20 years in Afghanistan: Was it worth it?
After 20 years in the country, US and British forces are leaving Afghanistan. This month President Biden announced that the remaining 2,500-3,500 US servicemen and women would be gone by September 11th. The UK is doing the same, withdrawing its remaining 750 troops.
The date is significant. It is exactly 20 years since Al- Qaida's 9/ 11 attacks on America, planned and directed from Afghanistan, that brought in the US-led Coalition that removed the Taliban from power and temporarily drove out Al-Qaeda.
The cost of this 20-year military and security engagement has been astronomically high - in lives, in livelihoods and in money. Over 2,300 US servicemen and women have been killed and more than 20,000 injured, along with more than 450 Britons and hundreds more from other nationalities.
But it is the Afghans themselves who have borne the brunt of the casualties, with over 60,000 members of the security forces killed and nearly twice that many civilians.
The estimated financial cost to the US taxpayer is close to a staggering US$ 1 trillion. So the awkward question that has to be asked is: Was it all worth it? The answer depends on what you measure it by.
Let's just step back for a moment and consider why Western forces went in in the first place and what they set out to do. For five years, from 1996-2001, a designated transnational terrorist group, Al-Qaeda, was able to establish itself in Afghanistan, led by its charismatic leader Osama Bin Laden. It set up terrorist training camps, including experimenting with poison gas on dogs, and recruited and trained an estimated 20,000 jihadist volunteers from around the world. It also directed the twin attacks on the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998, killing 224 people.
This week senior security sources have told the BBC that since that time there has not been one single successful international terrorist attack planned from Afghanistan. So, going purely by the measure of international counter- terrorism, the Western military and security presence there succeeded in its objective.
But that, of course, would be a grossly over- simplistic measurement that ignores the enormous toll the conflict has taken - and still takes - on Afghans, both civilians and military. Twenty years on, the country is still not at peace. According to the research group Action on Armed Violence, 2020 saw more Afghans killed by explosive devices than in any other country in the world. Al-Qaeda, Islamic State (IS) and other militant groups have not disappeared, they are resurgent and doubtless encouraged by the imminent departure of the last remaining Western forces.
Back in 2003, I remember a veteran BBC colleague, Phil Goodwin, casting his doubts on what the legacy of the Coalition's military presence would be. "Within 20 years," he said, "the Taliban will be back in control of most of the South." Today, following peace talks in Doha and military advances on the ground, they are poised to play a decisive part in the future of the whole country. (BBC)