My blog posts are almost always about writing and the world of publishing, but the shambles in Afghanistan, a shambles that has been entirely caused by the bumbling idiot Joe Biden, the utterly incompetent ‘leader of the free world,’ is too important to ignore. And it’s actually a subject that I know something about. A few years ago I ghosted a non-fiction book entitled ‘Joint Force Harrier’ for the Royal Navy’s most senior frontline Harrier pilot, and that was all about Afghanistan and the Taliban. So for what it’s worth, let me give you my take on what’s happened.
The one lesson that the human race has learnt from history is that the human race has never learnt anything from history.
The Allied campaign in Afghanistan was doomed from day one and anybody with the slightest knowledge of the history of the region should have realised that. Arguably the greatest military leader who ever existed was Alexander the Great, and his all-conquering army was defeated by the terrain and the people of Afghanistan. The Russians, possessing the second most powerful military machine in the world after the United States, and driven by a ruthless determination to succeed, retreated ignominiously – much as Britain and America are doing right now – beaten by what amounted to a ragtag guerrilla army armed with assault rifles and not much else. The Russians’ opponents were the mujahedin while today it’s the Taliban – essentially the same Afghani tribesmen just wearing different colour outfits and touting a different political philosophy – who are the victors.
So why was failure inevitable? Why did so many Allied soldiers, soldiers who fought with incredible bravery, often under the most appalling conditions, have to die?
There are several reasons, but most of them can be distilled into a single sentence: the reality is that the British and American governments had no coherent plan for the campaign and completely failed to understand the Afghan mindset, principles and attitude.
Let me be specific.
When the Allied forces took Berlin in the Second World War, the Nazi regime ceased to exist. The city was a clear strategic objective and once it was encircled Hitler and his henchmen had nowhere else to go. The Taliban are entirely different. They are everywhere and nowhere. They have no bases that can be attacked and destroyed. They are guerrilla fighters, able to operate in any area they choose for as long or as short a time as they wish, striking without warning. Fighting the Taliban has been accurately described as like fighting smoke.
But surely the Allies must have had a plan? Not really, no.
In simple terms, the Allied forces would identify an area where the Taliban had taken control. Troops would be sent out to that village or valley, and the Taliban would be driven away. Every contact between the Allied forces and the Taliban ended in an Allied victory because we had ‘fast air,’ jet fighters and bombers able to be summoned whenever needed and which could then drop bombs or fire rockets to disrupt the Taliban occupation and inflict serious casualties. Fine. The Allies would then do a bit of hearts and minds stuff to encourage the villagers and the farmers, and then they’d leave. And then, surprise, surprise, the Taliban would move right back in.
That in no way constitutes a planned campaign. It’s entirely reactive and was doomed to failure from the start.
In parallel with tackling the Taliban by force of arms, the Allies also embraced the concept of hearts and minds, but they even got that wrong. Allied engineers would visit some village and dig a well or install a generator or something else that would make the life of the villagers that little bit easier. Good idea? Yes, but virtually in parallel with that other Allied soldiers would then discover that the only cash crop the land around the village produced was opium, so they would steam in and use flamethrowers to destroy the poppies, doing their bit to disrupt the drug trade.
According to one of my sources, and because opium and opiates are extremely important drugs in use by the medical profession, it was suggested that instead of destroying the poppies the Allies should buy the crop rather than let the farmers sell it to the drug traffickers. That, apparently, was vetoed at government level by countries that benefited financially from the illegal trade in drugs, and there are plenty of narco-economies between Afghanistan and Western Europe, the principal destination.
So the conflict on the ground had its problems, but possibly the biggest problem of all was the national psyche of the Afghanistan people. It’s been well said that you can never earn an Afghan’s loyalty: the best you can ever hope to do is rent it by the hour. An Afghan can change his mind with incredible rapidity, sometimes even in the same sentence. Villagers could be violently anti-Taliban one day and a week later be enthusiastic supporters of the movement. We’ve seen examples of this in the news reports from Afghanistan this week, with Afghan army soldiers dumping their uniforms and weapons and, quite probably, enthusiastically joining the Taliban forces as soon as they could.
And in parallel with this national inability to ever commit to a single belief or philosophy, the Afghans as a nation are institutionally corrupt. Financial aid funnelled into the country almost inevitably ends up in the wrong place: the wrong place in this case usually being some Afghan official’s bank account. The former president of Afghanistan is the obvious example of this, unless you believe that the reported $100 million plus he was clutching when he arrived in the UAE represented what he’d managed to save from his salary.
While creepy Joe Biden might – uncharacteristically – be telling the truth in that it was never the Allied intention to create a nation-state in Afghanistan, but only to drive out Al Qaeda and stop the country being used as a base for terror attacks around the world. But his very limited intellect means he has clearly failed to grasp the obvious fact that the only way to achieve that aim long-term was to create a nation-state, a country that could stand on its own two feet and resist both the Taliban and Al Qaeda. And Western leaders also entirely failed to recognise the fact that there was no point in trying to foist a democracy upon the people of Afghanistan because they are Muslims, and Islam and democracy cannot easily, or even actually, coexist.
Afghanistan under the Taliban will almost certainly, and very quickly, become an extraordinarily unpleasant place to live, especially for those Afghans who have the misfortune to be women, who in Taliban eyes are less than the dust that the men tread. If they’re lucky, they might just be allowed to live as third-class citizens, as long as they follow the rules. If they’re unlucky and they’re caught committing some infraction, Sharia law will no doubt demand a painful and possibly fatal public punishment. Don’t forget that the Taliban see nothing wrong with throwing homosexuals off the top of buildings, whipping young girls for eating an ice cream – if they’re lucky enough to find one – on the street, and routinely mutilating and executing people for other more serious crimes. Women found to have committed adultery can expect to be stoned to death, while the errant male involved will just get a stern talking to, because he’s a man and far more important, and there are even reports that one punishment inflicted by the Taliban – upon women, obviously, who have severely irritated these bigoted religious lunatics – is for them to be skinned alive.
To describe the Taliban as mediaeval is giving them a great deal more modernity than they deserve. These people are little more than evil, vicious and uneducated savages. Savages who unfortunately are now equipped with Kalashnikovs and RPGs rather than the chipped stone tools that would frankly be a far better fit with their level of intellectual and historic development.
You cannot reason or negotiate with a religious fanatic of any persuasion and especially not with one carrying an assault rifle.
And to those few deluded souls who apparently still believe that life under the Taliban will actually be pretty good, all I can say is: don’t listen to what they say. Just watch what they do.
The only viable solution to the situation in Afghanistan is for the Afghans themselves to sort it out, to decide what they want to do about the Taliban and Al Qaeda and all the other terrorist organisations that will no doubt already be booking themselves flights to Kandahar or Kabul.
The best, and in my opinion the only, way forward is to repatriate all the Western soldiers and workers from Afghanistan, along with as many as possible of the Afghans who worked for the Allies. Then we should just walk away and make sure that we finally institute proper immigration checks on our incredibly porous borders to try to weed out the obvious terrorists before they strap on Semtex waistcoats and decide that some crowded street in London is the obvious place for them to join their promised seventy-two virgins for an eternity in paradise.
