Friends with the Taliban?

Wow. Are the Taliban our friends now? It’s beginning to look that way, now we need their help against IS-K, the latest incarnation of anti-Western terrorism in that wretched nation, Afghanistan.

Twenty years of war against them, and now we have to be friends?

We’re working with these guys? They’re our friends now? Really?

Back in 2001, many suggested that, while the Americans clearly had to do something in response to the 9/11 attacks, they shouldn’t do just anything. Well, in the end they did do just anything. They replied to an attack carried out almost entirely by Saudis, led and masterminded by Saudis, and financed with Saudi money, by invading Iraq.

“Iraq?”, you may cry out.

Yep. Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11. Invading it, however, did bring down, and eventually kill, Iraq’s brutal dictator Saddam Hussein. That was something that George H W Bush, father of then president George ‘Dubya’ Bush, had failed to do when he was president. At least some unfinished family business got cleared up.

What the Iraq war eventually did, apart from racking up huge cost not just in money but in lives (mostly Iraqi), was conjure ISIS into being. That was ironic, since the war was directed against terrorism, and ISIS carried out several spectacular terrorist attacks against Western targets. It took a lot more military effort and money to defeat it over the next few years.

The war had spilled over into Syria, where it turned lousy for the West, and lousier still for the unfortunates resisting the dire Assad regime, when the West pulled out, granting victory to Assad and his Russian allies.

In a region where the West’s bogeyman is Iran, the invasion of Iraq has turned the country into an Iranian puppet. The failed intervention in Syria has further entrenched Iranian influence. Somehow, we achieved the opposite of what we set out to do.

In any case, well before Iraq, the US has also invaded Afghanistan. 

“Afghanistan?”, you may cry out.  

Yep. Well, the Americans were hardly going to invade Saudi Arabia, the homeland of the Al Qaida terrorists. But the justification was a little less flimsy than for Iraq, since Al Qaida had a base there, from which it ran the 9/11 attacks. So a swift in-and-out mission to disrupt Al Qaida would have made perfect sense.

But there were no clear objectives or exit strategy for the intervention, so mission creep set in. The next goal was to overthrow the Taliban government that had sheltered the Saudi terrorists. That turned out to be deceptively easy. A bit like when the German army defeated the French and the British in a few weeks in 1940. That gave Hitler the delusion that he could defeat the Soviet Union too. 

Look how that ended.

The US-led NATO forces in Afghanistan thought they could turn the country into a Western-style liberal democracy. 

Look how that has ended.

Yep. It’s ended with desperate refugees crushing into Kabul airport in the hope of getting out of the country. A harrowing, dismal, tragic sight. But then retreats after a defeat are like that. And we should have seen it coming. 

Way, way back, in 1842, the British had to get out of Kabul in a hurry, with an army 4500 strong, accompanied by 12,000 civilian camp followers or dependents. They needed to withdraw just 90 miles to Jalalabad, but only one European survivor made it, with a handful of Indian soldiers. Another 100 or so British prisoners were later released. As were 2000 Indian soldiers, most of them suffering from the effects of frostbite. Some eventually made it back to India, but many were left behind in beggary or even slavery.

A defeated army in retreat leaves a trail of wrecked lives behind it. Every time. Just like now.

Elizabeth Thompson, Remnants of an army.
Assistant Surgeon William Brydon reaches Jalalabad,
the only European to make it on the retreat from Kabul

So here we are. We’ve left Afghanistan in a mess again. We started out with the Taliban in power and we’re leaving with the Taliban in power again. Took a lot of effort, didn’t it, to go full circle back on that one?

In any case, the lack of resistance to the Taliban returning to power suggests that liberal democracy didn’t appeal much to the Afghan people anyway. It can’t have helped that NATO or our Afghan allies did a lot of collateral damage: wedding parties or funeral processions bombed, for instance. One can understand why Afghans might wonder why they should prefer us.

And what about the terribly sad reversal of the few real measures we did achieve? Education for women, for instance, or opportunities for them later. I wish we could have done more to make them last. But in a nation that is 76% rural (the UK, by contrast, is 84% urban) and which remains miserably poor, I suspect most people are much more concerned with earning a living. For that they need peace, any kind of peace, under any kind of government. Democracy or even human rights, including women’s rights, may be less of a priority to them than to us.

Maybe the right they care for most is to stop being hungry.

Women and the people we’ve abandoned in Afghanistan are now going to pay for our deluded attempt to impose a democracy by armed force on a people not that keen on it. Perhaps we need to ask ourselves whether you really can force freedom on people at the point of a gun. Especially when it’s our notion of freedom we’re enforcing, not theirs.

In any case, we’ve now turned the Taliban into the good guys. Because we failed in even the limited objective of wiping out the terrorist threat from Afghanistan, we have to collaborate with the Taliban against it. Surely that’s an irony that doesn’t escape anyone. And where does it leave us in acting against the Taliban to demand better protection of rights for women?

Still, what’s done is done. The issue now is what we’ll learn. Can we perhaps resolve that we’ll never again intervene militarily anywhere without a clear and above all achievable objective, and a firm exit strategy for once success has been achieved? Can we decide not to go blundering into more unwinnable wars? Could the war hawks perhaps learn to listen to those who warn them it’s unwinnable, as so many did in 2001?

Let’s make the first question we ask ourselves, how on Earth did we persuade ourselves that it was a good idea to launch an operation that took us where we are? Then the second one can be, how do we make sure we don't delude ourselves the same way again? Then we may learn wisdom and end up with better friends.