Assessing our (4th) Afghan Adventure

What, in the end, did we get from Afghanistan?

As British forces finally withdrew from the country this week that is the question which now lingers and divides.

On the one hand we have newspapers and popular commentators praising the heroic performance of our troops who have served in their thousands over the last twelve years. They say that their legacy will never be forgotten – a promise made more potent by its proximity to next Remembrance Sunday.

And then there are those – and much of the popular media reflects this opinion – who say that we are leaving ‘nothing’ behind. They say that the fact that British forces have even had to remove all memorials to their dead fellow soldiers (for fear the memorials will be vandalised after withdrawal) is evidence of a legacy made of dust.

In order to come to a more appropriate summary of how we performed in Afghanistan and what lessons we might learn from it we will need to consider which of our objectives we attained.

The first stated objective in 2001 – making Afghanistan a territory in which al-Qaeda and al-Qaeda-like forces could no longer train with impunity – was attained fairly early on. Air strikes in 2001-2 inside the country made that achievable. But sustaining that reality was a different matter. For that we needed to topple the host Taliban government. That too was achieved early on. But keeping the Taliban out of politics, as opposed to out of government, proved a challenge too far and one which we should admit that we failed at.

As we leave the country, the Taliban remain and it is inconceivable that they will disappear in our absence.

The next problem was the shifting public explanations for why we remained in Afghanistan. Senior figures in the UK and US administrations now privately admit that they lost the narrative through repeatedly shifting the justifications. The ‘war on drugs’ justification soon fell away. As did many other hopes of fundamentally altering, by improving and diversifying, the state of the Afghan economy. It is true that educational opportunity – especially for women – has improved dramatically and proudly under NATO’s presence. But whether it remains something which will be defended in our absence let alone fought for by the population remains to be seen.

If there were a summary of the operation possible at this remove it would be this. As a counter-terrorism exercise the Afghan campaign has been a success, pushing terrorist forces back and nullifying the country as a centre of international terrorism. As an exercise in state-building however, the campaign’s lessons are far more humbling. The sacrifice of British troops for a mission which leaves a corrupt government behind is clearly already hard for the public to stomach.

Perhaps after all these years the final casualty of the conflict will be the concept of this country taking part in state building at all.