No lesson learned

There are places it’s just more sensible for your well-advised conqueror to stay well away from.

Last week, I put up a post about my father’s 1961 trip to Afghanistan. He’d visited the town of Istalif, peaceful but full of the bustle of a centre of crafts and commerce. At least, it had been back then, sixty years ago, but it has taken a hell of a beating since, as a consequence of the latest failures of the ill-advised refusing to keep well away from the long-suffering country.

US forces in Afghanistan. For now.

More news about the latest failure there brought it all to mind again today. As the US stumbles on towards failure in Afghanistan, it’s clear that all we are preparing for is the recognition that their twenty-year long conflict has been as futile as its predecessors. Including Britain’s own.

The British Empire was a rather ugly institution built on the hugely questionable notion that, the Brits being so good at running their own affairs, they had an obvious right, if not a duty, to run those of as many other peoples as they could possibly conquer. When you see what sort of a job they were doing of managing their own country – and still are, come to that – you’d have to doubt the suggestion that they were in any way qualified for their self-assigned task. More to the point, the way things went when they tried to carry it out makes it hard to believe that their self-assurance had anything at all to back it.

The Brits had a go all the same, though.

So, in particular they invaded Afghanistan from their base in India, when that was an imperial possession, not just once, not just twice, but three times. The first time, in 1842, ended in disaster. The second and third times, in 1878 and 1919, achieved very little. Afghanistan never fell to the British, and the best they could point to was that the Russians didn’t get a foothold instead of them.

The Russians didn’t give up, though. Under the alias the temporary alias of Soviet Union, they invaded in 1929, 1930 and 1979. None of the attempts achieved anything much, and the last of the three was a real disaster. The Soviets lost nearly 15,000 soldiers killed and almost 54,000 wounded. But those figures are as nothing compared to the civilian losses, which may have been anything between half a million and 2 million killed, without counting the several millions displaced inside the country or forced to flee into exile.

And did the Soviets do any better than the Brits? They didn’t. They were eventually driven out in humiliating defeat by Islamist insurgents, in those days receiving serious covert assistance from the US. The regime the Soviets had supported promptly collapsed and the insurgents, soon to be renamed the Taliban, took over. 

Just to underline the danger of not being careful enough in choosing who to back, the US soon found itself fighting the very same Taliban whose earlier incarnations it had supported.

Pretty soon, showing a monotonously familiar pattern of learning nothing from anyone else’s previous experience, the United States was sending military forces into Afghanistan, accompanied by a few from various allies. Those allies included Britain, having a fourth, if this time subsidiary, go at bringing the nation under control. 

That all happened twenty years ago. All you can say in its favour, compared to the Russian conflict that preceded it, is that it killed fewer people. The Americans have lost some 2300. The Afghan forces had lost 45,000 by 2019. Civilian losses have been about 64,000, with some 47,000 more injured.

The Russians spent the equivalent in today’s terms of about US$115 billion on their war effort. The US spent nearly a trillion, without counting aid projects, including on the Afghan army.

What makes the US action similar to all the others, though, is that it has achieved only limited and, above all, temporary success. Taliban action continues to intensify. Negotiations are going nowhere, with the Taliban conceding nothing, say on civil rights or women’s education. Why would they? Once the Americans are gone, they know they can sweep back into power. And the Americans are going, with the final withdrawal due on 11 September, to coincide with this year’s anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks in the US.

That may mean that Afghanistan becomes a radical Muslim state on the borders of Xinjiang province in China, where millions of Muslim Uighurs are suffering Chinese state persecution. That could be explosive. Might China be the next to intervene? Despite this long track record of failure by foreign power after foreign power? Human stupidity knows no borders, so who can rule it out?

My father used to smile wryly about the futility of the British invasions of Afghanistan. If he’d lived, he’d have been able to add Soviet and US futility too. Because nations don’t learn from mistakes. 

So they keep making them.