AFGHANISTAN

LET’S be in no doubt. The UK’s latest Afghan war – the fourth since 1839 – has ended in abject failure. The shameful retreat was down to a bungled withdrawal of US forces by Joe Biden, who’s lacklustre approach leaves his leadership open to criticism of weakness and inadequacy. What extraordinary and pitiful scenes the world has witnessed in recent days: bodies falling from the sky, the Taliban cheering in Kabul and the mighty America humbled. The Taliban on the ground is operating akin to the Nazis as they go door-to-door in neighbourhoods seeking retribution against those that supported the West. There is a growing sense of unease, and rightly too, as the West awaits what might come next.

Britain scuttled out at the same time, the prime minister telling MPs on the day of Mr Biden’s announcement that there can be no military victory in Afghanistan. What a shameful assessment given all that has been sacrificed in terms of blood and treasure plundered. The world is witnessing the extent of the military and political catastrophe after twenty years of miscalculation and misadventure.  

The UK is currently driven by a desire to stay close to the US. But America is a superpower, able to shrug off defeats and move on. The blow of losing Kabul is felt more deeply in Britain shorn itself of substantial global influence. And, yet, this has led the UK to take Washington’s lead in military affairs. In Afghanistan, the US judgment that a combination of special forces, local proxies and air power would wipe out domestic resistance to a military occupation was flawed. The Afghan security forces that NATO trained were exposed as a shell and collapsed at a time when it was most needed. In 20 years of relentless fighting, more than 170,000 Afghans have lost their lives. The death toll continues to rise as the barbarism of the Taliban metes out savage reprisals against local Afghans and interpreters who helped western intelligence services and the British Army in a quest for democracy and more moderate living. In June, almost 1,000 Afghans were killed in the simmering civil war. A few weeks later half the country was under Taliban control.

Western politicians prefer to tell a story of progress in Afghanistan. But that could all be unravelled now the Taliban are in control. Since 2001, the US has spent nearly $145bn (£106bn) trying to rebuild Afghanistan. By 2019, the average Afghan student received four years of schooling (twenty years ago it was just two). As prosperity was building, Afghans were known to have lived healthier and longer lives and the country is certainly wealthier than it was in 2001. But as many will soon realise the state can only function with international aid. Aid funds three-quarters of total public expenditure.

Elections were held in Afghanistan but the institutions that support democracy were not allowed to take root. One elected president, Hamid Karzai, fell out with the Americans so badly he threatened to join the Taliban himself. The other, Ashraf Ghani, fled as the Taliban advanced. Almost every other Afghan ruler in the 20th century was assassinated, lynched or deposed. A western-made “liberal democracy” has fallen into the hands of religious fanatics with close links to al-Qaeda. It must be clear by now that nations cannot be hustled at the barrel of an American gun into the postmodern age, especially when they have not been allowed to come to terms with modernity.

In Afghanistan, the battle for hearts and minds was lost long ago. Without hearts and minds, one cannot obtain intelligence, and without intelligence, the insurgents will remain undefeated.

The Royal United Services Institute, a security thinktank, describes the outcome in Afghanistan as “strategically worse than the situation prior to the 9/11 attacks – a Taliban state, with terror groups already baked into it, with nowhere else to turn for major support other than Beijing”.

The collapse of the Taliban in 2001 encouraged the US to adopt a similar strategy in Iraq and Libya. After 20 years of disastrous results, British ministers should reach for a new approach. After all, relations between London and Washington have historically never been entirely unconditional. Yet, whilst the government speaks of creating new special forces regiments and naval “littoral strike groups” for international interventions, Britain needs to learn its own history. It used to station military forces around the world to maintain its empire. It should think again before doing so for someone else.

AFGHANISTAN

COMEBACKS have rarely been as brutally quick as the Taliban’s dramatic surge across Afghanistan since the start of July.

Eleven regional capitals have fallen to the insurgents in six days and hundreds of thousands of Afghans have fled their homes, fearing life under Islamic fundamentalism.

Funded by an annual budget believed to be in the region of $1.5bn, cash comes direct from drug-running, extortion, and the imposition of local taxes in areas and regions the Taliban control. Their forces include up to 85,000 fighters and their weaponry include AK-47 assault rifles, rocket-propelled grenades, mortars, other small rockets, anti-aircraft and anti-tank weapons, suicide bombers, Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs), plus weapons captured from the Afghan army.

It is time to ask how a group reviled as savage religious extremists and sponsors of international terrorism could recover from utter defeat two decades ago to become Afghanistan’s rulers-in-waiting.

Does the Taliban’s apparent impending victory mean that the country is destined to hurtle back to the brutal medieval regime that ruled there in 2001?

Day by day, the plight of Afghanistan and its people grows ever more desperate.

Emboldened by the withdrawal of Western troops, the resurgent Taliban is sweeping through the country with alarming speed.

Nearly a third of the 35 provinces are under their control, with insurgents in striking distance of Kabul. The fact that 600 British troops – mostly from the Parachute Regiment – are being sent to oversee the immediate evacuation of all our nationals suggests the fall of the capital is just days away.

There are already reports of atrocities – summary executions, torture and mutilation. If the Taliban take the whole country, this wicked and hideous persecution will again become the norm.

This is not a problem the West can brush aside. American invaded after 9/11 to oust the Taliban and stop Afghanistan being a sanctuary for terror groups. Following their withdrawal, how long before the jihadis are plotting mayhem in the West?

Meanwhile, with up to 100,000 refugees fleeing each month, many will soon begin arriving in Europe seeking asylum. This is the world’s problem. Who will help Afghanistan’s fragile Government fight off the barbarians at their gate?

President Biden’s woefully nonchalant remarks that Afghans “need to fight for themselves” suggests America has shamefully washed its hands of its responsibilities.

To his credit, UK Defence Secretary Ben Wallace, a former soldier, tried to put together a British-led coalition. But without US engagement, it was never likely to happen. The lily-livered UN stands impotently by. The Islamic world is troublingly muted.

Afghanistan’s plight will be distressing to British soldiers who lost 455 colleagues trying to keep the Taliban out. Not for the first time, brave men and women who gave so much for our safety are left to rue the cost of politicians’ foreign misadventures. A tragedy that shames the world.