The Guardian view on Britain’s Afghan failure: a military and political disaster
The UK’s latest Afghan war, the fourth since 1839, has ended in failure. There is no consolation in claiming that this shameful retreat was down to a bungled withdrawal of US forces by Joe Biden. Britain scuttled out at the same time, the prime minister telling MPs on the day of Mr Biden’s announcement that “there is no military path to victory for the Taliban”. As events subsequently proved, Boris Johnson’s assessment of the situation was badly wrong. The extent of the military and political catastrophe for the UK that the blitzkrieg Taliban takeover represents is hard to overstate.
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 a Britain shorn of substantial global influence. 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. In 20 years, according to Brown University’s Costs of War project, more than 170,000 Afghans have lost their lives. The death toll was rising. 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. Yet this has come at a high price. Since 2001, the US has spent nearly $145bn (£106bn) rebuilding Afghanistan. By 2019, the average Afghan student received four years of schooling. Twenty years ago it was just two. In a report last month for the US Congress, the special inspector general for Afghanistan reconstruction noted that “many students, particularly girls, remain out of school”. Afghans do live longer and the country is wealthier than when the Taliban ran it. But the state can only function with international aid, which 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. This may count as an improvement: almost every Afghan ruler in the 20th century was assassinated, lynched or deposed. A western-made “liberal democracy” has fallen into the hands of religious fanatics linked to al-Qaida. 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, terrorists, as the Taliban’s return shows, will remain undefeated. Michael Clarke of the Royal United Services Institute, the security thinktank, describes the outcome 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”. It was the collapse of the Taliban in 2001 that 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 the government speaks of creating new special forces regiments and naval “littoral strike groups” for international interventions. Britain used to station military forces around the world to maintain its empire. It should think twice about doing so for someone else.