grossly unfair in implying that the Afghan army was guilty of cowardice in failing to resist the Taliban advance. Some 2,300 American troops were killed in the Afghan operation, compared with 69,000 Afghan soldiers. It was only once they knew the Americans were pulling out, that they chose not to fight and die in what they realised was a lost cause.

Biden was also unfair, and somewhat dishonest, to declare that he would not commit American troops to defend a country that would not defend itself. The reason they would not defend themselves is because they knew they could not do so without continuing American support. So the Afghan army collapse was triggered by Biden’s decision. And it was the army’s collapse that undermined the then government, leading to the Taliban advance, the speed of which caught everyone off balance. This was the genesis of the scenes of mass panic at Kabul airport as the many Afghans who had helped the Americans sought to escape the Taliban’s revenge, with horrific consequences.

President Biden did himself much damage by this self-serving address. He was entitled to point out that he had always opposed “nation-building” as a US policy in Afghanistan, and supported military intervention only in so far as it was focused on eliminating al-Qa’ida. If that was the limit of the US mission, he could reasonably call it a success. In the same way, Boris Johnson claimed the British contribution, which cost nearly 500 soldiers’ lives, was a success. But British soldiers died mainly in Helmand province fighting the Taliban, not weeding out al-Qa’ida. It is very hard to avoid the cruel and tragic conclusion that it was a wasted sacrifice.

It is said that while senior US officers believed the myth that the Afghan army was battle-ready, more junior officers with first-hand knowledge of it on the ground, British and American, knew it was not. That warning should have reached the top. In both countries there needs to be a thorough inquiry into who knew what, and when; and why military intelligence did not raise a red flag long ago. Perhaps it did and was ignored because it was politically inconvenient. There are shades of the Iraq “dodgy dossier” debacle in this affair.

As the American withdrawal proceeded, the British, to their credit, attempted to orchestrate a continued Nato presence to bolster and support the Afghan armed forces. It would not necessarily have been costly in men and materials – only two British military personnel have died in Afghanistan since 2013 – and it may only have needed a few thousand armed service personnel. It could have symbolised the continuation of international support, to buttress the precarious morale of the Afghan military.

One lesson for Britain in this avoidable catastrophe is the danger of following in American footsteps without a clear and coherent policy of its own. Another is that Boris Johnson has earned so little trust among neighbours and allies that they are loath to follow his lead in anything. And a third is that in an interdependent world, all really are responsible for all, to quote Pope John Paul II. Helping other nations to defend the rule of law and human rights, and to build stable institutions that are committed to the common good rather than pursuing tribal interests or personal gain, is a noble work when done well. And a fourth lesson might be that women’s rights are worth fighting for, even spilling blood for, and do not belong in some lower tier of rights that can be overlooked when politically inconvenient. The greatest sacrifice in Afghanistan is being made by its women.

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