Mick Hartley

As we in the UK are forced to acknowledge, we can't blame the disgrace of the withdrawal from Afghanistan solely on the Americans. Of course once Biden announced that the US was pulling out, we had no choice but to do the same. As we learned yesterday, though, the response of the Foreign Office was a sorry tale of incompetence and complete lack of concern for those Afghanis we were leaving behind to face the revenge of the Taliban.

[W]ritten evidence presented to the House of Commons Foreign Affairs Select Committee shows up the extent of the institutional decay of the British state. The effort involved few officials with any knowledge of Afghanistan and exposed a workshy culture within the civil service where the work-life balance of staff was allowed to rule over the interests of people caught up in a looming emergency. As the 31 August deadline approached staff were discouraged from working more than eight hours a shift – apparently on the basis that it could ‘pressure’ other employees to do overtime, too. Many staff were still refusing to come into the office, long after all had had the chance to be vaccinated and Covid restrictions had been lifted.

On top of that, the Foreign Office Permanent Secretary Sir Philip Barton couldn't even be bothered to return from his holiday for 11 days after the fall of Kabul. 

But, as Tzvi Fleischer points out in Fathom, what's remarkable about the twenty years we were in Afghanistan is how an almost universal acknowledgement across the political spectrum that the overthrow of the Taliban in 2001 was necessary in the wake of 9/11 and in the light of the threat of further Islamist-inspired atrocities, by 2021 had turned into an almost universal acknowledgement that it had all been a ghastly mistake, and we should pull out as soon as possible. Have we forgotten why we went there in the first place? Yes, the actual incidents of Islamist terror have never reached the scale that many feared, but the threat is still there – and the botched Afghan withdrawal makes it worse.

So what explains today’s reversal of opinion about the war? War weariness, certainly. The rise of populist political movements – both from the left and right – accompanied by calls to keep and spend money in the US, are also part of the story, as is the spillover from the intense controversy over the war in Iraq – the justification for which was less clearly linked to the strategic implications of 11 September.

But much of the reversal is the result of a systematic misremembering on our part: we misremember why we went in, and what we did when we were there, and we forget there was no viable alternative. In recent years a key part of our misremembering – particularly in broadsheet newspapers and think tanks – has been the claim that the intervention in Afghanistan was prompted by a hubristic belief in ‘nation building’ that was always doomed to fail. To give just a couple of typical examples, the Washington Post quoted the opinion of retired US officer Lt. Col. Jason Dempsey that the core problem of the Afghanistan war was that ‘we believed that we could shape the world in our image using our guns and our money.’ Columnist Paul Waldman claimed, ‘In a jingoistic frenzy we invaded Afghanistan almost gleefully, ostensibly to find Osama Bin Laden and destroy al-Qaeda. But bin Laden disappeared and we quickly settled in, thinking that in short order we’d create a thriving liberal democracy.’ Waldman claimed the whole episode is rooted in the US ideology that ‘we can accomplish anything, including remolding other countries in our image.’

Yet, as distinguished American foreign policy analyst Robert Kagan noted in a 26 August Washington Post essay, it is simply untrue that the US and its allies invaded Afghanistan out of a hubristic belief they could ‘nation-build’ it into a liberal democracy. Moreover, a belief in ‘nation-building’ has almost nothing to do with why the US, together with numerous allies, ending up remaining militarily involved in the country for the next 20 years. The reality is that the invasion of Afghanistan was a product of a reasonable fear – in Kagan’s words, ‘fear of another attack by al-Qaeda, which was then firmly ensconced in the Taliban-controlled country; fear of possible attacks by other groups using chemical, biological or even nuclear weapons.’ […]

It is worth recalling that a premature US withdrawal from Iraq in 2011 allowed the rise of Islamic State – which caused huge carnage both in the Middle East and internationally even without significant state sponsorship. The Trump administration’s decision to effectively withdraw unilaterally from Afghanistan, carried out in a chaotic and poorly managed way by the Biden administration, may well lead to far worse consequences. Not only is the image of steadfast, courageous and patient Jihadists, with God on their side, able to defeat a superpower already a huge recruitment tool and an inspiration for Islamist terrorists everywhere, but the Taliban, still intimately working with al-Qaeda, captured unprecedented amounts of US military equipment. Unlike IS, they are backed by both the state of Afghanistan and major elements of Pakistan’s security forces, with some support from Iran. Moreover the West has lost essential intelligence assets inside Afghanistan crucial to monitoring the Taliban, al-Qaeda, and the rival Islamic State-Khorasan (IS-K), also based in Afghanistan. Without these assets, the Biden administration’s promise to manage this threat primarily through ‘over the horizon’ military capabilities appears hollow.

Worth reading in full.