Afghanistan

On 11 August, at Russia’s initiative, an ‘extended troika’ will meet in Doha, Qatar to take stock of the Taleban’s major offensive to take over Afghanistan. The United States, scheduled to withdraw its forces by the end of this month, has been invited to this ‘Moscow format’, as have China and Pakistan. As of yesterday, the violent Islamist group had taken control of six provincial capitals in Afghanistan – though not the most important cities in the country. The US negotiator at Doha, Zalmay Khalilzad has warned that ‘a Taleban government that comes to power through force in Afghanistan will not be recognised.’ But so far the militants have refused to engage in negotiations with the elected Afghan government.

After two tours of Iraq as a soldier, I spent six months in Afghanistan in 2007 as part of Operation Herrick VI. My deployment came a year after the then Defence Secretary, John Reid, said we would be ‘perfectly happy to leave the country in three years’ time without firing one shot’. However, the very first night I arrived in Lashkar Gah, the capital of Helmand, troops were battling the Taleban across the province, with thousands of shots fired every day. Plans were being made about how we would evacuate our camp if it was overrun. Today, 14 years on, as the final US troops depart, left behind are more than 47,000 dead Afghan civilians, more than 3,500 dead soldiers from the coalition, and a country on the cusp of civil war.

On 7 October 2001 President George W. Bush launched Operation Enduring Freedom – the invasion of Afghanistan. The operation sought to bring the architects of 9/11 to justice and reduce the threat of terrorism. Twenty years later, President Joe Biden has pledged to withdraw all troops from Afghanistan by 31 August, bringing to a close the United States’s longest-ever conflict – known colloquially as ‘the forever war’. But Biden, who supported the invasion, is pulling out at a time when the Taliban – the highly-conservative Islamic organisation that was harbouring al-Qaeda in 2001 – is sweeping through half the country, killing civilians and human-rights defenders and besieging three cities.

The departure of American troops from Afghanistan is being lamented (or hailed — see the Chinese press, passim) as a defeat. But this is a shortsighted attitude, at least from the point of view of the US military and the multitude of interested parties who feed at its trough. For them, the whole adventure has been a thumping success, as measured in the trillions of taxpayer dollars that have flowed through their budgets and profits over the two decades in which they successfully maintained the operation. The truth of this was forcefully brought home to me once by a friend of mine who, as a mid-level staffer, attended a conclave of senior generals discussing Donald Trump’s Afghan mini-surge back in 2018.

As US and British forces pull out of Afghanistan, further victims of the ‘grave of empires’, Russia is experiencing a mix of satisfaction, exasperation and trepidation. It has its own bitter memories of the country, after all. In 1979, as a friendly regime was falling back in the face of a mounting Islamic fundamentalist insurgency, Soviet forces rolled into Afghanistan. The idea was that by installing a new leader and mounting a brief show of force, the rebels would be intimidated back into line. Six months, the old men in the Kremlin told themselves, that is all it would take. And so began a vicious ten-year war that saw the deaths of 15,000 Soviets and hundreds of thousands of Afghans.

President Biden’s decision to ‘end the war in Afghanistan’ means the complete withdrawal of 3,500 US troops by the 20th anniversary of 9/11. However, what may be domestically popular — particularly among Trump voters — will soon have consequences for the Afghans left unguarded by foreign troops. The Taleban and other jihadist militias are already making significant territorial gains while nuclear Pakistan will be strengthened by the vacuum left by the US military. But it is Afghanistan’s non-Muslims who will really suffer. Extinction is a word normally associated with dinosaurs — but it’s no exaggeration to say some minority religions (including my own) will now face that fate at the hands of Isis, Al-Qaeda, and a resurgent Taleban.

As we approach the final withdrawal of all US and Nato forces from Afghanistan, it’s worth pointing out a shocking double-standard that has so far gone strangely unnoticed. How can it be that Twitter has banned a US president, who even in defeat garnered more than 74 million votes in 2020, yet still allows the Taliban to pump out propaganda on its platform? Let’s be clear. The Taliban is a hard-line Islamist group that extols jihad, opposes democracy and is engaged in a brutal war of attrition against a democratically elected government in Afghanistan. As Paul Wood noted in these pages on June 24, Twitter is the Taliban's preferred social media platform.

The objectives of the Authorized Use of Military Force approved by Congress in 2001 have long been accomplished. Once Osama bin Laden was killed in Operation Neptune Spear in 2011, the last element of the AUMF was met. Our mission in Afghanistan was complete. But we did not leave. Why? The arrogance of a Military Industrial Congressional Complex that saw an opportunity to turn Afghanistan into a Jeffersonian democracy, using American taxpayer money to fund the experiment, over a 20-year period. It failed. A dirty secret: most of the money spent to help Afghanistan and its people was spent in Washington DC to enrich individuals and corporations that did nothing to help develop Afghanistan — a sad truth that my late friend Jerry Doyle called ‘combat to commerce’.

In announcing his decision to withdraw all remaining US troops from Afghanistan, President Joe Biden declared that 'it’s time to end America’s longest war.' The wording of the President’s announcement left little room for backtracking so his decision appears to be definitive. It’s also necessary and long overdue, if not without risk. But it will not actually 'end' the war that began just weeks after the 9/11 terrorist attacks when US special operations forces and CIA paramilitary units entered Afghanistan. The conflict that Americans are accustomed to calling the Afghanistan War will continue, albeit without any overt US military involvement.