Afghanistan: what was that all about? | thearticle

The Perra family of Cerres, California could not possibly have known the debt that American diplomacy would owe them when they took a young Afghan into their home as part of the American

Field Service exchange programme. The kid was bright and fell in love with America but there was nothing to suggest he would one day lead negotiations to end the country’s longest war, but,

it seems, that’s exactly what Zalmay Khalilzad is about to do. Final drafts are being worked over by US and Taliban teams in advance of an imminently expected announcement to mark the end of

American military engagement in Afghanistan. So, after 18 years, what was that all about? The attacks on 9/11 came like a bolt out of the blue but the Western response was shaped by events

that started with Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990. The Cold War – and indeed the world wars of the 20th century – had been conducted according to a classical concept of strategy

where power was both a means and an end in a competitive international system and war was used as a mechanism to resolve the balance of power between states. And, at first, that’s exactly

what happened, with the United Nations at the heart of an international response that sought to evict Iraqi forces from Kuwait. The Iraqi army that invaded Kuwait had the misfortune to find

the US forces that formed the core of the coalition at the height of their post-Cold War powers, and the subsequent mismatch was brief, decisive and entirely contained within the boundaries

set by the Security Council. So far, so classical. Yet, in the subsequent chaos within Iraq, both Kurdish and Shia minorities seized what they saw as an historic opportunity to rise up

against Saddam’s regime. The response was sufficiently brutal to provoke a Western reaction beyond the Westphalian boundaries of conventional grand strategy and into the affairs of a state

that, however reprehensible its actions, remained sovereign. UN Security Council 688 of April 1991 did not authorise any specific action, but it created an atmosphere sufficiently permissive

to allow a ground intervention in Iraqi Kurdistan and the imposition of two no fly zones, to wide international applause. This represents the first aberrant step away from a classical

tradition of war acting as the means to resolve the balance of power between states and to an instrument used to address the balance of power within states. In 1991 this still had a one-off

look, justified by localised and exceptional conditions. However, as the decade proceeded those conditions looked increasingly ubiquitous and habitual as the Balkan conflict, East Timor and

Sierra Leone saw successive interventions of increasing diplomatic and military fluency. A process that culminated in Tony Blair’s speech in Chicago in April 1999, laying out a formalised

manifesto for liberal intervention, which itself followed a British Strategic Defence Review in 1998 that had identified the military as a force for good rather than an instrument of

national power to be rationally applied in the classical, realist tradition. At that point, and following a seductive run of military and political success, the Chicago Doctrine was a

powerful contribution to the debate about the nature of power in the post-Cold War world, but it did not yet provide the intellectual underpinning for Western grand strategy; after 9/11, it

would. There are a number of ways to try to put a shape on the Western intervention in Afghanistan, but the vehicle this article will use is the four armies the US employed in the theatre.

The first never took the field in the wars of 9/11 but dominated the intellectual assumptions around the application of American force in the lead up to 2001. The Powell Doctrine made clear

that US forces would only be deployed in overwhelming strength, in pursuit of clear objectives and with a marked route to exit. In this it showed the legacy of messy engagements in Lebanon

and Somalia but also its firm roots in the classical strategic tradition. In the aftermath of 9/11, Donald Rumsfeld almost immediately sought to revise this approach in favour of a force

with the speed and agility to match the operational conditions. The solution comprised huge volumes of military firepower from invulnerable platforms in the air and at sea; CIA agents

playing a 21st-century version of The Great Game and dispensing cash to anyone claiming an ability to fight the Taliban; a ready-made infantry in the shape of the Northern Alliance; and, an

urbane and, at least then, compliant political leader in waiting in Hamid Kharzi. In a seminal example of asymmetric engagement, the second US army within the period shattered the Taliban

and drove its remnants into Pakistan or back to their villages. Victory is a difficult word to use in the Afghan context, but it looked pretty close in early 2002. The Taliban no longer

existed as a coherent entity and Pakistan, having been bluntly asked if it was with or against America, was proving an amenable partner. Within Afghanistan the sense of a better future was

palpable, in veteran reporter Jason Burke’s words “everywhere one travelled….one found the expectation of a new era of security, stability and prosperity was dawning”. All that remained was

to maintain the military and political momentum, internationalise a solution under the auspices of the UN, declare victory and walk away with American power – already at a unipolar peak – 

consolidated for a generation. This is the moment on which the Wars of 9/11 turn, and, instead of seeking a decisive outcome in a single theatre, America attention turned to the strategic

distraction of Iraq. In doing so, it managed the worst of all possible worlds in Afghanistan which was to stay but without the appetite or resource to make a real difference and the moment

passed and eventually soured. After what looked like a vindication of the Rumsfeld economy of force strategy, a new orthodoxy shaped US plans for the invasion of Iraq. As a result, General

Tommy Franks commanded a manoeuvre force sufficient only for the conventional phase of the war; the Kurds and Shia were assigned the role of auxiliaries; and, Ahmed Chalabi provided the

requisite urbanity and political compliance. That Afghanistan, with its strong society but weak state, was never going to be a model for Iraq, with its highly-centralised tradition of

governance, would only become apparent later. Iraq’s descent into chaos is well documented and led to the crisis of the campaign in 2006/7 and the deployment of the third US army, now

trained and equipped for counter-insurgency and capable of mounting The Surge of 2007 that gave at least the appearance of military success. By this time the only strategic objective that

remained in Iraq was to honourably discharge the residual powers of an Occupying Power under international law and return a functioning polity to the international community. Meanwhile, in

Afghanistan the major part of the country lay beyond the writ of Kabul and was policed by the very lightest of touches by NATO and Afghan security forces. At the same time, America regarded

the theatre primarily as a place to kill bad guys rather than an opportunity for nation building, which led to the US national and NATO coalition strategies pointing in different directions.

It was therefore entirely clear that only by combining the separate counter terrorist and nation building strands into a single campaign under unified command would the NATO operation have

any chance of success. Equally clear was the fact that only the commitment of large scale US resources could sustain the NATO plan through to its completion, and, until that happened, the

southern provinces that had harboured Al Qaeda and so precipitated the original intervention would remain ungoverned. In addition, the stalled NATO plan had effectively partitioned

Afghanistan between north and south, so feeding both Pakistan’s fears and ambitions. Its fears were based on the possibility of Afghanistan, under the rule of its non-Pashtun nationalities,

becoming a client state of India and completing the strategic encirclement of Pakistan. Its ambitions derived from a judgement that the West would follow the Soviet Union to failure in

Afghanistan and in the ensuing chaos Pakistan would need its Pashtun allies to prevent encirclement and to provide the strategic depth its obsession with India demands. On balance, Pakistan

chose to hedge towards its reserve position of supporting the Taliban as its only ally in a rough neighbourhood. With America’s eyes firmly fixed in Iraq, Britain led the NATO deployment

into Southern Afghanistan. American forces would follow later and a semblance of the Iraqi Surge was achieved in 2008/9, but, by this time, the Chicago Doctrine of liberal intervention was

looking distinctly shop soiled. The West fought the world wars of the 20th Century in defence of liberal values at home and these were wars of unnegotiable necessity. Since 1991, the West

has fought wars in promotion of liberal values in other people’s countries, and, by their very nature, these wars have been discretionary. When Barrack Obama entered the White House in 2009

he chose to exercise that discretion and signalled the long process of disengagement that would occupy his Presidency by the deployment of the fourth, counter-terrorist, US Army. The

counter-terrorist army of drone strikes and special forces raids would have its triumph in the operation that killed Osama bin Laden but that was a tactical success against a backdrop of

strategic failure. With all the benefits of hindsight, it’s possible to see that an operation in Afghanistan limited in geography and ambition might well have succeeded in isolation. But

that’s not the course America chose. In what history might judge as hubris, it embarked on the Global War on Terrorism (GWOT), which was always going to be problematical in strategic terms.

To be effective, military strategy needs clear objectives, a definable enemy and a recognisable theatre of operations. In particular, fighting a condition, at best a tactic, is hardly

consistent with the clarity that is the first condition of success. Also, while recourse to war was always understandable at a visceral level, it has the further disadvantage of making the

terrorist groups it targeted cohere in a manner that would have been unlikely had the attacks been regarded as criminal and subject to a civil response. Finally, a global condition that

demands to be addressed wherever it becomes manifest creates an automatic asymmetry between ends and means that would eventually exhaust even the strategic inventory of the United States.

Therefore the grand strategy declared in 2001, after a decade in gestation, contained a series of tensions within it that would test its military dimension repeatedly in the wars that

followed. So that was what Afghanistan was all about, but what are the consequences? Firstly and on a global level, an intervention intended to show American strength became a conflict that

eventually revealed its limitations. That America spent its power with such profligacy will present a salutary challenge to historians for years to come. Secondly and on a regional level,

the political geography of the Middle East has been transformed by the wider GWOT. Iran and Shia Islam has been liberated from the containment of the regional Sunni powers and become a

dynamic force throughout the region, with untold consequences. Thirdly and on a national level, what the success of Help for Heroes and the burial rituals of Wotton Basset briefly

illustrated was a wish by the British people to reach over the heads of the intervening political and military elites and engage directly with the British armed forces. Seen in today’s

terms, that process could have marked the birth of populism. Finally and as a contemporary observation, as India and Pakistan eye each other up, perhaps the smartest strategic call of this

entire sequence was Pakistan’s decision to bank on a failure of Western nerve, back the Taliban and reserve the strategic depth of Afghanistan for its private use.