Update: Quotes of the Weekend: Two Glimpses of Afghanistan, A Year after Withdrawal

[NOTE: Gwynne Dyer has been reporting on and analyzing wars for decades; he has a doctorate in military history & strategy. Adela Raz was the last Afghan ambassador to the U. S.  Their perspectives  a year later are distinct, succinct, valuable and illuminating.]

Afghanistan: down the memory hole
Gwynne Dyer Aug 10, 2022

It’s only one year since the fall of Kabul last August 15, 2021, and everybody in the countries that sent troops to Afghanistan has already forgotten about it (apart from journalists in need of a topic in a slow news month). This was predictable, but it is also unfortunate.

The 20-year Afghan war was never more than discordant noises off-stage for most people in the rich Western countries that sent troops there, so you can’t expect them to remember the “lessons” of that war. The Afghans never had any real choices in the matter, so they have no lessons to remember. But Western military and political elites should do better.

The first lesson is: if you must invade somebody, do try to pick the right country. Americans definitely wanted to invade somewhere and punish it after the terrorist outrage of the 9/11 attacks, but it’s unlikely that Afghanistan’s Taliban rulers were aware of Osama bin Laden’s plans. The “need-to-know” principle suggests that they were not.

The second lesson is: whatever the provocation, never invade Afghanistan. It’s very easy to conquer it, but almost impossible for foreigners to sustain a long-term military occupation. Puppet governments don’t survive either. Afghans have expelled the British empire at its height, the Soviet Union at its most powerful, and the United States.

Terrorism is a technique, not an ideology or a country. Sinn Fein in early 20th-century Ireland had the same goal as Kenya’s Mau Mau rebels of the 1960s—to expel the British empire—whereas the Western “anarchists” of the early 1900s had no territorial base and (deeply unrealistic) global ambitions. So do the Islamists of Al Qaeda today.

There are as many different flavours of terrorism as there are varieties of French cheese, and each has to be addressed by strategies that match its specific style and goals. Moreover, the armies of the great powers must always remember the paramount principle that nationalism (also known as “tribalism”) is the greatest force-multiplier.

Western armies got chased out of Afghanistan a year ago because they forgot all the lessons they had learned from a dozen lost counter-insurgency wars in former colonies between 1954 and 1975: France in Algeria and Indochina, Britain in Kenya, Cyprus and Aden, Portugal in Angola and Mozambique, and the United States in Vietnam.

The driving force in all those late-imperial wars was nationalism, and Western armies really did learn the lesson of their defeats. By the 1970s, Western military staff colleges were teaching their future commanders that Western armies always lose guerilla wars in the “Third World” (as it was still known at the time).

The Western armies lose no matter how big and well-equipped they are because the insurgents are fighting on home ground. They can’t quit and go home because they already are home. Your side can always quit and go home, and sooner or later your own public will demand that they do. So you are bound to lose eventually, even if you win all the battles.

But losing doesn’t really matter, because the insurgents are always, first and foremost, nationalists. They may have picked up bits of some grand ideology that let them feel that “history” is on their side—Marxism or Islamism or whatever—but all they really want is for you to go home so they can run their own show. So, go. They won’t actually follow you home.

This is not just a lesson on how to exit futile post-colonial wars; it is a formula for avoiding unwinnable and, therefore, pointless wars in the “Third World”. If you have a terrorist problem, find some other way of dealing with it. Don’t invade. Even the Russians learned that lesson after their defeat in Afghanistan in the 1980s.

But military generations are short: a typical military career is only 25 years, so by 2001 few people in the Western military remembered the lesson. Their successors had to start learning it again the hard way in Afghanistan and Iraq. Maybe by now they have, but they’ll be gone, too, before long.

This cycle of learning and forgetting again doesn’t only apply to pseudo-imperial wars in the post-colonial parts of the world. The wars between the great powers themselves were having such frightful consequences by the time of the First and Second World Wars that similar disasters have been deterred for more than 75 years, but that time may be ending.

Like many other people, I oscillate between hope and despair in my view on the course that history is taking now: optimistic on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays, pessimistic on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays, and I refuse to think about it at all on Sundays.

Today is a [fill in the blank], and so I’m feeling [hopeful/despairing].

—Author Gwynne Dyer is an international journalist based in London

Washington Post, August 11, 2022

Staff for the Post’s “Early 202” report interviewed Adela Raz, the last Afghan ambassador to Washington — who’s now the director of Princeton University’s Afghanistan Policy Lab — ahead of the first anniversary of the fall of the Afghan government.

[Excerpts]:
The Early: It’s been nearly a year since the U.S. left Afghanistan. The country’s economy is on the verge of collapse and up to half the country is facing starvation, according to the United Nations. How would you describe the situation there now

Raz: It was a poor country, and it is a poor country. It has gone through droughts. Climate change has definitely impacted the country. It’s a country right now with half of its population being expected to stay home and not work, which is women.

There are shortages of food. The financial sector is absolutely broken. It’s truly a dire situation. It’s a humanitarian catastrophe in terms of people being hungry, in terms of people having no job, in terms of shortages of food and the health situation.

The Early: You stayed on as ambassador for more than six months after the Afghan government fell. What was your life like during these months? Were you able to do your job?

Raz: It was not easy. It was very hard on many levels. I tried my best to identify what I could do in the short term. The focus was on those Afghans who were in the process to be evacuated. We tried to see how we could process their paperwork, advocate on their behalf, link them to the institutions and individuals who were helping them out.

The Early: Were you still being paid?
Raz: No, no. . . .[after the government fell] we knew that the budget was limited. It helped us for the next two to three months, and then there was no more salary.
. . . In terms of the finances, the good news was that the embassy building is the property of Afghan people. We didn’t have to pay rent. It was the utilities that we had to really manage. There were times when the internet was not working, we even [had to] use our phones [as hotspots] to connect to our computers and use them.

The Early: What has happened to the diplomats who worked in the embassy and in Afghanistan’s consulates and their families? Have they been able to stay in the U.S.?

Raz: Yes, most of them have been able to stay.

The Early: Your husband worked for Ashraf Ghani, the former Afghan president. Has he been able to join you in the U.S.? What about your friends and family?

Raz: My husband was able to come later. He joined me here. My extended family — my aunts, uncles, cousins, the rest of the family — they are still back in Afghanistan. Some of my family members worked in the government before. They have difficult times right now. Those of my family members who did not work for the government, they continue their regular lives but with difficulties and complexities. For the younger women in my family who cannot go to school, it’s extremely difficult and hard.

The Early: The Atlantic’s George Packer detailed in January how hard the U.S. has made it for Afghans who worked for the Americans to get special immigrant visas and for other Afghans at risk from the Taliban to come to the U.S. What is the situation like now?

Raz: Those who worked with U.S. allies, those who worked with the Afghan government, with the Afghan security forces — we all know that their lives are in danger. For some, they’ve been killed. For some, they’re still in hiding. That’s probably the most difficult aspect of all this — just thinking about all those Afghan security forces, those who couldn’t leave the country.

The Early: You’ve said that one of the goals of the Afghan Policy Lab is “national healing and reconciliation. What does that look like? Can it happen while the Taliban remains in power?

Raz: I’m not really sure, to be very honest, if it can happen now. For Afghans, the big question we always think [about] is why we move from one conflict to another conflict. We have to address our grievances, which we have not done, at least in the last 40 years. We need to look long term. We always say in the Lab, it’s not an easy question. There is not going to be an answer right away. But we have to start thinking about it now.