Before the events of this month, the First Anglo-Afghan War was arguably the greatest military humiliation ever suffered by the West in the East. Britain’s entanglement with Afghanistan between 1839-42 was catastrophic, costly and entirely avoidable. Nothing until the fall of Singapore in 1942 was so disastrous for Britain.
The most infamous incident of the war was the retreat from Kabul, which began on the 6th January 1842. An entire army — 18,500 men — left the British cantonment, only to be annihilated by scantly-equipped tribesmen. In the myth of the war, only one British citizen, the surgeon Dr Brydon, made it through to Jalalabad six days later.
Brydon’s desperate escape on a collapsing nag became one of the era’s most famous images, in Lady Butler’s oil Remnants of an Army. Likewise, William Barnes Wollen’s celebrated painting of the Last Stand of the 44th Foot — a group of ragged but doggedly determined soldiers on the hilltop of Gandamak standing encircled behind a thin line of bayonets, as the Pashtun tribesmen close in — drummed home the terrible truth of the war. The world’s premier military nation had been brought low, it’s armies massacred or enslaved.
Defeat cast a long shadow. Perhaps it was that image of a desperate Brydon, half-alive outside the gates of Jalalabad, that deterred British policy-makers from further adventures.
“Remnants of an Army” by Elizabeth Butler portraying William Brydon arriving at the gates of Jalalabad as the only survivor of a 16,500 strong evacuation from Kabul in January 1842.
Writing just before Britain blundered into the Second Anglo-Afghan War 30 years later, George Lawrence, a veteran of the first conflict wrote, “a new generation has arisen which, instead of profiting from the solemn lessons of the past, is willing and eager to embroil us in the affairs of that turbulent and unhappy country . . . Although military disasters may be avoided, an advance now, however successful in a military point of view, would not fail to turn out to be as politically useless . . . The disaster of the Retreat from Kabul should stand forever as a warning to the Statesmen of the future not to repeat the policies that bore such bitter fruit in 1839–42.”
Lawrence’s warning was still echoing when Harold Macmillan told his successor Alec Douglas-Home “as long as you don’t invade Afghanistan you’ll be absolutely fine.” Sadly, by the time John Major was handing over 10 Downing Street to Tony Blair, Afghanistan was a distant memory. In 2001, soon after the catastrophe of 9/11 Blair signed up with Bush to invade Afghanistan yet again. What followed was a textbook case of Aldous Huxley’s adage that the only thing you learn from history is that no one learns from history.
Britain’s Fourth Afghan War was to an extraordinary, near-absurd extent, a replay of the first. The parallels between the two invasions were not just anecdotal, they were substantive. The same group rivalries and the same battles were fought out in the same places 170 years later under the guise of new banners, new beliefs and new political orchestrators. The same cities were occupied by troops speaking the same languages, and they were attacked again from the same high passes. In both cases, the invaders thought they could walk in, perform regime change, and be out in a couple of years. Ultimately, in both cases they were unable to prevent themselves being pulled into a much wider, bloodier conflict.
The First Afghan War was waged on the basis of doctored intelligence about a virtually non-existent threat: information about a single Russian envoy to Kabul was exaggerated and manipulated by a group of ambitious and ideologically-driven hawks to create a scare — in this case, about a phantom Russian invasion. As John MacNeill, the Russophobe British ambassador wrote from Tehran: “we should declare that he who is not with us is against us… We must secure Afghanistan.” Thus was brought about an avoidable war with all its astonishing resonances with our situation today.
Take the puppet ruler — Shah Shuja ul-Mulk — the British tried to install in 1839. He was from the same Popalzai sub-tribe as Hamid Karzai. His bitterest opponents? The Ghilzais, who today are the mainstay of the Taliban’s forces. Taliban leader Mullah Omar was the chief of the Hotaki Ghilzai, just like Mohammad Shah Khan, the warrior who supervised the destruction of the British army in 1841. These parallels were largely invisible to Westerners, but frequently pointed out by the Taliban: “Everyone knows how Karzai was brought to Kabul and how he was seated on the defenceless throne of Shah Shuja” they announced in a press release soon after he came to power.
We in the West may have forgotten the details of this history that did so much to mould the Afghans’ hatred of foreign rule, but Afghans never did. In particular Shah Shuja remains a symbol of quisling treachery in Afghanistan: in 2001, the Taliban asked their young men, ‘Do you want to be remembered as a son of Shah Shuja or as a son of Dost Mohammad?’ As he rose to power, Mullah Omar deliberately modelled himself on the deposed Emir, Dost Mohammad, and like him removed the Holy Cloak of the Prophet Mohammad from its shrine in Kandahar and wrapped himself in it, declaring himself like his model Amir al-Muminin, the Leader of the Faithful, a deliberate and direct re-enactment of the events of First Afghan War, whose resonance was immediately understood by all Afghans.
Hamid Karzai was particularly sensitive to these parallels. When I first published my book the First Anglo-Afghan War, Return of a King, in 2012, he called me to Kabul. Karzai quizzed me on the details over several dinners at his palace about the lessons this history can teach us. His view was that the US were doing to him what the British had done to Shah Shuja 170 years ago: “The lies Lord Auckland told Dost Mohammad Khan, that we don’t want to interfere with your country, that’s exactly what they tell us today, the Americans and all the others,” he told me. “Our so-called current allies behave to us just as the British did to Shah Shuja. They have squandered the opportunity given to them by the Afghan people. They tried to do exactly as they did in the 19th century.”
Karzai made it clear that he thought Shah Shuja didn’t stress his independence enough, and said he was never going to allow himself to be remembered as anyone’s puppet. After reading Return of a King, he substantially altered his policies to make sure he never repeated his forbear Shah Shuja’s mistakes. Hilary Clinton blamed his reading of my book for a chilling of relations between Kabul and the White House during the Obama years — according to a leaked email published in the New York Times after Wikileaks.
Ashraf Ghani, Karzai’s successor, was a noted academic anthropologist and economist. He’d stood on the TED stage in Berkeley, California and co-authored a well-received book on fixing “failed states”. Sadly he learned nothing from the lessons of history. Karzai was a skilful diplomat and an operator; Ghani was rude, lofty, impatient and arrogant. He pushed away tribal leaders with his lack of charm and politeness. He would tell clan elders who had trekked across Afghanistan to see him that they had “ten minutes” and he would take off his shoes, put his feet up on a stool and point them at petitioners — an act of huge rudeness in Indian and Afghan society. As we have seen, in the end, few were willing to die to keep Ghani in power.
For the Afghans, the First Afghan War changed their state forever: on his return in 1842, Emir Dost Mohammad inherited the reforms made by the British and these helped him consolidate an Afghanistan that was much more clearly defined than it was before the war. Indeed Shuja and most of his contemporaries never used the word “Afghanistan” — for him, there was a Kingdom of Kabul which was the last surviving fragment of the Durrani Empire and which lay on the edge of a geographical space he described as Khurasan. Yet within a generation the phrase Afghanistan existed widely on maps both in and outside the country and the people within that space were beginning to describe themselves as Afghans. The return of Shah Shuja and the failed colonial expedition which was mounted to reinstate him finally destroyed the power of the Sadozai dynasty and ended the last memories of the Durrani Empire that they had founded. In this way the war did much to define the modern boundaries of the Afghan state, and consolidated once and for all the idea of a country called Afghanistan.
“The last stand of the survivors of Her Majesty’s 44th Foot at Gandamak” by William Barnes Wollen, portraying a stand made by soldiers of the 44th Foot on a hill outside Gandamak during the retreat from Kabul in 1842. As late as 2010, the bones of the dead still covered the hillside.
If the First Afghan War helped consolidate the Afghan State, the question now is whether our current failed Western intervention will contribute to its demise. Afghanistan has changed beyond all recognition in the last twenty years. The cities have grown, people travel much more widely, thousands of women have been educated. Television, the internet and an ebullient media have opened many minds. It is impossible in such circumstances to predict the fate of the divided state of Afghanistan under renewed Taliban rule, even as the resistance begins to organise itself in the Panjshir Valley under the leadership of my old friend Amrullah Saleh, formerly the head of the NSD. But what the Afghan historian Mirza ‘Ata wrote after 1842 remains equally true today: ‘It is certainly no easy thing to invade or govern the Kingdom of Khurasan.’
For the truth is that in the last millennia there had been only very brief moments of strong central control when the different Afghan tribes have acknowledged the authority of a single ruler, and still briefer moments of anything approaching a unified political system. Afghanistan has always been less a state than a kaleidoscope of competing tribal principalities governed through maliks or vakils, in each of which allegiance was entirely personal, to be negotiated and won over rather than taken for granted.
The tribes’ traditions have always been egalitarian and independent, and they have only ever submitted to authority on their own terms. Financial rewards might bring about cooperation, but rarely ensured loyalty: the individual Afghan soldier owed his allegiance first to the local chieftain who raised and paid him, not to the shahs or Kings or Presidents in faraway Kabul. Yet even the tribal leaders had frequently been unable to guarantee obedience, for tribal authority was itself so elusive and diffuse. As the saying went: Behind every hillock there sits an emperor — pusht-e har teppe, yek padishah neshast (or alternatively: Every man is a khan — har saray khan deh). In such a world, the state never had a monopoly on power, but was just one among a number of competing claimants on allegiance. “An Afghan Amir sleeps upon an ant heap,” went the proverb.
The first British historian of Afghanistan, Mountstuart Elphinstone, grasped this as he watched Shah Shuja’s rule disintegrate around him. “The internal government of the tribes answers its ends so well”, he wrote, “that the utmost disorders of the royal government never derange its operations, nor disturb the lives of its people.” No wonder that Afghans proudly thought of their mountains as Yaghistan — the Land of Rebellion.
This is now the problem facing the Taliban. As the Taliban transforms its military command into a government for Afghanistan, alliances and tribal configurations that kept two rival Taliban factions together in recent years are already being tested. Factional divisions began to emerge between the Quetta Shura and militant commanders farther east on the ground after the death of Mullah Omar in 2013. The result was a far-reaching realignment among Taliban factions — particularly between hard-line groups like the Haqqani network that wanted to escalate fighting and more moderate Taliban leaders who sought accommodation with Kabul and Islamabad.
It is too early to see if, and how, the different Taliban commanders from East and West Afghanistan, the Quetta shura and the Taliban political wing manage in Doha manage to settle their differences and succeed in control Afghanistan’s naturally centrifugal polity — certainly the recent campaign appears to have had far more disciplined and coherent coordination than any of us expected. Only time will tell if the movement remains united or splinters into regional Taliban fiefdoms.
What is the longer-term strategic picture now? Few will now trust American or NATO promises and we have handed a major propaganda victory to our enemies everywhere. India has lost a leading regional ally and Pakistan’s ISI believe they have won a major victory — Imran Khan went as far as saying that the Taliban victory meant the freeing of the Afghans from the “shackles of slavery”. Meanwhile China has announced it will do business with the Taliban regime, and reopen the Mes Aynak copper mine which lies beneath a major Buddhist Silk Road archaeological site. The direction the winds are blowing in is clear.
Britain’s Fourth Afghan War has ended, like the First, in ignominy and defeat. There is no Lady Butler or William Barnes Wollen around today to paint the explosions outside Kabul airport, or the desperate crush around American C-130 transport planes inside its perimeter. A Butler or a Wollen is not needed — images of both have already travelled halfway around the world on social media. The words of the First Afghan War’s first historian, Rev. G.R. Glieg, are as hauntingly apt in 2021 as they were in 1843: “Not one benefit, political or military, has been acquired with this war. Our eventual evacuation of the country resembled the retreat of an army defeated.”
William Dalrymple is a Scottish historian, art historian, and photographer. Return of a King: the Battle for Afghanistan 1839-42, is published by Bloomsbury.
Informative 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.
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.
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.
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.
Lesley van Reenen
2 years ago
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.”
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!
Claire D
2 years ago
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.
Tom Lewis
2 years ago
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.
How can a campaign to promote the rights of women be anything other than a mission for societal change?
Adam Bartlett
2 years ago
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.
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
Perry de Havilland
2 years ago
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.
David McDowell
2 years ago
This essay alone is worth the subscription.
Douglas Proudfoot
2 years ago
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.
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.
David George
2 years ago
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.
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.
Geoffrey Simon Hicking
2 years ago
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.
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.
Dustshoe Richinrut
2 years ago
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 do actually (play cricket) and they’re rather good at it too.
Tony Taylor
2 years ago
Absolutely loved your spot on The Rest is History.
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Christian Moon
2 years ago
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.
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.
William Blake
2 years ago
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.
Kerie Receveur
2 years ago
George Macdonald Fraser’s first Flashman novel is good on Afghanistan.
Andrew Hammond
2 years ago
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.
Mangle Tangle
2 years ago
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.
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Andrew D
2 years ago
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.
David Pinder
2 years ago
Clear. Illuminating. Riveting. Thank you.
John Hicks
2 years ago
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?
Jon Hawksley
2 years ago
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…
Zorro Tomorrow
2 years ago
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.
Barrie EMMETT
2 years ago
An excellent informative essay read with thanks
Matt B
2 years ago
All this was well known in 2001, and ignored.
Last edited 2 years ago by Matt B
ed martin
2 years ago
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.
GA Woolley
2 years ago
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.
Mike Buttolph
2 years ago
So the internal dynamic of Afghanistan has been and will be a contest between the people from nowhere and the people from somewhere.
Nicholas Taylor
2 years ago
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…?
Howard Gleave
2 years ago
A fascinating read.
Michael James
2 years ago
Come on then, tell us what’s wrong with Dalrymple’s account.
Edward De Beukelaer
2 years ago
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…
Campbell P
2 years ago
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.
Campbell P
2 years ago
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.
Claire D
2 years ago
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.
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.
Chris Eaton
2 years ago
“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.
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.
Patrick Mallen
2 years ago
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.
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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.