The Afghan cockpit

Reporters and spooks are the hunter gatherers of the information world. They ply their trade in parts of the world, such as Afghanistan, that are off the beaten track. They are the outside world’s eyes and ears. 

They occupy that ambiguous space between reality and conjecture. Stories or intelligence assessments are crafted out of morsels of information, scavenged here and there as events unfold. These are then pieced together in a mental process – part experience, part hunch – to make sense of events.

What journalists serve up, however, is the antithesis of a secret. You can read it over breakfast. When they get it wrong, they’re fair game. Spies, on the other hand, serve up their narrative behind a protective veil marked “ Secret ”, for politicians far away to decide the fate of nations.

We know what reporters were saying these past few weeks as the Taliban’s race for Kabul gathered pace. Mostly they saw it coming. We don’t know precisely what the intelligence community in Washington and London was telling decision-makers. But, not for the first time, they seem to have been behind the curve. The same failure to catch the mood was evident when the Shah of Iran was deposed by the clerics in 1979.

What we can surmise, beyond the somewhat unconvincing expressions of astonishment and inconsequential tales of sun-loungers, is that our leaders were caught flat-footed. Either that or, forewarned by the spooks, they suspected that Afghan forces would collapse in the face of the advancing Taliban forces – and carried on regardless. 

Either way, the West has suffered another strategic defeat at the hands of a barefoot army. This cannot be sugar-coated. For all his bravado, President Joe Biden has fumbled badly. 

Non-combatant Afghans – especially women – are now thrown into a world of foreboding, their trust shattered. The few precious freedoms recently acquired appear to have been sacrificed, yet again, at the altar of expediency. The fate of Afghan women hardly bears thinking about. This a culture that stones women to death and requires a female high court judge to be accompanied by her four-year-old nephew when she goes shopping.

Also tragic is the threat to a new generation of bright, young, tech-savvy Afghans in Kabul — men and women — who would have been the bridge between a medieval past and a future full of promise, of engagement with the world.  

Not for the first time, too, US forces slipped away in the dead of night as the Taliban advanced. In 2011, 100,000 American soldiers crept out of their barracks and quietly left Afghanistan, leaving behind a note saying “Sorry”. This time, after nearly 20 years, the remaining forces turned off the lights at Bagram air base and crept away, without even telling the Afghan commander. Where is the honour in that?

Afghanistan has, yet again, been swallowed up by regime change at the point of a gun. No other nation on earth has been churned up both from within and without as often as this wild, magnificent, mountainous land which sits at the fulcrum of East and West.  

Torn by religious, ethnic and tribal divisions and, with the recent exception of Kabul, stuck in a medieval reality, Afghanistan’s history is one bloody milestone after another, stretching back to Alexander the Great. 

I witnessed one of these revolving door upheavals on Boxing Day 1979. Flying in from Delhi on the last commercial flight in (and out) of Kabul, I watched as the full might of the Soviet military machine descended with brutal efficiency on a bewildered Afghan population.

Less than three months earlier the Afghan president, Hafizullah Amin, who was overthrown by the Soviets, had his predecessor smothered to death by a pillow. His predecessor in turn was ousted and murdered. Amin was himself eventually despatched after several botched attempts by the KGB, including a bid to poison his Coca-Cola. Running Afghanistan – if such a thing is possible – is not for the faint-hearted. 

I recall sitting on the steps of Kabul airport terminal as wave after wave of Soviet Antonov troop carriers landed in the lee of the southern slopes of the Hindu Kush mountain range. I chatted to an Afghan English teacher. He was gloomy but philosophical. “Others have come before the Russians,” he said. “They left. The Russians will leave also.”

The Soviets’ ill-fated eight-year occupation of Afghanistan, in which up to two million Afghans died, became the breeding ground for the mujahideen, who morphed into al-Qaeda and the Taliban. 

Then came 9/11. America invaded, joined by Britain and other Nato forces. Plenty of insurgents died. They were driven into their mountain redoubts. But with every battle, won or lost, the mujahideen and their successors were thinking ahead, stockpiling weapons, learning more, honing their military skills. They had, In Tom Tugendhat’s striking phrase, strategic patience. 

We know now – if we did not before — that Afghanistan is not to be trifled with. What we do not seem to have learnt is how little we understand about this patchwork nation. 

For all its mesmerising influence on outsiders, Afghanistan is not an open book. It defies easy characterisation, interpretation and certainly prediction. It is often called the graveyard of empires, but this is misleading. Afghanistan is more accurately the place that defies comprehension. It’s like a devilishly complicated Rubik’s cube. You can see all the bits and the colours, but you can’t assemble the whole. 

The West is now scrambling to limit the fallout. The first and urgent priority is to help those who wish to leave. We have a moral responsibility to those left stranded half-way up the beach. We do not know yet how, if at all, Taliban 1 differ from Taliban 2, but despite a slick PR operation we cannot be sanguine.

Beyond that, however, the West must face up to some inconvenient truths. 

The first of these is that its ability to influence events elsewhere in the world has, for the foreseeable future, been severely curtailed. Why would anyone trust us, when women who relied on us to live a normal life were driven to handing their children over razor wire to British and American troops at a besieged Kabul airport?

The Taliban are back. They are believers. You cannot extinguish a belief, an idea, however warped. America on the other hand is decidedly not back while Britain has learned just how hollow that special relationship really is.

The second truth is that the Taliban’s takeover opens the door to even greater Russian and Chinese influence. The new regime desperately needs investment. The country is rich in minerals. The Chinese, as we have discovered in Africa, will sup with the devil with the shortest spoon possible and turn a blind eye to any horrors they might commit.  

The third is that victory for the new Islamic Emirate will embolden radical Islam elsewhere and raise the threat level from terrorists. The next few weeks and months will tell us whether this latest iteration of Islamic fundamentalism will be able to hold on to their gains. We may see an attempt at coalition building by the Taliban. That would make sense. 

We can expect the new rulers of Kabul to forge alliances with other Islamic states in Central Asia and the Middle East. Pakistan, or at least its meddlesome intelligence service the ISI, will be congratulating itself on a proxy victory. 

There are, however, signs that their opponents in this profoundly fractious country are gearing up to challenge them. This should come as no surprise. Ahmed Massood, the son of Ahmad Shah Massood, leader of the western-backed Northern Alliance who was killed two days before 9/11, has warned that without a power-sharing agreement another civil war is inevitable.

These people who call themselves the Taliban (seekers or students) are deeply unpleasant. They chop off hands, shoot people in the streets, erase women from the public space, hang their opponents from trees. They are also not a unified force with a clear set of agreed objectives, as they would have us believe. They are vulnerable to rivalry even within their own ranks.

But the last thing the West should do is get involved and fuel the fire. Encouraging another civil war would merely prolong the agony of this extraordinary and long-suffering country. 

Nato has lost a war it could never win. Full stop. Our military chiefs must learn the lessons of that defeat. Our politicians must accept that liberal interventionism at the point of a gun or from the belly of a high-altitude bomber in a country that remains largely hostile to western values is hubris. 

We have tried and failed to nation-build. We have to find another way. We must let the political landscape play out, but find other ways of trying to influence the process. This requires thoughtfully-targeted use of soft power: aid, education, engagement, exchange programmes, dialogue. If we do not understand we cannot engage. If we can’ t engage , we cannot influence. 

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