A story of strategy mis-managed. Founding partner Andrew Firth writes from his close personal experience of international engagement in Afghanistan from 2003 to 2014. This post was originally published by The Article in August 2021.
Shock, disbelief, fear, horror, outrage, anger and despair have all prevailed over the last few days as the final curtain appeared to descend on the twenty-year intervention in the politics of Afghanistan. And rightly so, of course. For servicemen and women there is the abandonment of an ideal and of Afghan friends, the memories of comrades killed and wounded. Heartfelt and personal, eloquent and empirical though the countless responses are, however, amidst the angst and the wringing of hands there is a real danger that we will miss capturing the salient points of failure that have undermined the blood, sweat and tears of the last twenty years.
Freedom of speech, human rights, gender equality, representative government, democracy, coercion and (il)legitimate force, weak institutions, the rule of law, the threat of terrorism, and the flow of illegal narcotics are all huge and important challenges that without question are deeply concerning. All of these and more are present in Afghanistan. Addressing them all, individually and collectively, has proven beyond the capabilities of even the most advanced governments and alliances which failed to plan coherently and failed to act consistently. We should be worried enough about that.
The salient points of failure in Afghanistan are on a deeper level, however, a level that should be of even more concern to Europe, America, and their partners with shared values around the world. Grasping this failure sets the conditions for the future as well as making sense of the mistakes of the past. Simply put, those involved in this latest adventure in Afghanistan since 2001 did not understand – and showed little real interest in understanding – the history and culture of the country. More importantly, they did not understand the real importance of Afghanistan and why the intervention was necessary.
Because of these fundamental failures, the international community never stood a chance of acting in concert to address the serious and systemic challenges of stabilising Afghanistan. These failures are the root cause of what we are seeing played out from Kandahar to Kabul on our television screens today. They are a source of trauma for many who have been closely engaged with Afghanistan over the last two decades. A source of trauma that keeps re-surfacing because many in the defence community knew about these failures a long time ago and felt powerless to arrest the descent into chaos that we have seen.
We should be quite clear that the scenes this week are not consequent on President Biden’s decisions since the US withdrawal was announced in April. As General Robert Fry has said here, “the country was lost in the summer of 2002, not 2021. What we are witnessing now is no more than the final, largely pre-destined act of an attenuated tragedy”. There have been twenty long years of disunity, disregard, and discontinuity amongst the alliance of nations and their agencies which have involved themselves in Afghanistan since 2001. Collectively, they failed to characterise the nature of the huge challenge that they faced, and therefore had no coherent and consistent approach to its constituent parts.
We knew that other adventurers had been there before, yet we paid no real heed to the outcomes of previous interventions, such as those by Russia in the 1990s, and Great Britain in the 1840s, 1870s, and again almost exactly one hundred years ago. Although we read the books, we didn’t really ask why Afghanistan has been subject to so much foreign invasion or why it has never succeeded. We believed we would overcome and it would be different this time. That was hubris.
Afghanistan is the cockpit of the most volatile region in the world. It is the critical pivot between the troubled Middle East and the growing troubles of Asia. When successively we were told that the intervention in Afghanistan was necessary because of the War on Terror, the War on Drugs, or to uphold the principles of democracy and human rights, we failed to capture the true importance of the country – its strategic position. That was why we were in Afghanistan and why it was important for us to stay there, but we couldn’t admit that even if we had wanted to. To do so might have appeared imperialist and, as was endlessly reiterated, “America doesn’t do nation building”.
The United States and its allies went to Afghanistan seeking revenge for the terrorist attacks of September 2001 and subsequently searched for a reason for our presence to endure. The Bonn Agreement in December 2002 gave some form to the mission to come, recognising that what was required was a “functioning” Afghanistan, no longer a threat to itself or others. In 2008, however, the UK government was still struggling to answer the question “why are we in Afghanistan” in a way that would engage public support. Whitehall endlessly chased “the narrative”. Because we weren’t clear about the fundamental purpose, either in decision making circles or with the public, we lacked cohesion and consistency in the ways and means of our presence. We wasted resources on a series of good ideas and well-intentioned but disparate activity. In the end we lost interest and President Biden lost patience.
Why is Afghanistan’s strategic position so critical? And why should it have been the driving factor in the intervention and our continued presence in the country? Robert D. Kaplan in The Revenge of Geography asserts, “For Afghanistan, as a geographic buffer between the Iranian plateau, the Central Asian steppes, and the Indian Sub-continent, is breathtakingly strategic, and thus has been coveted by not just Russians, but by Iranians and Pakistanis, even as Indian policymakers have been obsessed with it”.
Kaplan’s argument from 2012 is clear, simple, and wholly convincing. Although it was made to the US and UK governments in 2008, unfortunately it failed to convince them. And it should have been the unifying approach to intervention seven years before that; a systemic failure from the outset. It is no surprise that the governments of Russia, Iran, and China have already stated that their embassies will remain in Kabul and that they wish to maintain a relationship with Afghanistan despite the seizure of power by the Taliban.
To make matters worse we also collectively failed to understand the history and culture of Afghanistan and incorporate that understanding in our approach. Be they Pashtun, Hazara, Tajik, Uzbek or Almaq, the people understand the importance of their country. Not as a conscious process perhaps. It’s in their bones because they intrinsically understand their connections to China, Iran, Pakistan, India, and the northern ‘stans’. We did not acknowledge the importance of these connections, and therefore the importance of Afghanistan in the region.
The people also understand the balance of power in Afghanistan and the nature of time. In 2005 there was a view that the most critical unifying element of any approach to stabilising Afghanistan should be the relationship between central and local government. Intrinsic to this was the relationship between traditional and legislative governance. The suggestion was dismissed, and it was even found risible by some, but it has been found to be the case. We tried to exercise control outwards from Kabul. The Taliban has mobilised from the provinces to the centre.
We also treated ‘The Taliban’ as a single, formed, and to some degree rational entity. The people of Afghanistan know it is a framework of ethnically or politically tribal groups under the banner of Islamic fundamentalism and Pashtun nationalism. Strategic engagement is always skewed if one doesn’t correctly understand the very nature of one’s adversary.
And then there is the concept of time. A local farmer near Kandahar told me in 2003, ‘you will come, and we will wait. And then you will go’. A generation is nothing to such perspective; such is the nature of Afghanistan. China, Russia, Iran, India, and Pakistan all understand the importance of strategic patience as significantly as we do not.
These are all elements of an approach to Afghanistan that were raised as we planned and conducted our intervention from 2001. Strategy is about the ‘why’ that drives the ‘how’ and the ‘what’ of planning. That these questions were not written in tablets of stone and embedded in the core of our approach is the systemic failure of our strategy in Afghanistan. And it is not the only recent instance of similar strategic failure.
We have now seen the failure of our strategy in Afghanistan to follow strategic failure in Iraq. Our lack of a coherent international approach to the ravages of COVID-19 across the world borders on another strategic failure. All of this continues to undermine the strategic failure of the international rules-based order that success in Afghanistan would have bolstered.
Now we have a failed state at the heart of the ambitions of China, Pakistan, Iran, Russia, and India – four (or possibly all) – of which are nuclear powers. There has been another clear demonstration to the world that the United States and its allies cannot, do not wish to, or believe they do not need to think, plan, or act strategically. The trauma for many of those individuals involved is that for reasons of expediency, political self-interest, and hubris the fundamentals of strategy have been consistently ignored. That is the real tragedy and importance of Afghanistan. It has been coming for some time and will haunt us well into the future.
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