A year ago today, the Taliban took over Kabul and now are in charge of pretty much the whole of Afghanistan, complete with gun-toting teenage militias and Virtues and Vice police. The surprise was the speed and ease with which the Taliban took huge swathes of the country last year — though they did so with quite a bit of help from their friends in the Pakistan military and intelligence services.
On August 13 last year, the US, Britain and the allies accelerated their rescue mission for vital personnel and helpers in Kabul. It was an unedifying scramble — a cut-and-run job in keeping with the mishmash of policy and strategy that had taken the US and allies like the UK to Afghanistan in 2001.
There are serious and timely lessons to be learned from the whole sorry Afghan adventure — the fifth or sixth by Britain in just under two centuries. They have implications for the cluster of crises now upon us; Ukraine, Taiwan, and the energy and food crunch. It is far from clear how much is being learned in Westminster and Whitehall. There has been no formal inquiry into our involvement in Afghanistan and how it fell apart.
The Foreign Affairs Committee under Tom Tugendhat had no doubts. “It is a disaster and betrayal of our allies” to be felt for years, it reported.
The pull-out from Afghanistan had been agreed in a squalid deal struck by negotiators for Donald Trump and a group of Taliban in Doha in February 2020. It transpires there were secret annexes about intelligence, which Washington refused to divulge to even close allies such as the UK. The Afghans, under president Ashraf Ghani, had to fend for themselves.
The Afghan policies of the last three US presidents, including Barack Obama, whom Joe Biden served as vice-president, always had a whiff of humbug. The Americans started with the Global War on Terror then went in for a bit of reconstruction, nation-building even. But they were always half-hearted, backing the corrupt regime of Hamid Karzai. They were always to be outsmarted by the clan and tribe politics of one of the great narco economies of the world.
The British ended up with trying to police the centre of opium poppy production, Helmand. It was mission impossible given the paucity of time and resources allowed by successive prime ministers in Westminster. The former defence chief, General Sir Nick Carter, a highly experienced Afghan hand, describes last year’s retreat as the culmination of a “long malaise” in UK policy.
“There was never any coherent political strategy,” he said at the weekend, and a total failure to understand the complex roots of the renewed Taliban insurgency. “We failed to build an Afghanistan that was sustainable — not least an army.”
There are two areas that now must be addressed: the state of Afghanistan, and the wider implications of how the UK does security, strategy and aid now.
Taliban Afghanistan is desperately poor — only one family in 20 can feed itself adequately. There is less local violence than last year, but the extremists are very much back — witness the presence of the al Qaeda boss Ayman al-Zawahiri, killed by a CIA drone last month. Once more, Kabul is a hub for networks reaching across Africa and Asia. Aid has to be got into the country by working, under, over or through Taliban militias, and with the brave NGOs still on the ground.
Trickier is the legacy for how the UK does support operations in the future. The agencies working in cyber, space and information, and the military in targeting, surveillance and logistics, have been on a steep learning curve in the six months of the Ukraine war.
The big question is whether they will get sustained strategic approach from the politicians. I fear the next prime minister and the Treasury could be pleading Ukraine fatigue ere long. The lesson of the Kabul debacle of August 2021, for the UK especially, is why they shouldn’t.
