Tell us something about Afghanistan we don’t know

In the summer, I was invited to a small-town film night in middle England. The movie was called Facing the Dragon, and told the story of two Afghan women, a politician and a journalist who is a friend of mine. I was asked to introduce the film, and afterwards, I answered questions.

Who is paying for the Afghan government, a man asked. Whatever happened to the young European women who travelled to Afghanistan to marry Taliban fighters, a woman wanted to know. Were you scared while living and working there, came another.

Britain’s historical engagement with Afghanistan – four wars in less than 200 years – means that people here generally, and genuinely, feel they know a lot about the country. London is a collection of military monuments to the fallen over centuries, and war – the empire it built, the spoils it won, the men, women and even animals it took – is never far from the collective consciousness.

After the 9/11 attacks triggered Nato’s Article 5, Britain’s fourth war in Afghanistan began. More than 400 British soldiers were killed, most fighting the Taliban in the southern opium belt of Helmand province. 

For many British people, Helmand was Afghanistan; coffins carrying the remains of soldiers killed there made solemn parades through a pretty Wiltshire village, respectful locals lining the streets. Mothers wept publicly for their children.

The parades continued as Afghan warlords, politicians and police grew fat on embezzled aid money and the proceeds of Helmandi heroin, which was killing children in Allied countries, as well as Russia, Iran, Pakistan, and beyond. Public opinion polls in the US showed support for the war turning from majority to all-time minority within a decade. 

Few media organisations anywhere in the world were cheerleading the Afghan engagement. Rather, journalists like me were telling the story of failure as it unfolded, in real time, in front of us. We travelled to the country’s battlefields; visited its hospitals; spoke with its widows and orphans and its crippled and displaced; flew over blooming pink poppy fields; interviewed military leaders and politicians and community leaders. We wrote it as we found it.

The Costs of War Project at Brown University tracks statistics on the number of people killed in America’s “war on terror” since 2001. It’s now up to 801,000, of whom, by November, 157,000 died in Afghanistan as a direct result of the war. The Afghan war has cost the United States $2 trillion. 

Such a huge number of American military personnel deployed to Afghanistan that few families could have been untouched by it. By the middle of 2019, almost 2,400 American soldiers had been killed, and more than 20,000 wounded in Afghanistan.

There were no mass protests against the war in Afghanistan, as before Iraq in 2003, and as against Vietnam. Rather, Afghanistan was invaded with Western public support, a righteous war against an evil enemy. Within days of the invasion, the New York Times was warning of a Vietnam-style “quagmire”. It’s been there for all to see.

The recent document dump by The Washington Post has confirmed that the war in Afghanistan, from the start, lacked coherent policy, focus and big-picture thinking; that no one knew who the enemy was; that all sides were tainted by corruption and waste. And that any expectation of victory had early dwindled to nought.

“The Afghanistan Papers” is largely a collection of interviews conducted by the Special Investigator General for Afghanistan Reconstruction with civil and military leaders, as well as unidentified analysts and bureaucrats. 

SIGAR was established by Congress to track the billions that had evaporated in Afghanistan. It broadened its remit to monitor the expansion of the Taliban’s footprint and its heroin empire. Many of the papers published by The Washington Post are part of SIGAR’s “Lessons Learned Program”. 

The content of the documents, acquired through a freedom of information request, has raised little surprise, though some concern that politicians and generals were duplicitous, talking up a war they privately regarded as costly and unwinnable. 

What the unnamed interviewees have to say is just as relevant as the Big Names that have already been quoted: Lute, Flynn et al on waste, lack of situational awareness. And Year One on a loop. 

On the ground were a cohort of intelligence grunts, who lived locally and remotely, and built an anthropological understanding of disparate parts of the Afghanistan equation. The military strained to fit into this, and its learning lagged the evolution of the field.

At no stage of the fight was this not reported, notably as the effectiveness of insurgent tactics outpaced Allied defences. Improvised explosive devises ranged from crude to increasingly sophisticated, and took many lives. Helmand is historically devastating for the British. As in an earlier war elsewhere, the Americans stepped in with greater might.

Analysis and reporting of the war has tracked its negative trajectory. Anyone who thought otherwise wasn’t paying attention. The SIGAR interviews are an important resource for strategic studies, and history thanks The Washington Post.

Maybe, said a friend who has spent much of the past two decades working in and on Afghanistan, this is a moment on which policy turns. She thought again. We already know what the policy is, she said. It’s to get out.

The Trump administration has started talking with the Taliban again, aiming to cut troops ahead of the 2020 election. Nato allies will be right behind him. The end game in the latest Afghan War has begun. 

Back to the English village film night: Who pays for the Afghan government? We do, I said. That’s our taxes at work. Or not, as the case may be.

What happened to the young European women who went to Afghanistan to marry Taliban men? Maybe you’re thinking of ISIS brides in Iraq and Syria.

Was I afraid while living and working in Afghanistan? Of course, I said. Fear is a sign of intelligent life. I got out alive, but probably not unscathed.