It is becoming a mantra, an unarguable truth, that to pull our troops out of Afghanistan would be a betrayal of those who have died and those who have been injured; but this view never seems to recognise a betrayal of future casualties if we stay?
Boris Johnson steps into the ring and dances around the subject with customary flair and charm, but his general drift is that of an armchair general who doesn’t really understand the true sacrifice our Servicemen are making.
We enlisted with America in the cause of driving out the Taliban extremists who were harbouring bin Laden.
Not sure this is entirely true. Sure, we are there primarily because the Americans are there, but the original cause was not the driving out of the Taliban; that was merely an extension of attacking Afghanistan to get at the terrorists. US Defense Secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, spoke about ‘a sustained campaign to root out terrorists,’ not a sustained campaign to root out the Taliban. In the early days of the invasion – or limited raids, as is more accurate – we did indeed attack Taliban defences from the air, but this was primarily to enable US troops to conduct ground and airborne operations without fear of losing troop filled helicopters via SAM. Terrorism was always the reason we went into Afghanistan; attacking the Taliban was a mere, yet essential, precursor.
Whatever the Independent on Sunday may demand, we will remain in Afghanistan, shoulder to shoulder with America, for as long as the mission endures.
Boris might well be right here, but the key question is this: what is the mission to which he refers? Mission creep seems endemic. First it was breaking up the terrorist training camps, possibly capturing Osama Bin Laden, and now it is building a Western style nation from the dust. These two missions are miles apart. The first is relatively easy to achieve, and indeed does not need forces permanently in the country, but the second is where we get into difficulties. Building nations is an extremely difficult endeavour; and it takes decades, not just years.
As is customary in building an unassailable argument to justify a particular course of action, straw men are strategically deployed, and so is the case here. Boris talks about pulling out ‘now – immediately, unilaterally.’ When it is put like this, we can of course see the dangers, but withdrawal can take different forms and serve different purposes: if we were to leave, tail between legs, nursing wounds and bruised egos like an X Factor wannabe, then that would not be good, but if withdrawal was a part of a different strategy to attack and resist terrorists, then that is a different matter.
A second false argument is that it would ‘let down Britain’s most vital geo-strategic alliance.’ What he means here is NATO, but although this is an operation under NATO leadership, it is by no means simply a NATO operation. There are 14 other nations contributing to the operation, so it is, as ISAF itself says: ‘a coalition of the willing deployed under the authority of the UN Security Council.’ It is a UN operation, first and foremost, not a NATO one. and anyway, this is the argument of an idiot, too afraid to change course just because this is what we are doing now.
If we left in the way Boris criticises, it could well be ‘this country’s biggest military humiliation since Suez,’ but our last years in Iraq might challenge this claim. Even the Americans were not best pleased with the way we managed our exit. But in Afghanistan, the proposal is not to leave as some defeated, humiliated army, but to leave as a precursor to fighting this war on our own terms and in ways that deal with the real threat closer to home.
Remember that the mission began as an assault on terrorism – anyone remember the phrase ‘the war on terror’? – but it has morphed into a typically conceited form of nation building under the new doctrine of Liberal Interventionism. Men who have spent serious time in Afghanistan, such as Rory Stewart, voice similar concerns about the mission, far more eloquently than anything on these pages, and their voice of caution and reason should not be ignored.
The objective must never be determined by circumstances and inertia, it must always be set according to our own interests. And our interests are in the attrition of terrorist capability, not just in Afghanistan, but wherever it can be shown to have a direct impact on our own countries; and it is not axiomatic that we need to do that by keeping great armies on the ground, serving as something like a permanent irritation to local people who might want to do things their way, and not ours.
Boris shows in subsequent paragraphs how those who stay at home and risk nothing are often the best at coming up with grand schemes to bring utopia to the rest of the world, without risking much themselves. Why on earth should we risk the lives of our Servicemen to ‘improve the lives of the people,’ or to ‘teach them the values of democracy and of educating women.’ These aims might be laudable in a way, but what about places like Sudan and Burma? To massage the conceit of armchair generals and grand schemers and to make soft liberals feel better about themselves is not enough of a reason. And if we seriously want to ‘wean them off the opium crop’, then how about getting serious about weaning our own flabby, selfish people off the drugs they produce.
No Boris, we are not going to ‘haul up the white flag,’ because the battle against the true enemy, the terrorists, will continue, only on terms that are favourable to us, not them. And it is a bit rich castigating ourselves for consigning Afghanistan ‘to a bunch of thugs and religious maniacs’, when we do precious little to stop similar communities developing in our own country.
Neither is it set in stone that if the Taliban retake control of Afghanistan, ‘the whole region will become a playground for the would-be terrorists.’ Is he not aware of the playgrounds in our own country, adventure training centres and West London bedsits? And withdrawal of troops from the ground does not necessarily mean leaving any possible future terrorist camp unmolested. We can just as well attack them from several miles in the air as we can from the ground. And what evidence is there that the Taliban would harbour al-Qaeda after we were gone? There is no true affiliation between the two groups, and we could always try persuading them that it was not in their interests to support them.
Still, having said all this, Boris is probably right in that we should not leave immediately. But, we need the political will to match military determination and sacrifice, and we need to define a narrow political objective. We need to stop indulging ourselves that we can change their attitude to women and set up a political system that they do not ultimately support themselves – that is and always was going to be up to them; is there much of a difference between corrupt pseudo-democrats and fanatical tribalists? We should then concentrate on the terrorist capability, wherever it is in the world.
It is arguable that in Afghanistan we have already achieved this more limited mission and that it has been a resounding success. We have not failed. The mission has been accomplished and we must now regroup to determine where the next major concentration of terrorist incubation develops, and strike it there, not mess around with a tribal people and their attitude to burka and jirga.
