Long read: how the US lost its appetite for intervention

General Austin Miller’s resignation from his command of US operations in Afghanistan this week brings to an end America’s $2.2 trillion commitment to a war and reconstruction effort that has cost 2,500 military personnel and contractors their lives.

Last week, US air force planes, drones and personnel suddenly quit the base at Bagram, an hour north of Kabul, by road. The lights were extinguished on a timer. They went off 20 minutes after the planes and personnel quit – so their Afghan hosts wouldn’t know they’d gone.

On 24 June, the British tried to dignify the exodus of their last vestigial military force with a modest flag lowering at their base – no press or media invited.

This hugger-mugger affair calls to mind another flag lowering ceremony in Kabul. This time it was on a foggy morning on 30 January 1989. Press were invited to see the American chargé Jon Glassman lower the Stars and Stripes on the Soviet-backed regime of Mohammed Najibullah. The Red Army was pulling out and the betting was that the insurgent Mujahedeen would soon be at the gates of Kabul. On lowering the flag, Glassman proclaimed: “The people of Afghanistan will enjoy peace and freedom once again. That is our wish.”

Some hope. Najibullah hung on – until the money ran out, and then was lynched after being dragged from the UN compound in Kabul. The Mujahedeen, flush with American and British weapons, rolled up in 1992 and proceeded to fight each other – an internecine feud, which wrecked Kabul, and was only stopped by the arrival of the Taliban in 1996.

Fighting and plunder has been continuous ever since 1989. The US and its allies, Britain in the lead, resumed contact with Afghanistan to oust bin Laden and his Taliban hosts. This was the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, believed to have been planned in Afghanistan.

The western intervention has been a story of messy planning, confused strategy, disjointed execution on the ground, and high and low intent. The British committed a budget in excess of £32bn, a total of 150,000 military personnel over  20 years – at the cost of 457 killed in the line of duty, to say nothing of the wounded and the toll on brave NGO leaders trying to bring help, health and education to Afghans.

This was at least the sixth military withdrawal, or retreat, from Afghanistan, since 1832 – the first British-Afghan war. Last week Prime Minister Boris Johnson and the head of the armed services General Sir Nick Carter tried to put a brave face on what had been achieved by the British effort – especially in Helmand Province. They pointed to the amount of aid spent on clean water, health services, and education – especially for girls. “Afghanistan today is very different today from twenty years ago,” Cater said – and instanced the fact that 3.2 million girls are now in school. But for how long, now the Taliban legions are on the march, one may wonder?

He also admitted that “the news now is grim,” with the Taliban claiming huge areas of rural Afghanistan, though so far they hadn’t succeeded in taking a provincial capital. Since he spoke last Thursday, the Taliban have captured the provincial centre at Qala-e-Naw, capital of Badghis Province. At a news conference in Moscow at the weekend the Taliban claimed to hold 85 per cent of Afghan territory.

Carter also had hopes that the western–trained government forces might defeat the Taliban as they approach Kabul in full force. He said he could also envision a major and decisive engagement – “a battle of Jalalabad”, as he put it. There might be a peace agreement, such as the one with the Americans at Doha in February last year.

Each of his scenarios seemed somewhat implausible. Afghanistan seems condemned to yet more violence and chaos which worries the neighbours – Russia, Iran, India, and China included – and not just the western alliances. India withdrew its diplomats from Kandahar, the lynchpin of south west Afghanistan, at the weekend.

The boast that Afghan territory is no longer a base for international extremist groups – the prime reason for the commitment of force in autumn 2001 – seems pretty idle. The UN reported at the end of last year that there were at 500 “effective operatives” of al Qaeda in the country, plus new formations and mutations of ISIS or “Daesh”.

Then there is the conundrum of Pakistan, which is always both part of the problem of Afghanistan and the Taliban, as much as the solution. Taliban militant groups were largely raised and trained in the Pashtu refugee camps and madrassas in Pakistan. They have been organised, trained and supplied by elements of Pakistan’s armed forces, especially ISI, the hugely powerful inter-services intelligence agency. Pakistan trainers have been discovered among Taliban fighting units.

For Pakistan itself, Taliban affiliates such as Tehrik-i-Taliban in Pakistan (TTP) present a persistent threat. They have been hit hard by Pakistan’s armed forces – and lost popularity after several ugly attacks on schools. They remain a crucial link in a network of hardline Islamist militants across Afghanistan, Pakistan and Kashmir. Their activities and influence are unlikely to be confined to their native territory and region.

A strange omission from the account of the closure of the British mission to Afghanistan by Boris Johnson and General Carter was the role of opium poppy and the narco economy. It was, after all, one of the alleged reasons Tony Blair was keen to send troops to Helmand. Today drugs account for around 60 per cent of the Afghan economy – and much of the rest comes from aid revenue and subventions.

Tony Blair’s government volunteered to tackle the drug issue following the Bonn conference for the settlement and reconstruction of Afghanistan in December 2001. Donald Rumsfeld, the US Defense Secretary who was effectively running US Afghan policy, scored what in hindsight appears a spectacular own goal: he forbade any representation of any element of the Taliban – who even then still held sway in much of rural Afghanistan.

At Bonn, principal donor nations took responsibility for different areas of assistance; training the army and police, developing agriculture and light industry, justice reform, health, hygiene, and education.

By 2004 this led to a crazy muddle of military and security planning, strategy, and development programming, linked tenuously to nation building in Afghanistan. This was the story of Whitehall in action, and full dysfunction. It was part of the agreed plan for 2004 that the peace support or “stabilisation” operation by the International Security Assistance Force of some 37 nations should be spread across Afghanistan as a whole and beyond main provincial capitals.

This took the British to Helmand, the best poppy growing province. How all this came about, and the lessons that still need to be learned, is described and analysed in a brilliant study by Mirjam Grandia Mantas of the Netherlands Army, “Inescapable Entrapments” on the planning of the Dutch and British deployment to Uruzgan and Helmand. I have reviewed its conclusions at length elsewhere in this publication and underlined the lessons still to be learned from the mash-up of the experience of UK, Dutch, Canadian, Danish, Estonian and Australian forces and policies across the south west provinces between 2006 and 2014.

In sum, Blair wanted Britain to show that it was a vital ally to the US, was effective as a senior Nato member, and had forces that could punch above their weight. This was to be shown by a force of 3,150 to stabilise Helmand in three years. They had to aid development, government and justice reform, and eradicate drug production. This had to be done “because this helps get the drugs off British streets” according to the Blair mantra. In the same way, British and allied forces were there “to keep terrorists from menacing our cities again.” By the time UK troops had got even halfway through the mission, few believed in either proposition. Grandia’s book shows the planning by civil servants and military both in the Netherlands and the UK followed an almost ritualistic pattern of observing well worn practice and norms – so the means and modes of action on the ground never matched the lofty intentions. In other words, it was like that old favourite in “I am Sorry I haven’t a Clue” – one song to the tune of another. As when he went into Iraq, Blair never completely explained his intent for Helmand to party, parliament or public – and not many of his cabinet either, it seems. The press and media weren’t nosey or forensic enough about what was being cooked up and why.   

Sadly, but unsurprisingly, Boris Johnson said an enquiry into the Afghan adventure is neither timely nor appropriate. He is wrong. An open inquest is needed urgently and quickly if the UK is to mount peacekeeping, stabilisation, rescue and recovery operations of scale and credibility in the foreseeable future.

The operations in Iraq and Afghanistan have left Britain with a barebones army – which can only be employed and supported by an ally in any peace, stabilisation or security operations in the immediate foreseeable future. The difficulties working with America are underscored by Biden’s pronouncements on his closedown of operations in Afghanistan in the past two weeks. So the UK will have to work closely with likeminded nations from across the board, including Europe.

In a trickle of announcements of the end of Afghan operations – “America’s longest war” – Joe Biden has stressed his reservations about the operation in the first place, and doing anything remotely like it again during his presidency. “We are not in this for nation building,” he announced, and, “it’s now up to Afghans to decide on their own future.” The latter remark could be judged about as weasely as Jon Glassman’s about peace were naïve back on that foggy flag dipping morning in Kabul in 1989.

Biden might well have gone the whole hog, and echoed the corny US Marines nostrum in Afghanistan: “Peacekeeping is for pussies.” As vice-president he opposed Obama’s reluctant and very temporary reinforcement of 30,000 troops in December 2009. This was despite Obama announcing at the same time that a military drawdown would start the following July.

Biden had a particular dislike of President Hamid Karzai, as he did for Benjamin Netanyahu – both as a result of testy verbal exchanges. On Karzai he had a point. He was running a kleptocracy, living largely on the bounty of international aid. This led Peter Galbraith, veteran US diplomat and deputy UN representative in Kabul, to question supporting Karzai and his clan when he stood for re-election in 2009 – an election which was fraught with claims of ballot rigging and fraud. Corruption, along with drugs, and the uncertainty of the future path of the Taliban and its Islamist associates is the biggest question of the viability of any governance from Kabul in the decade to come.

Peter Galbraith’s questioning of the Kabul kleptocracy raises the question of why a major peacekeeping or counter–terrorist strategy is never corrected by commanders or politicians – like those of America and Britain, in this case – until it is too late. Grandia’s book shows that institutions and commands are so wedded to their practices – “normative behaviours” – that they cannot quickly reassess and adapt. This is the parable of the “Yes Minister” TV series of former civil servant Anthony Jay. Put simply, it means that institutionalised practice trumps free tactical and strategic innovation and thought. It breaks one of the oldest military maxims: don’t reinforce failure.

With Biden, it goes further. He is reluctant to get involved in any peacekeeping and stabilisation operations that involve flexible deployment, and above all a flexible timetable. For this reason he has turned a deaf ear to the urgent requests for a stabilisation force in Haiti following the murder of the country’s controversial president. True, this follows a decade of a very expensive American-led aid and sustainment operation, which has achieved little in terms of stability, safety and governance. This echoes the US–Afghan missteps. But Haiti is 840 miles from Florida where hundreds of thousands of refugees could be heading soon. Slightly over 450 miles south of Florida, Cuba is now the scene of civic meltdown over Covid, another source of unrest and refugees.

The whole notion of peacekeeping and liberal intervention is now under stress, if not facing outright rejection. With the end of the Cold War came the era of peacekeeping and humanitarian intervention, cruelly distorted by the eccentric formulation of the Global War On Terror by George W Bush and Donald Rumsfeld.

This past week President Emmanuel Macron has pulled the plug on France’s stability and support mission to five Sahel countries – Operation Barkhane. The force of 5,100 French troops is to start winding down this week. This is after a second coup in Mali in a year and there are reports that the regime is in collusion with Islamist groups. France is to join an international group to “attack leaders of the militants, and help build up legitimate forces in the region.” From peacekeeping and stabilisation, the focus switches to classical counter-terrorism and counter-insurgency tactics, impure and simple.

Elsewhere, peacekeeping operations are unravelling – most spectacularly in South Sudan. It should be celebrating it 10th birthday as an independent nation; instead it is mourning 10 years of civil war. Peacekeepers, including a small British engineer detachment, are preparing to quit in frustration.

America’s reluctance to get involved in the messy realism of peace operations, following the Biden lead this month, marks a real turning point for the network of western alliances. Biden’s administration seems to treat such work in Africa and much of the Middle East as a job for others. Such activities should, naturally, be part of supporting “the rules-based order” Biden has been so keen to proclaim. But his aloofness towards real thinking and action on this score is like that of an absentee landlord in the Ireland of his ancestors.

Stabilisation and peacekeeping is not a game of political gestures – of the kinds that too many Afghans and Iraqis have been victim these past 20 years.

In the interest of donor and recipient, it is time for a hard rethink and reset before it is too late.