Active containment is the best way to deal with this insoluble dilemma

‘Choosing an open-ended commitment to impose a Western version of democracy in a country with a strong political and social culture sowed the seeds of failure’

‘An active containment policy could track the terrorists’ flexibility in moving from country to country without all that is involved in long-term occupation’

After two decades of casualties, costs and campaigning “down among the people”, the US president is abandoning Afghanistan regardless of the outcome. The Taliban are largely in control and Western strategy is in ruins. Not only will they probably harbour terrorist groups again, other Islamist states may well follow suit. So, how should we have handled a country, like Afghanistan, when it served as a base and a launch pad for al-qaeda, and how should we deal with such situations in future?

For many years, I have argued that a form of containment, rather than counterinsurgency, is the only practical answer to international terrorist movements sheltered and sponsored by rogue regimes. Containment held the Soviet Union in check throughout the Cold War until its empire imploded and its ideology was discredited. Islamist extremism has a subversive reach similar to that of revolutionary Communism: indeed, one of its leading ideologues consciously adopted Marxist methods. Neither of those totalitarian doctrines is compatible with our system of constitutional democracy. Our task, therefore, is to keep them at bay until they collapse or evolve into tolerant, or at least tolerable, alternatives.

In Afghanistan the task of overthrowing the Taliban and driving al-qaeda into exile was quickly achieved in 2001. Nato then arrived at a fork in the road. The option selected was an open-ended commitment to impose a Western version of democracy, and protect it indefinitely in a country with a strong sense of its own political and social culture, which was known to be politically allergic to foreign intervention.

Making that choice sowed the seeds of failure: as Robert Mcnamara, former US Secretary of Defence, learnt from his Communist counterpart after the Vietnam war, North Vietnamese fighters were motivated less by Marxist ideology than by a strong sense of nationalism and anti-colonialism.

Yet, there was another option available to Western strategists in response to the 9/11 attacks. Having achieved our immediate objectives, we should have said we were removing our forces but would promptly return if international terrorist groups were again detected within Afghanistan. Ignoring this option was the first in a series of mistakes that led to the current situation, which satisfies no one except the Taliban who can boast of defeating both of the world’s military superpowers: first the Soviet Union and now Nato.

Containment works mainly because totalitarian ideologies are at odds with human nature. Such intrusive repression leads, in the long term, to internal disintegration over issues of principles, power and quality of life. Once the Taliban regain full territorial control, they will lose their shield of invisibility: as in 2001, they will be vulnerable to orthodox military initiatives. If they then pose or facilitate a renewed terrorist threat to Western security, they should expect both their leadership and their military capability to be hit hard by our mobile land and air forces. That cycle would be repeated until the threat was removed; but we should not, and would not, allow our forces to be sucked in again.

An “active containment” policy of this sort could track and match the terrorists’ flexibility in moving from country to country, as circumstances dictated, without undertaking all that is involved in permanent regime change and long-term occupation. It has been described by the academic strategist Dr Afzal Ashraf as “boots with wings” (rather than “boots on the ground”) and, more colloquially, as “swoop in, swoop out”.

It would depend upon maintaining integrated and highly mobile land forces, pre-positioned in regional strategic base and bridgehead areas (SBBAS), ready to strike, withdraw and strike again, whenever needed.

If Afghanistan, or any other susceptible state, became what the Prime Minister and the Defence Secretary have called a “breeding ground” for al-qaeda or similar international terrorist groups, proportionate military initiatives would be taken and interventions mounted from such SBBAS, without getting sucked in to long-term counterinsurgency campaigning.

Active containment is the hardheaded solution to an otherwise intractable dilemma: whether to allow terrorists to attack us with impunity or to shoulder the unending burden of occupying every reckless rogue state that shelters and supports them.

Nevertheless, by following a strategy of nation-building in Afghanistan, we created obligations to protect those Afghans who put themselves at risk by accepting our values and acting accordingly. We must save them from the consequences of our error at that fork in the road, 20 years ago.