Afghanistan is yesterday’s war because no one wants to fight it any more

A Clausewitzian analysis of U.S. military strategy should be a joy to read. Especially when it is applied to the wars of the 21st Century.

Carl von Clausewitz was a Prussian military officer who devoted his life to analysing war. His signature work, On War, is probably best known for ideas that pithily bring coherence to the complexities of conflict.

War, he most famously said, is the “continuation of politics by other means,” a brilliantly simple summation of why nation states, who in his day had the monopoly on violence, fought each other. War was the consequence of the failure of politics. Clausewitz died in 1830, two years before his work was published.

It is difficult to know what he would have to say on the nature of modern conflict, in which the nation-state no longer has the monopoly on violence and non-state actors pose serious threats to the very notion of the state. The so-called Islamic State is a case in point – it sought to control territory upon which borders were superimposed hundreds of years ago, but which it did not recognise.

In Afghanistan – where imperial imposition of the Durand Line created a border that is also notional – we are currently witnessing the unfolding of political failure in talks that will likely result in the American surrender to that most tenacious of non-state actors, the Taliban.

Sir Robert Fry’s attempt at a Clausewitzian critique of a factual news story on the situation in Afghanistan fails to address the very point of the story: the Afghan government and people have been delegitimised and marginalised from a process that could quite possibly see the Taliban return to power. This presents a very real chance of the country’s subsequent return to civil war. Civil war, and the chaos it entails, would mean that Afghanistan will once again become a threat to the region and the rest of the world.

As Afghanistan’s National Security Advisor, Hamdullah Mohib, has said in recent days, this also dishonours the thousands of U.S. and NATO soldiers who have fought, died or been injured in Afghanistan since 2001.

Unlike Mr Mohib, Sir Robert does not address the trustworthiness of Washington’s interlocutors. The Taliban have a monopoly of the global heroin trade. They use religion as a tool of repression. In many areas of Afghanistan where they have a presence, schools are closed and women are forced to remain in their homes.

Pakistan, mentioned as a partner in the “war on terror,” has funded, sheltered, armed and lied for the Taliban, and as well as other murderous militant groups, to destabilise its neighbour and keep its real enemy, India, on its toes. Where does this appear in Sir Robert’s analysis?

Is Afghanistan “yesterday’s war” because the US-led coalition hasn’t grasped the nature of modern warfare, that we are beyond the era of the nation-state, that non-state actors now pose an equal threat to the West; that the U.S. military bureaucracy has not been nimble enough to adapt strategy to meet the new demands and challenges?

Or has the United States, and its NATO partners, fallen into the trap of fighting the last war?

Afghanistan is yesterday’s war because no one wants to fight it any more. It’s become an embarrassing reminder of strategic failure and flabby narrative, and attempts at clever analysis do no service to the people who now stand to lose the hope they’ve been peddled of a better future as part of an international community of shared liberal values.

And no amount of Clausewitzian spin can get us out of that.