The unsavoury truth behind the ‘miracle’ of Kabul
The evacuation of Kabul was described by the tabloids as the greatest British feat of arms since Dunkirk. But actually, as one US paratrooper quoted in The Atlantic put it, it was “a complete clusterf---”.
Elliot Ackerman, a former US marine who served in Afghanistan for eight years and the author of some acclaimed novels, is interesting because he is both an intellectual and a man of action. In his new book, The Fifth Act, he tells the story of the “clusterf---” unfolding as he holidays in Venice with his children. This conjunction of banality and evil is very striking.
Everyone who has lived in a warzone knows how normal life goes on in the shadow of destruction – babies are born during air raids, washing hung out to dry in a city under siege, children play in a shell crater – a phenomenon so striking that Auden wrote a poem about it. He hung it on Bruegel the elder’s picture of Icarus falling to his doom, where the ploughman in the foreground surely hears the boy’s cry of despair as he plummets to his death, but continues stolidly on with his job – he doesn’t even look up. Tarantino makes a similar observation when his hitmen discuss what they call a Big Mac in Paris, before blowing away a bunch of teenagers.
Ackerman thinks the war in Aghanistan had two defining characteristics: it was fought by a volunteer army – unlike Vietnam – and was paid for by borrowing. Thus the American public, undrafted and untaxed, was completely insulated from the messy reality of war. And the cost is colossal: of the US’s $28trillion national debt, $6trillion is due to wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
One of the mysteries of the Afghan war is why America allowed Pakistan to rearm the Taliban from 2002 onwards. It is very curious that Ackerman doesn’t write about this. The Taliban can only be understood as a wholly-owned subsidiary of the ISI, the Pakistani secret service, right from its beginning in the early 1990s.
I think it at least possible that Afghanistan could have been put back together had Pakistan not rearmed the Taliban. The US could have got tough with Pakistan and told them that a strong and successful Afghanistan was in the US’s national interest and it could have been America’s footprint in central Asia. But Pakistan would not have believed it. They would have calculated that America would eventually fold in Afghanistan, just as it did in Iraq, when faced with a prolonged insurgency.
If Pakistan’s interference were taken out of the equation, could Afghanistan have recovered? Perhaps it could. From 2002 to 2003, I was the Spectator’s Afghanistan correspondent. I remember the sense amongst Afghans in 2002 that this country’s dreadful martyrdom had finally run its course. Very few people at that point thought that Pakistan would be so wicked as to rearm the Taliban. The US seemed to have a fairly strong hand when dealing with Pakistan, which is the recipient of $1.3 billion a year in aid. If the US had threatened to cut that money off, I think the ISI would have accepted that the great game of subverting Afghanistan was over.
They had been playing that game since the 1960s, when the Afghans started agitating for a new country, Pashtunistan – a greater Afghanistan – absorbing two Pakistani provinces: the NWFP and Baluchistan. Effectively this would have broken up Pakistan, which was an extraordinarily foolish policy for Afghanistan to pursue. Hence Pakistan’s paranoid desire ever since to control Afghanistan, which they regard as a vital strategic interest – “strategic depth”, they call it.
Was the collapse of Ashraf Ghani’s government on August 15 2021 inevitable? On paper, it was well equipped: it had 300,000 men against 75,000 Taliban. But Ackerman calls it a “plywood army”. The US announcing it was going to leave meant it was economically rational for an Afghan to be corrupt, to provide a nest-egg for when the US had gone. “You may have the watches but we have the time,” they said.
H Collins, author of a new memoir, Left Behind in Kabul: Surrounded by the Taliban, should be a valuable eyewitness. He is a former Royal Marine Commando who served in Afghanistan from 2001, then in Iraq, where he later became a security contractor, spending five years in the “triangle of death”. In 2014, he found himself back in Kabul, working as a team leader with civilian security contractors responsible for the diplomatic security of the Japanese Embassy. He was there in 2021 when one of the largest ever airlift evacuations took place, from Kabul and successfully evacuated all the Japanese staff.
He saw it all, yet his book has no sense of place. Afghanistan is the graveyard of empires, he says, but he should have described the corpses that litter it – the wrecked tanks, old howitzers and pieces of engine recycled in dry stone walls that I remember so well in the Panjshir. Instead, we are treated to detail that would have been better left at home, like the colour of his vomit after a bender. Collins does not have much feel for words. The book is dedicated to a former colleague “a leader, mentor and warrior in every single sense of the word”. Eh?
It’s not a bad test of a book to see what detail you can remember a week later. The only detail that I will take away from H Collins’s is that the Marines gave 007 names to various camps and there was a Camp Pussy Galore. But Collins does not have the observing power of a journalist and it is pretty uninformative – you don’t learn what it’s actually like to be in a battle.
These two depressing books leave one thinking that the West’s involvement in Afghanistan was doomed from the beginning. The only way for America to have succeeded in Afghanistan was to do what Alexander the Great’s Greeks did and stay there for longer than one or two generations, and build marble, well-governed cities, like Ai Khanoum, which I visited in August 2001, when it was the front line between Massoud’s forces and the Taliban.
But even Alexander was forced to attempt a political settlement in Afghanistan by marrying a local princess, Roxana. And the Greeks didn’t like to stray too far from their frog-pond of the Mediterranean. Afghanistan is muggy hot, too, not the lovely dry heat of Greece; and its livestock and crops are different. Alexander’s settlers didn’t like it in Afghanistan and, when news of Alexander’s death reached them, they tried to return to Greece. Those that didn’t manage to leave maintained a Greek kingdom in Afghanistan which lasted for 300 years. The lesson that conquerors should heed is that you really need to put down roots there, and eventually become Afghan.