A History of Failure in Afghanistan: Part One.
Ok, so here’s what President Barack Obama should say today about the Middle East. We will leave Afghanistan tomorrow. We will leave Iraq tomorrow. We will stop giving unconditional, craven support to Israel.
Robert Fisk, Thursday 19th May 2011, The Independent (1).
The late, great Robert Fisk, in his acerbically honest and effervescent way, perhaps unique among Western journalists who lived in the Middle East, wrote the above words just before then President Obama made his ‘remarks on the Middle East and North Africa’ on the same day.
He also said a lot more besides— Fisk didn’t respect Obama, or Hillary for that matter, very much at all —and much further down the article, bluntly said that neither Obama nor Clinton ‘(had any) idea what they (were) facing in the Middle East’. Something which might just as easily be applied to Presidents George Dubya, Orange Fanta Man, and more latterly, Joe Biden.
Speaking on ‘Post Reports’ (2) Craig Whitlock likens the Afghanistan Papers, subject of his forthcoming book, to the Pentagon Papers, the defence departments top-secret history of the Vietnam War. He postulates that the American failure in Afghanistan largely boils down to the fact even after 20 years in Afghanistan most Americans on the ground had very little understanding of the country or it’s people.
So, stealing a line from Fisk, that might be summarised by saying the Americans had no idea what they facing in the Middle East.
Trying to ‘nation build’ — just love that term. Read on, you’ll see — or train an army in the midst of such ignorance of the nation concerned was never, ever going to succeed.
And when Americans talk about nation building it really is just realpolitik for colonialism anyway, but without the overtly, historically negative connotation.
Historically when colonial powers colonised an area, the Indian sub-continent for example, the Colonial process took generations to happen. Yet Americans naively seemed to think that they could construct a ‘mini-me’ inside of a few years, something which is plainly not going to happen — look Vietnam; look Iraq; now look Afghanistan, and outside of major wars, but disasters nonetheless, Haiti and Somalia.
All devastating failures. All enormously costly, both economically and militarily. But also so costly on humanitarian grounds. Civilian losses in each case dwarf military deaths. All hugely embarrassing and painful for American pride, and all hugely damaging to America’s reputation.
Is that naivete, or hubris? I’m undecided. Either way, as I’ve said before, Americans need to grasp the concept that not everyone wants to be like them. Not everyone wants what America’s got! Cos these days it might just be catching!
Whitlock (2) goes onto say that the reason America ended up staying so long in Afghanistan was basically because no President was prepared to take the political hit of such a disastrous failure — ‘not on my watch’ — until Biden came to power.
For that much, I guess Biden deserves some praise.
Though, had not polling suggested that the majority of Americans wanted out of Afghanistan — various polls suggested approximately 60% advocated pulling troops out — then, ‘let’s be clear,’ as Joe loves to say, it might not have happened.
However, clear eyed as ever, the majority of those Americans polled then up and contradicted themselves immediately by saying they also wanted troops to go back in to deal with the Taliban! Go figure!
Polling never was an exacting science!
Commentators and journalists in the US seem torn on Biden’s decision, as well as on his fighting stance re-his teams handling of the draw-down, some giving him a tentative thumbs up, but most are not impressed at all.
However, there does seem to be general agreement on the idea that the great American public will move onto something new before too long, and that despite a drop in Biden’s approval rating right now, there won’t be any lasting detrimental or electoral consequences for Biden, whatever one may think about his administrations performance during the chaotic, hard to watch scenes of the last week at Kabul airport and from across Afghanistan.
There may be longer lasting ramifications though internationally. While American’s can luxuriate in a short memory that can, arguably be considered a blessing, outside of the US we tend to stew on things a little bit longer.
The manner and execution of this withdrawal may have done lasting damage to America’s reputation abroad, leaving a very bad taste in the mouths of far too many non-Americans, but it is only with time that we will answer that question more fully. And so this is a discussion for another day.
In the end America’s fateful decision to stay the course after the stuttering success of the initial invasion in the Autumn of 2001, and begin the colonial — sorry folks! Freudian slip! — nation building project was a decision borne out of a lack of anything else to do really! This complete lack of a strategy sort of meandered aimlessly into nation building, the direction of which sort of vaguely and imprecisely grew out of American’s complex, often hypocritical relationship with democracy itself — just ask your average Republican who should qualify to vote.
Tactically of course, the invasion was initially a success, but an incomplete one. However, what it does show is that given the proper bipartisan political support America really can shift mountains if it so requires. To have successfully organised and executed such a mammoth logistical operation in the time span of just a few short weeks in 2001 goes to prove that when America and Americans work together they really can, as Joe likes to say, ‘achieve whatever they put their minds to.’
But there it ends really! The good news, that is!
I think it was David Petraeus — tried to find the reference, but plainly didn’t make a note at the time! Sorry about that! — who said recently, the war in Afghanistan was a ‘tactical success but a strategic failure!’
If you’re right, you’re right. And he was right.
So, following the initial tactical success, came strategic failure number one. That was the failure to gift wrap the mission by capturing or killing Osama bin Laden, then getting the hell outta Dodge!
Given that the mountain had already been already been metaphorically moved by US forces, why o’ why the use of overwhelming force was not employed at this time to ensure the complete success of the invasion remains a mystery. As it was, bin Laden escaped from his fortified cave in Tora Bora across the border to skulk about in the rugged tribal regions of Pakistan, effectively lost to the US for the next 10 years.
Had this giant tactical step been taken then perhaps the revenge mission — and let’s face it, that’s what it was —could have ended right there. The troops could have come home, the war would not have become the protracted disaster it eventually did become; we could have clapped the soldiers on the back with a hearty ‘well done lads,’ and all would have been fine and dandy!
But no! You can’t stop once you’ve already started! Strategic failure number two was hanging about in Afghanistan, as Forrest Gump might say, ‘for no particular reason.’
But hell! Why end it all there boys! Bring on strategic failure number three.
As above, American hubris or naivete — you pay’s your money, you makes your choice — couldn’t let a rip-roaring success get in the way of a mind-numbing defeat. Especially when the next invasion held such potential for enormously lucrative spin-offs,— best keep that quiet though, shhh! — so at the behest of Messrs Dubya, Grimwald Rumsfeld and Tricky Dick Cheney, it was decided that they wanted to get their hands on what Saddam had.
Thus for ‘no good reason whatsoever’ — welcome back Forrest! — well, other good old fashioned greed that is, they concocted a whole bunch of lies and half-truths, stripped the US forces in Afghanistan to bolster the more lucrative, money-making invasion of Iraq; that well known fictional home of WMD’s, al-Qaeda training camps and a thoroughly bad man, who just by some bizarre coincidence that’s best not mentioned, America had actually been supporting financially and militarily during the Iran-Iraq war — but that’s kinda by-the-by and not so important — in order to get their grubby little mitts on the vast reserves of oil that lay beneath Iraq’s sandy environs.
And as we know, the rest is what they now call history.
Except it isn’t.
Because those good old boys just couldn’t let it alone and decided in their infinite wisdom that what both Iraq and Afghanistan needed, after they’d both been pummelled by US air-strikes, was a nice political pick-me-up in the form of American democracy introduced through the process of colonial— oops! Sorry! What I meant to say was…— nation building and American trained armed forces.
And all that despite Dubya having said categorically that he wouldn’t use US armed forces for nation building, because that wasn’t their job (2) and he didn’t want to get caught like BJ Clinton did in Haiti and Somalia! But guess what? He did it anyway. “Yeh-harr! Go get ’em boys!”
Thing is, and here we start to see how complex (and I’m being kind by using that word instead of the infinitely more suitable term of ‘fucked up’) America’s relationship is with democracy. Because if they’d ever taken the time to actually talk to people in Iraq or Afghanistan they would learned that a Western style democracy, and in particular and American style democracy, wasn’t ever going to work in a nation with an Islamic majority in a gozillion years.
Your average Iraqi/Afghani— delete as appropriate — on the street might say something like, ‘Sure, democracy we’d like. But it’s gotta be our kind of Islamic democracy. Not your kind of Western style democracy!’
Well of course, that sort of response doesn’t go down too well with those colonial — sorry! There I go again — nation building folks at the state Department, so they came up with a solution. It was easy!
Just don’t ask the locals what they think might work; just go right ahead and do what we do best! After all, these poor uneducated, illiterate non-Americans don’t know what’s best for ‘em! So we goin’ tell up straight up! “Yeh-harr! Go get ’em boys!”
America loves to tell the world all about democracy promotion and how it’s leading the way; the world’s oldest (or should that be most broken?) democracy, blah de blah de blah and how nations with poor, illiterate, populations would reap the benefits politically and economically by joining hands across the world with America and it’s friends.
‘And we got some fine friends y’all, ‘specially in yo neck o’ the woods!’
They include Israel — that likes to call itself a successful democracy — but is in fact anything but a democracy, and just loves to violate the human rights of a significant proportion of its population on a daily basis and has been doing so for decades with impunity.
Then there’s Egypt, where we propped up the ruthless dictator Mubarak, and now al-Sisi, who rules a sham democratic nation that jails, tortures, even executes political opponents, but where we also refused to support a democratically elected head of state Mohamed Morsi — and, well, it’s kinda funny t’be honest, cos we even backed activists who were working to overthrow him on account o’ his connections to the Muslim Brotherhood, and oh yeh, al-Sisi, well, he abuses the human rights hell outta whole lotta people.
Well, next of course there’s those fantastic people in Saudi Arabia who not only kindly supplied 15 of the 9/11 bombers — which of course we don’t really talk about — but is also the biggest source of funding of Islamic cultural centres in the world that unashamedly promotes the hard-line Wahhabi doctrine, prevalent in Saudi, and subscribed to by many, if not most, of the world’s most famous and deadly Islamic terrorist groups including al-Qaeda— but we don’t like to talk about that — and remains the single biggest export market for US made weapons — so now you know why we don’t like to talk about it — but they’re really fantastic people, even if they did slice and dice Jamal Khashoggi — but we really, really can’t talk about that — or even make MBS et al into the pariahs we said we would, because they really, really are fantastic people underneath it all with very, very deep pockets…
And the list goes on…we got friends aplenty! So c’mon! Join the club!
As Robert Fisk likes to say, America does democracy promotion right enough. But it has to be the ‘right kind of democracy’ with the right kind of democratic leader at the top; basically one that they can keep under their big fat American thumb! And one that will keep those pesky terrorists in line even if that does mean horribly abusing the human rights of large swathes of their own people in the process. Otherwise, if that democratically elected champion can’t manage that then, it’s — if you can visualise me now dragging my finger across my throat and making a gurgling sound that helps! — for you!
And then Hey Presto! Regime change and yet another money making war! “Yeh-harr! Go get ’em boys!”
Anyway you look at, America wins! Ain’t life grand?
- Arab Spring Then & Now. From hope to despair. Published by The Independent. Robert Fisk, Patrick Cockburn & Kim Sengupta; 2016.
- The Afghanistan Papers Revisited. Post Reports podcast from the Washington Post; August 20th 2021.
