The Forever War: why Afghanistan has been this generation’s Vietnam 

The events of September 11, 2001, reshaped American hegemony forever. On a cold autumn morning almost 20 years ago, two hijacked airliners were flown directly into the twin towers of the World Trade Centre in Lower Manhattan. Another plane hit the Pentagon in Washington DC. Almost 3,000 people were killed in the deadliest terrorist attack on American soil in US history.

In a series of highly coordinated measures, it was soon understood that the 19 terrorists who hijacked the Boeing 767 aircraft used in the attack adhered to the radical Islamic ideology of Wahhabism. This was the bastardised Saudi Arabian version of Islam adopted by al-Qaeda – the terrorist group founded in 1986.

The attack was presented as a convincing casus belli to depose the Taliban, the fundamentalist regime in Kabul, who had stubbornly refused to expel al-Qaeda from Afghanistan and hand over Osama bin Laden, head of al-Qaeda and chief architect of the 9/11 attack.

So on October 7, 2001, President George Bush launched Operation Enduring Freedom: the wholesale invasion and occupation of Afghanistan. The goal was to remove the threat of Islamist terrorism and to liberate the people of this war-torn and ravaged land from the Taliban.

Two decades later, President Joe Biden decided it was the right time to withdraw all ground troops from Afghanistan. August 31 is the date set to mark the end of the United States’s longest-ever foreign conflict – what has become notorious as “the forever war”.

Biden’s justification for the withdrawal was that the US had achieved its mission:

“The United States did what we went to do in Afghanistan: to get the terrorists who attacked us on 9/11 and to deliver justice to Osama bin Laden…We achieved those objectives.”

Bin Laden is dead. But his terrorist organisation remains a serious threat to the region. Nature abhors a vacuum. With US troops withdrawing from the country, they will leave Afghanistan cruelly exposed and ripe for al-Qaeda’s return. Unless the Taliban break off all relations with al-Qaeda, the potential for a full-scale terrorist takeover becomes frighteningly real.

When Donald Trump signed the Doha peace agreement in February 2020, it forced the Taliban to cut all ties with al-Qaeda. Yet there are now reports that relations between the two radical Islamic groups are strengthening. Dr Sajjan Gohel a security and terrorism analyst believes “the Taliban is inseparable from al-Qaeda”.  While others, like Edmund Fitton-Brown, believe the senior leadership of al-Qaeda is still under Taliban protection.

If the Taliban do indeed end up regaining power, then Afghanistan will be left in the same parlous state that prompted us to invade the country in the first place. The gains that have been made in this inchoate Afghan state – women’s rights, free elections and democracy – will inevitably be lost. All it takes for a vile and disgusting regime to take over is to sit back and wait. Afghanistan is predominately a mountainous and inhospitable region, the terrain is rugged. Numerous hiding places exist. As long as any terrorist group is well-funded, they can just roll back out of the shadows and regain control.

As I write, the Taliban are rapidly gaining ground. They have seized control of vast areas of Kunduz – a key city in northern Afghanistan. While Lashkar Gah – the provincial capital of Helmand and of strategic importance is back under the hardline Islamists’ control. Hundreds have been executed and thousands more are likely to follow. The United Nations agency on the ground reports that 40 civilians were killed in this area of southwest Afghanistan on just one day last week.

In The Times William Hague has described the decision to withdraw as a “betrayal”. It has to be asked: a betrayal of whom? Maybe those that suffered years of imprisonment and were denied basic human rights in Guantanamo Bay? Or the widows and families of the 457 British soldiers not returning home? Perhaps he meant the 50,000 Afghan civilians who were killed?  This is the price that has been paid in an attempt to install democracy and teach girls to read. Even these achievements will all be rolled back if and when the Taliban take over and institute a ban on women’s education.

If, however, Hague is referring to the failure of the UK government to offer a resettlement scheme to the Afghan interpreters, then I agree. It is a betrayal. These brave people risked their lives assisting British forces during the war. Abandoning them in Afghanistan is a potential death sentence.

The withdrawal just highlights the futility of this war. The war on terror is our generation’s Vietnam. That was another protracted foreign war waged in a country thousands of miles away that we should never have entered.

What has been achieved in the last twenty years? The war in Afghanistan has cost more than $2 trillion dollars and perhaps a quarter of a million lives . So, it has to be asked: what was the point?