Watching history

I write this less with the aim of communicating anything particularly profound to the small number of readers of this blog, but more with the aim of capturing what I am currently thinking so I can refer back to it at a later time to see if I'm right. Though 'right' is a ridiculously narrow concept for history. Perhaps better to say that it will be interesting and perhaps informative to see how I would change my views with the benefit of hindsight, rather than simply right/wrong. 

Maybe that's the point of all these posts. Something to reflect on later. But read on, anyway. It might be interesting.

I think that the rapid collapse of the Afghan national army, and Government, underlines why Joe Biden was right to withdraw from Afghanistan. In 20 years "the West" had failed to establish a stable Afghan state. So the options were stay in perpetuity, like on the Korean border, or leave.

But Afghanistan is not Korea. Is is not a 'frozen war' but a hot war. 'Allied' soldiers, foreigners, Afghan security forces, Taliban, and civilians, particularly, always, civilians, were dying, and if "we" stayed, those deaths would have escalated on all sides. Nobody can credibly claim that, having failed to defeat the Taliban over two decades, we could defeat them this time. No military strategy for "winning" was presented because none existed.

Staying, at current troop levels, was unsustainable. The Taliban, already buoyed by the release of 5,000 of their members by Trump, were gaining ground daily. A protracted war to push they back could not be fought with the troops we had, and the Afghan army practically useless. There would have had to have been a total repudiation of the Trump deal (disgusting as that deal was) and a massive troop increase. Deaths would have spiralled on all sides. We could presumably, once that initial burst of fighting was over and the Taliban were pushed back, have frozen the conflict with our Western troops and our Afghan allies controlling the urban centres, subject to regular terrorist attack, with the remoter regions handed over to warlords, drug gangs and the Taliban. Women in Kabul would still have been in school, and we could salved our consciences that ever time an allied rocket went astray and killed an innocent, that was a price worth paying, that every solider we sent to die went in a noble cause. It is obvious that the Taliban are total shits, and women will be treated as chattels now that they are in charge, but it is not obvious to me that the balance sheet is worth it. Then again, I'm not a woman. Still, we are very keen to talk about women in schools, and not very keen to talk about all the dead people we had to kill to keep them there, whether or not the particular people who ended up dead were bad or not. How much killing is it worth enduring to keep the schools open?

I do not believe - and this is where I could be most wrong, and in being wrong, the balance changes - that the Taliban regime can endure. But the very presence of allied forces justifies its existence. Afghanistan was in stasis, and is was a ghastly status. Poverty was, under our 'rule' endemic. Corruption was endemic. This was true in 'our' areas as well as areas outside our control. It doesn't logically follow that our withdrawal with reverse this, but the abject failure of our attempts to 'develop' the country undermine the rationale for continued occupation. Nation building had failed. Perhaps, just perhaps, under a ghastly time under the 2nd Taliban regime, something better can emerge. Of course, this is wishful thinking, but no more wishful thinking than believing that further occupation would have led to a stable Afghan state at some indefinable point in the future.

Furthermore, the presence of 'our' troops in Afghanistan was an occupation. Over successive general elections the proportion of the electorate voting has declined to 20%. Hamid Karzai could hardly demand that the Americans leave, given that they turned a blind eye to the electoral fraud that saw him elected in 2009, and Ghani could not feasibly claim to represent the majority of Afghans when such a tiny fraction of them voted for him. There was no meaningful democratic mandate for any Afghan Government from 2009 onwards, and therefore no group represent Afghan's who could ask the Americans to leave or hold them to account. I don't think, by this point, it's in any way possible to know whether Afghans in the country as a whole prefer rule by a Ghani puppet government propped up by Americans or the Taliban, who will offer stability and less corruption, if not democracy or prosperity. This is not, of course, to suggest the Taliban have any mandate other than that of force of arms. But then, by the end, neither did the former Government.

Permanent occupation of a country by an outside force is not -- to put it mildly -- a good state of affairs, though obviously it might be considered the least bad one. 

Of course, the binary surge/leave framing might be an over-simplification. Perhaps a small 'surge' could have kept the Taliban at bay, at least until the winter when the fighting tends to die down. But imagine a situation where the Taliban enter into a Government of 'national unity' with Ashraf Ghani. As soon as Western troop levels dropped, the Taliban would have killed him and taken complete control. Which is why Ashraf Ghani, not an idiot, rejected such a deal. 

We could, of course, have done a deal where we handed the entire country over to the Taliban immediately and spirited Ghani and anyone else who wanted to leave out of the country. The optics of that would have been worse than what we have now, though our withdrawal/surrender might have been more orderly.

In short, of course we could have stayed. But an honest appraisal of staying is one where Afghanistan is under permanent western occupation and in perpetual civil war, unable to go back and unable to move on. I'm not sure it is the role for the USA, the UK, or any other country, to keep the demons at bay in a far off land, particularly when they continue to sell arms to other demons, in Egypt and Saudi Arabia and Bahrain and more, and particularly when poverty cannot be fought in their own countries because there is no 'magic money tree'. To suggest that Afghanistan has to stand or fall on its own feet may feel particularly callous, given the likely killings and oppression the Taliban will probably unleash over the coming months and years, yet in the long run things may improve. "Tell that to the women of Kabul" is a reasonable response, but I guess my counter-offer is that telling the families of soldiers, Western, Afghan and Taliban, that the deaths that would have followed another "surge" were worth it rings equally hollow.

I think history may be kinder to Biden, and much less kind to Obama, than the news today would have you believe.