Seventy-five years on from the War, its meaning has changed (Photo by Gareth Copley/Gareth Copley)
When I was in sixth form, one of my masters was an enthusiastic collector and distributor of obituaries featuring notable persons from the Second World War. Two I remember in particular were both fighter aces: the Luftwaffe’s Adolf Galland and the RAF’s Air Vice Marshal “Johnnie” Johnson (not to be confused with Squadron Leader “Johnny” Johnson, who at 99 is the last survivor of the Dambusters raid).
My secondary school years, 1994-2001, seemed to be a busy period for such obituaries. Perhaps this was just my impression, but it was the age when men who had been in the prime of life during the war years were entering their eighties.
Over the course of my life the generation of people who actually fought in the Second World War has been gradually leaving us. I entered the world shortly before Mrs Thatcher’s stonking general election victory in 1983, and VJ Day, the end of the war, was not so very long ago. Factories and officers and schools still contained plenty of people who had served, some of them relatively young and vigorous.
Anyone in their late forties or older was likely to have some clear recollection of the war years. We were still living in a decidedly post-war world; there were four British armoured divisions permanently stationed in Germany, and Rudolf Hess remained a prisoner in Spandau, 42 years after his flight to Scotland.
Public life in 1983 was full of people who had been in uniform between 1939 and 1945. This included two of the previous three Prime Ministers, Ted Heath and James Callaghan, and the Archbishop of Canterbury, Robert Runcie. Runcie, indeed, had won the Military Cross during the advance to the Rhine, a distinction he shared with the popular cricket commentator and broadcaster Brian Johnston and the former Foreign Secretary Lord Carrington, who had honourably resigned the previous year after the Foreign Office failed to foresee the Argentinian invasion of the Falklands. The Chief of the Defence Staff during the Falklands War, Terence Lewin, served with great distinction in the Royal Navy during the Second World War.
Such links are now extremely rare. In 2020, anyone who saw active service against Nazi Germany or Imperial Japan is well over ninety. Almost the only prominent people in public life who served in the war are the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh, who saw some lively service in the Mediterranean as a young naval officer.
This chronological distancing has been accompanied by a curious change in the way that we collectively remember the Second World War. It’s hard to describe this change precisely, or say exactly where it has come from. But if I had to try, I’d say that a folk memory of the Second World War as essentially a war fought for patriotic reasons against other countries to defend the British national interest, as part of a wider ongoing national story, has been substantially replaced by one that regards the war as an idealistic conflict fought in defence of universalist moral values, especially those that nowadays form the bedrock of high-status elite thinking — equality, diversity, non-discrimination, anti-nationalism and so on.
Now of course there is some truth in this account, and some incompleteness in the older version. As the war went on it was framed increasingly by Allied leaders and populations as a fight for civilisation against barbarism, and of course this was a strong theme in British propaganda from the very early days of the war.
In Churchill’s famous speeches in 1940 he referred to the “odious apparatus of Nazi rule” and the “abyss of a new dark age”. The horrific revelations at the end of the war about the death camps and the atrocities throughout Occupied Europe made it very clear that the war had in some sense truly been a struggle against a diabolical evil.
But this is not the whole story. The Finest Hour speech appealed to a fundamentally patriotic understanding of the war, noting with regard to the Battle of Britain that “upon it depends our own British life, and the long continuity of our institutions and our Empire”. The “Fight Them On The Beaches” speech explicitly situated the danger from Hitler in the context of a long series of threats to British independence from Continental tyrants, and declared the Anglo-French intention to “defend to the death their native soil”.
And Britain had entered the war for old-fashioned strategic reasons; not to defeat a country with a wicked government that was oppressing its population, but to stand up to a continental power that threatened to dominate Europe and so undermine the British national interest.
There is also, of course, the little matter of our alliance with the Soviet Union, a savage tyranny which had killed far more of its own citizens during the 1930s than Nazi Germany had managed. If the war was straightforwardly a crusade against barbarism, it is hard to account for our forging a jewel-covered ceremonial longsword as a present to Joseph Stalin, who had carved up Poland with Hitler in 1939, and whose armies raped and murdered their way across Eastern Europe in 1944-45, shadowed everywhere by battalions of secret policemen ready to shoot local dissidents, and indeed terrified peasant boys who fled the front line.
The Soviet alliance is intelligible and defensible in the context of a war for national survival and the national interest; less so if we conceive of the conflict as a grand battle of good versus evil.
A useful concept here, I think, is the neologism “retcon”, a portmanteau of the words “retroactive” and “continuity”. Retconning is a term originally coined by comic book readers, and it refers to the retrospective revision of completed fictional works, typically with the addition of new information to make us understand previous events in a different way.
Something similar has been happening to the Second World War over the last few decades. Not only are the events of the war itself being repurposed to tell a simplistic tale about an idealistic war, but additionally the war is treated as an origin story for all that is considered good in the post-war world, from the NHS and the welfare state to our ability to rise above primitive notions like patriotism and national interest to the sunlit uplands of universal benevolence.
This retooling of the popular imagination is necessary partly because of sweeping demographic change complicating conceptions of national history and popular memory, but also because what you might call “old-fashioned” wars, entered into and fought for reasons of national self-interest, are seen as increasingly problematic.
To celebrate a hero because he fought or died for Britain, for King and Country, for the land from which he sprung, makes people uneasy; to celebrate him because he fought for “freedom” or “against Fascism” is much more acceptable. Ironically, this suspicion of national feeling is a result of the terrible events of the war, which have forever tainted patriotic energy with the horrible shadow of genocide and racial bigotry.
The semi-conscious move to the story of the war as a morality tale has surely also contributed to the curious transformation in our attitude to veterans of conflict, and not just the world wars. Across great swathes of public conversation, we seem to have only two cultural templates for those who have served in war; hero, an appellation now applied freely and therefore uselessly to anyone who has spent time in uniform, and victim, the man left emotionally and psychologically scarred by the experience of battle, grappling with addiction or PTSD and unable to function effectively in civilian life.
While it is very good indeed that we now take more seriously the mental health of service personnel, there is little evidence that veterans have worse mental health than the general population, once you have controlled for possible confounding factors.
Thus surviving Second World War veterans — such as Captain Tom Moore, NHS fundraiser extraordinaire — are held in the most exaggerated reverence, treated almost like holy objects rather than normal people who lived through an incredible chapter in our history and have had the good luck to live to a grand old age.
This is in line with the reimagining of the war as a high moral endeavour and the catalyst for the dawning of a new Britain freed from the shackles of an unenlightened past. It doesn’t help that there is no-one left alive who had any kind of senior or strategic role in the conflict, to temper the impressionistic, partial and fragmented recollection of the poor bloody infantry with a wider perspective that makes clear the difficult choices constantly faced by military commanders.
I am fairly sure that this exaggerated reverence is something new. I don’t recall it from the big wave of Second World War remembrance in the early 1990s. Then veterans were still treated with great respect, of course, and their recollections listened to with attention, but the very fact that there were so many of them, and that so many of them were still of an age to be actively engaged in normal life, arguably meant that we had more of a sense of them as normal people, for good or ill, rather than enormously aged relics of another world.
There is another reason for this pivot to extreme deference to Second World War veterans, and it was neatly summed up by an astute Twitter correspondent of mine, who noted that the wartime generation have become less culturally threatening as they have aged. Discussing the recently-discovered footage of Captain Tom Moore on the TV show Blankety Blank in 1983, he suggested that at that time he was the right age (63) to be a resented authority figure, liable to tell you to get a haircut and turn that bloody racket down, rather than in the category of enormously ancient and hence admirable sage from times long past.
This seems like a very plausible dynamic to me. The generations who have grown up since the war have complicated psychological attitudes to those who fought in it. They are compelled to admire their sacrifice and their resilience, especially if the cause for which they fought can be reconfigured as a war for modern liberal shibboleths, but also keenly convinced of the moral backwardness of the world which the wartime generations stood for, and which they still to some extent represent. It is entirely plausible, then, that the younger generations’ attitude to the few remaining survivors of the old world, should become more indulgent when any meaningful political and social threat from them has entirely passed (as it had not done in 1983).
The effect of the various phenomena noted above is to make it increasingly difficult for people to have a nuanced, realistic understanding both of our military history in general, and of how we should think about particular soldiers’ experiences. It’s always a delight, therefore, to see pushback against the sentimentalist or simplistic presentation of such experiences.
For example, one of the great strengths of Peter Jackson’s They Shall Not Grow Old, released in autumn 2018 to coincide with the centenary of the end of the First World War, was that it avoided a clichéd over-emphasis on what you might call the “muddy futility and tragic poetry” view of that war.
Over the end credits we heard not the usual sad piano music, or a famous actor reading Dulce Et Decorum Est in their special Shakespeare voice, but a jaunty and – it must be said – filthy British Army marching song, Mademoiselle From Armentieres. Jackson, if I remember correctly, included voices noting that we did actually win the Great War. Not alone, certainly; the immortal French heroics at Verdun and the arrival of the Americans in the last year or so cannot be ignored. But the British Army and its imperial allies — and the Royal Navy’s blockade of Germany — played a decisive role in actually defeating the Germans in the field.
Also featured were testaments to an under-discussed aspect of the modern presentation of remembrance and popular history: i.e., that a large proportion of soldiers actually rather enjoy the experience of battle. This insight is fascinatingly explored in Niall Ferguson’s The Pity of War, among other works. However, it struggles to get much discussion time in the modern media environment because it runs so strongly against the grain of our conception of human nature.
It will be intriguing to see how the remembrance of the Second World War develops over the next two decades, as the conflict passes out of living memory altogether. I fear that the trend towards an ahistorical and politicised folk memory will only intensify, and that our collective endeavours to memorialise that great struggle will become ever stranger, as we try ever harder to cling to the mythologised version of the war, one of our few remaining collective reference points for the vanished past.
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SubscribeInformative piece, thankyou.
But I don’t need a grasp of history to wonder what we were doing there in the 21st century. I am a firm believer in leaving people to their own devices and if the Afghans prefer to live in, what to me, is a state of savagery, then I don’t need to stop them
Brecht had his little joke about dissolving the people and electing a new one. I wonder how we can dissolve the elite and elect a new one, because General Elections don’t seem to work.
there’s a way – more than enough lampposts – but we are now ’emasculated’ as a people (meaning ‘The West’ in general) and the elites know it.
I believe ‘the west’ interfered because they saw the middle east in a constant state of turmoil and wanted to ensure reliable sources of oi. Now it is folk after lithium. Betting the chinese will win.
It is fascinating how there us now a big divide between the interventionist elite in the West and ordinary people. The latter are not responsible for this disaster, and we should definitely object very strongly to assuage our leaders’ guilt tripping at our expense, through for example, through further mass immigration.
Much as I admire people like Douglas Murray on most issues, it would be rather nice to hear some humility from former neoconservatives, more so people like Blair, fat chance the latter.
Well said.
What we were doing there in the 21st century was spending 20 years preventing Afghanistan being a base for anti-Western terrorism. It seems to be forgotten that this actually worked. The Taliban were defeated within weeks of the original 2001 invasion, and by about 2012/13, the occupation was largely peaceful.
Internal political strife in the USA, symptomatic firstly with Trump and now Biden, meant that the intention to withdraw the USA came to depend wholly on internal US politics and not the strategic situation in Afghanistan: the USA and NATO were not under threat in Afganistan, their occupation as broadly stable and in fact no longer even all that expensive. The cost in blood, of course, is a different matter: more emotive, and harder to place a value upon. But either way, the cost calculation is very obviously going to turn out to have been badly wrong, because the military, economic, strategic and geopolitical damage that this is going to do to the West is vastly larger than whatever has been saved by leaving the Afghans to the savagery of Taliban rule.
In short, it was never possible to say that this wasn’t our problem. It was and is our problem, and we will bear the costs of it whether we accept that or not.
I agree.
Well said. The US has chosen to abandon stability in Afghanistan. To gain what? Some favourable domestic headlines. Well that backfired spectacularly.
And now the West has lost control of the future with all its calamitous possibilities. This will end really badly. If it ever does end.
Absolutely negligent.
However, Trump’s deal and prisoner swap seeded this disaster.
What an informative and absorbing essay.
Putting the clans aside, ‘Every man is a Khan’ sums up a warning to anyone wanting to rule Afghanistan. I spoke to a migrant Afghan a few years ago who explained that part of his reason for leaving were the constant inter-family and interpersonal feuds which resulted in people being hunted down and killed for minor slights – sometimes many years after the incident.
Blood feuds seem to be at the base of all warrior cultures, family/tribal honour of prime importance.
I’m guessing the Afghans who are desperate to leave wish to be part of the West with our rule of law and it’s attendant less violent way of life.
I think you might be right, but would be curious to know if there are any Afghans who have migrated and committed atrocities in their new homeland. Anyone have information?
Many Afghans were among the millions of young Muslim men who accepted Angela Merkel’s open invitation to migrants in 2015. Since then, unfortunately, there have been many accounts of gang rapes and sexual attacks carried out by Afghans. The most recent case (https://apnews.com/article/europe-austria-migration-government-and-politics-8194249c84d0c7413ee94b23c09bb111) involved the gang rape and murder of a 13-year old girl in Vienna. Of course, many such attacks have been carried out by migrant men from diverse backgrounds. But the savagery of those carried out by Afghans have been particularly disturbing.
In 2017, the Austrian sociologist and advocate for refugees Cheryl Bernard wrote an article on the topic (https://nationalinterest.org/feature/ive-worked-refugees-decades-europes-afghan-crime-wave-mind-21506) which reached this conclusion:
“The young Afghan attackers are saying, yes, that they have no impulse control, that their hormones are raging, and that they hate themselves and the world—but most especially, that they will not tolerate women who are happy, confident and feeling safe in public spaces. They are saying that they have no intention of respecting law, custom, public opinion, local values or common decency, all of which they hate so much that they are ready to put their own lives, their constructive futures and their freedom on the line for the satisfaction of inflicting damage.”
Very interesting. For such individuals, life imprisonment is the only answer. Or return to their country of origin. Their choice.
That makes shocking reading.
When I read the Jack Reacher book Gone Tomorrow, I learned a lot about Afghanistan, the brutality of its inhabitants and the Mujahedeen. Yes, it’s fiction, but eye-opening, nonetheless.
There’s an interesting comment attendant to this by Geary Johansen on male aggression, cultural influences and evolution here https://quillette.com/2021/08/29/inflammatoryanti-racism/ it’s part of his second comment beneath the article. Worth looking at.
Agreed – one of the best essays I have read on this difficult matter. But we must be wary of the Chinese!
A family relative, an old soldier in the Indian Army, greatly admired the Pashtuns, as men and fighters. This is a Warrior Culture, our own ended in the 15th century with the Wars of the Roses, then commerce and Protestantism gradually took over.
You cannot force 500 years of western development through the high passes of Afghanistan. Let them be.
As I read the article I kept on thinking of Myanmar. If only people understood that we need to look through the eyes of our five-hundred-year-old ancestors to understand the political infrastructure of Afghanistan, once you do that everything makes sense even if it is regrettable.
I’m sorry but I don’t really understand what you mean.
I’m surprised that Hillary Clinton seems to have avoided all censure ? I seem to recall that she was prominent in a campaign to promote the rights of women in Afghanistan, and therefore might have well been influential in the gradual transformation of the campaign from a defined objective to a mission for societal change.
And Libya. We came, we saw, he died. And alienated a whole continent.
How can a campaign to promote the rights of women be anything other than a mission for societal change?
Thanks for a first class article.
There’s no way I’d have been convinced by such arguments before events proved them true. I’d have been like, very “clever” analyses, but the national differences you’re relying on aren’t really things anymore, it might be a stretch to say we’re one big global village, but that’s the direction of travel.
Might be good if historians and scholars like yourself win back a bit of the influence on policy makers they’ve lost to interest groups and data scientists.
And to rigour and discipline being replaced by wokery in our educational system.
Exactly. Splendid article. We – or our rulers – need to learn the lessons of history!
The problem is that journalism has been replaced by live interview.
Instead of doing their homework, visiting the place, talking to local people, reading history etc, nearly all journalists simply pick up the latest ‘story’ and do endless interviews asking similar questions and listening to people who reinforce the narrative.
The mobile phone has replaced facts with opinions. It is, perhaps, a branch of post-modernism,with evidence being replaced by ‘lived experience’.
It was the same with Brexit and COVID.
There are so few proper journalists left like DALRYMPLE
Second Anglo-Afghan War was actually successful for Britain. But then the objective was *not* nation building or actually occupying Afghanistan, it was just ensuring the Afghans stayed out of the Russian orbit. The problem with the latest fiasco is the aims were predicated on changing the very nature of Afghanistan.
I’m glad someone else mentioned the 2nd Anglo-Afghan war; I though Mr Dalrymple’s article was very good but like lots of other commentators he seems to ignore both the 2nd and 3rd wars (granted, he’s only got a certain number of words allowed I imagine so needs to concentrate his writing to make his point so I can’t be too critical).
I think lots of people are in such a rush to look wise about comparing the 1st and 4th wars they ignore the lesson of the 2nd; well defined, and realistic, objectives make winning such a war possible. A lesson for all countries/conflicts if there ever was one. Also evidently a lesson very few of our current political class (including those of the New- Labour era – on both sides of the house), have learnt.
This essay alone is worth the subscription.
As a former Air Force Systems Analyst Officer (1972-1976), the part of Vietnam that I remember best is that in 11 days of unrestricted bombing and air dropped mines, Operation Linebacker II put all of North Vietnam’s ports out of business. This cut off all supplies, because the Red Chinese skimmed 90% plus of what was shipped overland. If Linebacker II had been launched in 1965, or even 1968, instead of December, 1972, it would have saved a lot of lives and made Counter Insurgency (COIN) a lot more effective, a lot earlier.
We lost in Vietnam because between 1973 and 1975 Congress cut aid to South Vietnam by 75% and outlawed US air strikes anywhere in Southeast Asia. Congress and the American people lost patience with the Vietnam War. If we had bombed in 1965 and kept bombing, we would not have had Congress outlaw air strikes after we had won in 1967 or 1968.
The lesson of Vietnam and later US failures isn’t that there’s no military solution to political problems. The lesson is that our military strategy and tactics for fighting these wars didn’t work. Allowing guerrillas a source of abundant financing and supply, allowing guerrillas sanctuary in other countries and imposing restrictive rules of engagement artificially limits the application of American military power.
Recently, we have watched ISIS go from strong to dead because we eliminated their source of income, oil sales, by bombing their tanker trucks, oil fields and oil handling facilities. I don’t mean to make light of the combat efforts it took to eliminate ISIS, but I do want to point out that ISIS was far less formidable broke than they were when they were rich. Eliminating their financial resources made them far easier to defeat.
Which brings us to Afghanistan. The Taliban runs on opium sales. Everybody knows it. To eliminate the Taliban, we would have needed to eliminate their opium sales. When we chose not to do it, we chose to lose. We compounded the problem by allowing the Taliban to use Pakistan as a sanctuary. Restrictive rules of engagement didn’t help either.
There was a military solution in Afghanistan for the Taliban, just like there was a military solution for the North Vietnamese Army in Vietnam. Nobody believes the Communists could have won an election in South Vietnam, and only a few people believe the Taliban could win an Afghan election without intimidation.
In the future, if we’re not willing to cut off guerrilla’s main supply source, we shoudn’t try to defeat them. If we aren’t going to even try to win, we shouldn’t play. Military leadership owes the American people a resignation and an explanation if they are ordered to wage a half a$$ed guerrilla war we can’t win. Two episodes of the Fall of Saigon is two too many.
Great comment, but how would you cut off the opium sales to the Taliban?
I have a distant memory that Tony Blair had an option to destroy opium crops in Afghanistan but bottled out. Maybe somebody else recalls this. Long time ago, of course.
Now, it would still be possible to go down that path (with much cost and risk) but it would also deprive rural communities of any income. Shame that opium has to be the crop of choice but I’d welcome more insights into these complex issues.
I suppose in contrary to the above essay, Douglas’ comment looks at the problem from a pure military angle. For this angle to be realistic we have to consider whether we can, using military force, change the nature of a country population as if the last hundred’s of years have little influence on how a population behaves and wants to live. In this case we have to consider that people/a population can just change its habits and world view over night (= over 50 years or less).
Lets do a test: would ‘you’ accept to change your ‘religion’ and culture to fit in with the world view of another population?
Note: your answer can only be subjective: it is impossible to be objective about the value of a culture.
Thanks William, good to get some historical and Afghani perspective. I’m left wondering; has there ever been any lasting peace in the place, it looks like the Afghans have been, and will be, at each others throats forever.
The reign of Zahir Shah was long and peaceful but is probably the exception that proves the rule.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mohammed_Zahir_Shah
It’s a shame that he was overthrown, but that happened in many countries, ostensibly to advance a country’s welfare, but usually resulting in the start of conflict with the aid of modern weapons.
He tried to help Karzai. He clearly did more than sit in his armchair.
Most interested in how Ashraf Ghani got elected with so many lacking confidence in him. Was he a puppet selected by western elites because he was unlike Karzai? Trump seemed to dislike Ghani to a degree but seemed to distrust Pakistan even more. The game between India, Pakistan and the new Taliban Afghanistan has a long way to go with China happy to keep them all on edge.
Unsure, but I hope Trump put some mechanisms in place to deal with Pakistan (which Biden will ignore, but oh well).
History can be tainted by perspective.
Good to see someone seeing through the smoke of historical verbiage and able to avoid jumping on the bandwagon of totally seduced readers. There was something in this piece I felt uncomfortable about, was it that the author was overly fitting things to confirm his personal world view? .. Was it style at the expense of critical thought ? ( perhaps a bit harsh)
I just couldn`t my finger on it, …until I read your comments.
And yet regardless of worldview the Afghan government whose continued existence justified two decades of military operation was blown down by a stiff breeze.
There is a place for military interventions but it has to clearly tied to a core national interest. Destroying Al-Qaeda was such an interest. Sending Afghan girls to school was manifestly not.
I’m sure the Taliban don’t do paintings. So they and their tribal menfolk must tell stories. And stories get told round camp fires, are easily disseminated and passed down. Maybe, for some, every evening is an eve-of-battle situation. They don’t play cricket, I’m almost certain.
The picture of the last stand on ‘a’ hill outside Gandamak, of Her Majesty’s 44th Foot, is dramatic-looking alright. And that scene would have been the lot of committed Afghan army units had they fought on without American air power to support them. That WAS a couple of weeks ago the reality for them.
they paint a lot; usually in red
They do actually (play cricket) and they’re rather good at it too.
Absolutely loved your spot on The Rest is History.
Surely the 1880 settlement of the 2nd War achieved British objectives until 1919, though.
Clearly this depended on having the army in then contiguous India, but isn’t the picture of the consistent failure of Western arms incomplete without at least nodding towards this?
William is indeed very well informed about the region, and his historical insights are instructive, but (and it’s a big BUT) he isn’t always, in my opinion, an even handed observer, he has, you might say “gone native” and suffers from that very 20th century, British, scholarly, intellectual, disease, Britain bad, everything else good.
It is is possible to be an imperial sceptic whilst being pro-British.
Anyway, he refers to British reforms in this article. He isn’t as anti-British as people say.
As I recall, on The Rest Is History podcast discussion, they do discuss this, basically concluding you can’t be a reformer if you don’t want to be called an imperialist.
That was only 39 years… and the goals of that war were narrowly focused on controlling Afghanistan’s foreign policy. Western arms have never had problems winning battles or producing short term changes and realignment. The idea of remodelling the society there was always a mirage though.
39 years ago, it was 1982. I don’t understand your point.
Quite so !! Spot on. Our so called educated elite never learn from history and rarely get punished at the ballot box for their stupidity. It is always we the hoi polloi who pay the price.
George Macdonald Fraser’s first Flashman novel is good on Afghanistan.
Whilst a most interesting article, the conclusions of which I fully understand, I am a little concerned that the Second Afghan War is only mentioned in the context of “Britain blundered into the Second Anglo-Afghan War” and the Third is not mentioned. I can understand the Third being left out, but the Second Afghan war did, to my mind, illustrate a number of lessons which I think would amplify this article, rather than diminish it. Roberts’ speed of operation and exit show that somethings can be done, they just perhaps can’t be done for very long.
Totally agree, though some of the battles were very close. And Britain was fortunate to have a decisive senior officer of the highest calibre in charge of that campaign. Someone of lesser qualities…
Indeed, and I have a high regard for Roberts. His performance in Afghanistan and South Africa suggests, to me, a man of markedly greater competence than his contemporaries, in the context of the operations he was asked to deal with.
I think my purpose, whilst agreeing with the article, is to reflect that the title is not comprehensively accurate. To say that Afghanistan cannot be occupied over a prolonged period seems perfectly accurate; Roberts, I believe, indicates that eager relentless pursuit and engagement followed by brisk withdrawal and menace is a different matter.
I do not readily see how the process followed in 1880 could be replicated in the present day, so I do not dispute the author’s direction. I did feel that contrasting the process with the Second Afghan war would have helpfully illustrated the author’s point with regard to the first and fourth instances. Referring to “Britain blundered into the second Anglo-Afghan war” seemed to gloss over an important opportunity for differentiation.
From memory, there were two British forces. The one to Kabul succeeded, the one to Kandahar failed, whereupon Roberts took an army from Kabul across hundreds of miles of Afghanistan to fight and win the battle of Kandahar. This of course long before radio, helicopters, air bombardment, antibiotics and other medical and hygienic advances.
As you say, it illustrates the fact that an alien army can defeat an Afghan army, but that victory shouldn’t be turned into defeat by staying in the midst of such a fierce and independent-minded population who inhabit such a wild country. And surely the very long period during which Britain made no attempt to govern the place rather shows the wisdom of its policy over a very long time, and the lack of wisdom in the modern politicians when it was ignored.
I think ” victory shouldn’t be turned into defeat by staying in the midst of such a fierce and independent-minded population” puts it very well.
William, you know more than anyone that the warlords have expertly played off superpower rivalry and have now moved on to taking advantage of Islamic terrorism. It’s highly likely that the US has struck a deal with the Taliban. “You control the country and prevent the export of islamic terrorism, and we’ll commit to funding you (i.e. protection money)”. There will be plenty of unmarked executive jets landing at discreet airports near Kabul over the next few years! The Taliban will find this far more lucrative than the commision they make from opium exports. If this is true, predict stability in the area and the squashing – by Taliban – of any ISIS competitive activity. None of this is to deny that Biden’s team’s handling of the actual exit has been anything other than disastrous.
Fascinating and informative essay. Just one quibble: ‘Sadly, by the time John Major was handing over 10 Downing Street to Tony Blair, Afghanistan was a distant memory’. Is this true? The Soviet humiliation in Afghanistan was within recent memory, and it’s not being wise after the event to say that this should have given pause for thought before getting into any long-term entanglement in that part of the world.
Clear. Illuminating. Riveting. Thank you.
An extraordinary insight. Thank you for your remarkable scholarship, that, other than a “good read” (and the strange Mrs. Clinton), appears to have been ignored by those directing and managing our engagement in Afghanistan these 20 years past. Why we thrust medical advisors, statisticians and Covid modellers to the forefront in designing helpful strategies, yet in deploying our most valuable human assets in foreign lands ignore this knowledge and experience that we have to guide us?
A helpful article that fills in a lot of information on just how naïve Bush, Blair, their advisers and successors were. It also highlights the much greater disparity between the cities and villages. It seems likely that internationally the Taliban will be supported to keep IS at bay and for economic advantages. It is hard to predict how stable their Government will be without knowing much more about the persons and politics within them. If there is a consensus that Sharia Law should be strictest outside of the home then they may leave access to the internet in place allowing women freedoms to work, educate and socialise from home. If they are nervous about having their authority challenged by popular opinion, as opposed to tribal factions, then they will shut the internet down and women will be even more isolated.
Sadly the decision on whether Bush and Blair were naive or not may well also need to take into account the press, elections and business support they enjoy…. Democracy is the least bad of all government systems…
Skipped over the war of retribution where Pollock got the British prisoners back. But yes, the appetite to fund and garrison the place was gone, much as it is now. The players will fall out, Al Q, ISIS-K, Taliban and Massood’s resistance. Interested to see how the Chinese get on. Classic don’t learn from history, rinse. repeat.
An excellent informative essay read with thanks
All this was well known in 2001, and ignored.
my father was an nco fighting in the NW Frontier Province pre-second world cup.
he loved what he called India (all the british empire countries), but had a simple view on NWFP – don’t bother!
we can refine our explanation for diplomatic reasons but the inference is quite clear.
one comforting crumb – the folks out their don’t want other foreigners meddling either.
Supposedly ‘moderate’ Muslims in the West have failed Afghanistan, And Syria, Iraq, Libya, etc. Not only every Muslim country, but are failing the UK as well. They have the knowledge, and safety, to formulate and interpret an authoritative version of their religious texts to bring them into line with the principles of ‘the religion of peace’ which they claim to belong to, but which, quite clearly, most of the Islamic world does not. Instead, it’s left to ayatollahs, sheiks, mullahs, imams, and fundamentalist clerics of all stripes to tell Muslims what and how to think, or not think at all. Moderate Muslims could help rescue Islam from the utter certainties demanded by al Ghazali, and promote the one quality which drives progress; the quest for knowledge and understanding that comes from doubt.
So the internal dynamic of Afghanistan has been and will be a contest between the people from nowhere and the people from somewhere.
I was talking to a chap in a pub yesterday (don’t laugh just yet!) who claimed that Biden caved in to the Taliban because he has a secret project to put an oil pipeline across Afghanistan to avoid dependence on Russia and its satellites. Actually this was a plan in the 1990s and it has been claimed this was the real motivation for the 2001 invasion. The question hanging from all these foreign adventures is: “What do the ‘elites’ know that we (the taxpayers who feed and house them) don’t?” If the ordinary Joe has a grasp of history along with his beer, how come this slips through the fingers of our leaders? The question riding on these is whether this kind of incestuous statecraft is the root of the problem.
I hope this chap in the pub is still taking his tablets. Building an oil pipeline is one thing. Protecting it is another. In probably the most lawless, unstable part of the world, doing neither is the safest option.
Unless your mate has struck oil in Afghan, presumably the pipeline will be for transiting oil from an oil producing country to an oil consuming one. Russia, Iran and some other central Asian states produce oil. But where to send it? Pakistan – rapidly becoming more of a danger to the West than Afghanistan. Or China…?
A fascinating read.
Come on then, tell us what’s wrong with Dalrymple’s account.
If we consider that we should export our way of living and thinking to other countries and populations we should consider whether this works best with arms or whether engagement (in many ways) is more likely to lead to success. Of course, success will be measured over many years, decades, centuries… Difficult perspective for politicians and the press…
Blair did whatever the US asked because they promised him a seat at the top table from the membership of which he has made a not inconsiderable fortune.
Blair did whatever the US asked because they promised him a seat at the top table from the membership of which he has made a not inconsiderable fortune.
I agree with you that the political and military strategies that have led to this lost war are important, but that does not negate the lessons history can teach us, surely both aspects are worth examining.
It would have been better for both of us if you had disagreed with me openly in a reply, instead of behind my back as it were, though being called a wiseacre did give me a laugh.
I obviously do not think it is all about me, that’s ridiculous. But in your first comment you say “self-appointed experts on Afghan tribal and warrior culture etc etc”. There is no other comment which refers to “warrior culture” specifically apart from mine, so it seems perfectly reasonable to think you were referring to me.
If you were not referring to me and had not even read my comments then my apologies.
He was clearly talking about the author.
I guess history always repeats itself – but never fully. I sympathise with your suggestion (?) that it is a bit too comfortable now to sit (in an armchair?) letting the latest 20 years of Western policy in Afghanistan slide smoothly into History.
The most “progressive” point in the above article, however, could be the recognition of relatively large scale transformations having taken place during the Western intervention, like education.
So what, on the other hand, makes Afghanistan “conservative” (maintaing what they are)? And what could it be that makes their conservatism seemingly strong? My suggestion would be ‘personal rule’. Although sleeping on an ant’s mould, the Afghan ruler is a person. This poses a challenge to the West. Our societies are democracies, but don’t always promote personhood. Politicians rather tend to ‘flatten’ their persons in order to get a broader appeal. Political power is also executed by impersonal bureaucracies. This may not look attractive to all other cultures.
“Afghanistan always defeats the West”
Really. Afghanistan is a worthless country that has been found by many to be unworthy of holding. The people who live there don’t have a clue what freedom means…and if they don’t get that after 20 years of US efforts, then their populace deserves what they get. Aside from getting US Troops out of there, I don’t give a single God Damn about that worthless country.
Thanks, Chris
I agree with Terry Needham below, about leaving people to their own devices. I’ve never favoured missionary activity. That being said, 20 years is a long time, and it is clear that a number of things were done, not least in education. Writing off the post-2001 Western policy is too early. The present overlords of Afghanistan will have to live with what the missionaries would consider some of their successes.
The human rights fantasy which all prig liberals naively and foolishly believe in, was the real driver of our involvement in Afganistan and the wider Middle East. Blairite ‘can do’, sort to answer the serious critique that HR are enforced not proclaimed, by the various invasions they undertook which were all genuine sincere attempts to create states founded on adherance to human rights principles. Each has ended in ignominy and disgrace.
It is a furtther disgrace, this time on modern conservatism, that there is almost no living conservative politician or journalist who didnt go along with the epic folly of “regime change”.
Spare a thought for that dismal bullshitter Christopher Hitchens, patron Saint of the Eternal Undergraduate, who embodies the intellectual fatuity of a generation human rights advocates, in all their repulsive self-righteousness and idiotic orthodoxies.