Thread by @MattCarr55

Lots of Tory MPs and Republicans handwringing about #AfghanistanBurning right now. Some Labour MPs joining in. Some of these lamentations are aimed at Biden. Others bewail a more general ‘betrayal of Afghan women’/wasted British and U.K. sacrifice/NATO failure etc

No acknowledgement of the strategic failures that were obvious - to those who wanted to look - long before the collapse of the Afghan state. Or the horrific damage inflicted on Afghanistan by so many countries in the savage geopolitical competition for Mackinder’s ‘heartland’

Let’s go back to March 17 1979. The Soviet Politburo meets to discuss the deteriorating security situation in Afghanistan, where the USSR’s communist allies are savagely suppressing and Islamist insurrection in Herat. Foreign minister Andrei Gromyko explains the situation

To which Chairman of the USSR Council of Ministers Alexei Kosygin asks

When the meeting is reconvened the following day KGB chief Yuri Andropov makes the same point

In fact the Soviet ‘doves’ were entirely correct. Islamist insurgents were already being funded and armed by the US and Pakistan with the aim of luring the Soviets into a ‘bear trap’. Years later Jimmy Carter’s sec. advisor Zbigniew Brezinzski admitted this

In light of subsequent events, did Brezinzksi regret this decision? Did he hell.

On 24 December 1979 the Soviets fell into the ‘trap’ and invaded Afghanistan, this beginning a war which killed more than 1 million people and created more than 5 million refugees, and the largest CIA covert operation in history.

The US, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, France, Egypt, Britain - all funded the Afghan ‘muj’ and helped ‘make Russia bleed’, as Congressman Charlie Wilson put it. Russia did bleed. And so did Afghanistan. How we loved those Afghan ‘freedom fighters’ in those days. Devout, noble…

Never mind that some of them put bombs in girls schools, blew up markets, threw acid in the faces of women students. Or funded through heroin/opium pipelines. As long as they killed Russians, all good. And if foreign volunteers wanted to help, that was good too!

The Red Army often behaved with stunning brutality in Afghanistan, but the Soviet leadership under Gorbachev recognised their strategic mistake and wanted to withdraw: nsarchive.gwu.edu/briefing-book/…

As early as 1985! Which would have saved many lives, and perhaps might have stabilised Afghanistan, but no

And so it went on for four more bloody years, until the Soviet withdrawal in 1989. This was followed by civil war between the warlords and factions, culminating in the near destruction of Kabul between 1992-1996

The collapse in security was a crucial factor in the rise of the Pakistan-backed Taliban ‘student’ movement, which took Kabul on 27 September 1996:

In exchange for ‘order’, the Taliban imposed a harsh version of Islam on a country wrecked by war, whose prohibitions included

The Taliban also continued to host some of the foreign volunteers who had fought the Soviets and fought in the post-occupation civil wars, including al-Qaeda, whose leader Osama bin Laden, declared war on America in 1996

And then, there was this…

At this point the US might have carried out a limited military strikes aimed at the al-Qaeda network/coupled with an international law enforcement operation. Instead NATO overthrew the Taliban and invaded and occupied the country. The first part was easy…

The second less so. Because even though the occupation was accompanied by much nation building/democracy building/women’s rights rhetoric, you don’t get democracy by working with warlords like the mass murderer Abdul Rachid Dostum

Dostum once allowed hundreds of Taliban prisoners to die by leaving them in trucks, but never mind, as the Washington Post notes

An unavoidable wartime alliance? Perhaps. But Dostum never went away. And there were many like him, who prospered in ‘democratic’ Afghanistan, making fortunes from drug money and aid money. The Washington Post once again…washingtonpost.com/graphics/2019/…

Ok,so sometimes you have to work with what you’ve got? But if you’re in the business of democratic state-building, you’re not going to get far when you allow the leaders of that state to fake election results and loot the country, as a certain Hamid Karzai did

Karzai’s sleaze and corruption were legendary. Here’s just one example - the near collapse of the Kabul Bank in 2010

Another thing, if you really want to have a chance of building a viable democratic state in a complex country devastated by wars that you helped cause, w/ a long history of resisting foreign occupations, it’s a good idea to concentrate your energies on that country. Instead…

Iraq was another example of the Rumsfeld ‘sweep it all up’ doctrine. A stunning combination of hubris, arrogance, ignorance and overreach, with Afghanistan not even close to stabilisation, security. Don’t expect the Tories and Republicans to mention this. They all supported it

So w/ the US and Britain bogged down in Iraq, NATO struggled against a resurgent Taliban insurgency that drew its strength from a corrupt state that was increasingly despised by the Afghan population, a state that, it now appears, couldn’t command the loyalty of its armed forces.

Bombings, special forces, Stanley McChrystal’s JSOC death squads, hearts and minds, anthropologists, military training to Afghan forces - none of this was able to shift the strategic balance in the ground.

When US soldiers warned about these failures, as Lieutenant Colonel Daniel Davis did in 2012, they were ignored.

theguardian.com/world/2012/apr…

The same in the UK. When Mike Martin, a serving British officer in Helmand Province, wrote his book An Intimate War criticising the British army’s campaign in Helmand, the MoD tried to ban it

Neither the top brass nor the politicians were interested in the truth of a war that has left more than 400 British soldiers dead. And so we got flannel and claptrap, such as this comment from David Cameron in 2012

And now the endgame is upon us, and the truth of Ho Chi Minh’s famous statement ‘You will kill 10 of our men, and we will kill one of yours, and in the end it will be you who tire of it’ has been borne out: that guerrilla movements fighting foreign occupations win by not losing

And yes, we should lament this outcome, because we may think (rightly) that the Taliban are a disaster for the Afghan people, but to some extent they have been chosen by the Afghan people, if only because they saw nothing better worth fighting for.

But those who are wringing their hands and crying ‘betrayal’ need to take a long look back and ask themselves why this is this the case, and I ver much doubt whether any of them will.

THE END