What Exactly Are We Doing In Afghanistan?

'We are certain that we are winning. Why should we talk if we have the upper hand, and the foreign troops are considering withdrawal, and there are differences in the ranks of our enemies?' - Zabiullah Mujahedd (Taliban spokesman)

The Afghan Taliban think that they have time, as well as god, on their side. This would be far easier to dismiss if it wasn't for the fact that we seem to agree with them (about the time, not god). Of course we don't say this directly, but all the talk of deadlines has exactly the same effect. This isn't the same as admitting defeat, the idea is that one more push can buy us one last chance to change the trajectory the future, and so for now the war goes on. The message however is clear, the weight of history is against us and thus we have to be 'realistic'. But is there far more danger in this than we realise? We only have to look back at what is usually taken as proof of the intractability of the Afghan problem - the Soviet occupation - to see one suggestion in this direction. 


'Afghanistan didn't just defeat the Soviet army. It reached out and corrupted and corroded the Soviet Union's faith in itself. Above all it destroyed what was left of the dream that communism was the future universal model for the world. The fascinating question now is whether Afghanistan is beginning to do the same to us in the West. Bit by bit, as we accept torture, corruption and rigged democracy, is our faith in the universalism of our European idea of democracy beginning to falter? And with it our power.' - Adam Curtis

In terms of domestic politics this is almost impossible to evaluate. Even though it is true that the majority of people on both sides of the pond think that the war is going badly, and is being mismanaged by political leaders, there are so many other factors that affect people's faith in their government it is extremely difficult to know if this precisely is what has undermined our faith in our political institutions of late. But it does highlight the extent to which we do appear to have given up on transplanting our idea of the best political institutions to Afghanistan. The crucial question now is, why?

There are, to my mind, three answers to this. Firstly we can simply deny that we have in fact done so, all our realism in this case means is that we have rejected the naive idea that any radical transformation like the one we are trying to effect can happen overnight. Even the deadlines reflect only the recognition that the process cannot be completed by ISAF and NATO but only once Afghan security is handled entirely by forces under the control of a sovereign Afghan authority - this is part of democratic accountability and nationhood.

I find this very problematic. Sovereignty and central government control, even when democratically accountable, does not mean that the positive (so we see it) values of freedom, meritocracy, and maximum possible individual self-determination will flourish. We have surely learned by now that democracy and western values are not identical, even if they are often coextensive. And so, as so often seems to happen, we have a Catch 22 situation. If we are to justify pulling out as part of the process of transformation then we need to appeal to the popular sovereignty issue, but when we do this we give up our only way of ensuring that our other transformative aims are achieved - which was the only way we could justify pulling out in the first place.

Secondly we could answer that we have indeed taken a pragmatic decision to abandon the aim of a pure liberal-democratic Afghanistan. This was only ever a secondary aim anyway, the primary aim was national security and reprisal for the 9/11 attacks. An illiberal democratic government is still preferable to the old 1990's Taliban regime, even if the modern Taliban have to be cut into a post war settlement. So long as Afghanistan doesn't provide haven for terrorism or export too much opium then the country's domestic arrangements are not for us to dictate. It would be both arrogant and futile to try to tell Afghan's how to live, it is simply not sensible to rule out a solution that comes from inside of Afghan culture because it doesn't accord with how we would ideally want it. This seems to be about what the current paradigm is, and what was behind Liam Fox's poorly judged recent comments.

Again though I find this problematic. The national security benefits of the war are extremely spurious. We heard Eliza Manningham-Buller (former head of MI5) state fairly unequivocally at the Iraq inquiry that that war, which was admittedly even more unpopular, greatly increased radicalisation of British Muslims. I think it is reasonable to assume that Afghanistan is not much different, especially given it's proximity to the geographic origin of a large portion of Britain's Muslims in Pakistan. At this point someone usually quotes that statistic about how many of the terrorist plots against Britain had a connection to the Afghan-Pakistan tribal areas. However they rarely ever stop to wonder whether this is only because of the the destabilising and motivating effect of the war, as seems more likely to me - I'll go into why in another post. As for the second point, that we are simply not in principle able to bring about substantive change, why? Are Afghans somehow psychologically or biologically unable to adopt non-traditional lifestyles? This seems unlikely, we managed it (more or less). Moreover it is even more patronising than imposing change on them, thereby voiding the moral argument at the very least.

Third, and I think this is the honest truth, we find ourselves on the current unambitious course because we are fighting for, and over, nothing - simply because we can't think of a good reason to leave. The problem we face is that in spite of our inability to find a reason to fully justify continued fighting, like a really strong belief in liberal-democratic regime change (A Bush Doctrine), this does not seem to be an adequate reason for a pull out, like a really strong anti-interventionism (A Ron Paul Doctrine). In other words what we have found is that while staying in and pulling out might seem like two options in the same decision they are in fact two separate possible events that must be independently argued for, or more precisely that can be independently argued against. Thus when we find ourselves unable to make a convincing case for either we end up muddling through. In the mean time we deploy any old argument, national security, education, Pakistani stability, women's rights, Iran, until at some point in the future, when it feels like the right time, we can make a convincing argument to ourselves to justify leaving.

When we leave finally leave Afghanistan i suspect that the war will not be over. The war will in fact go on but with the key distinction that only Afghans, and maybe the odd aid worker, are being killed. As the Afghan government continues to fight the Taliban we will begin to see the war as just another global conflict - terrible and tragic yes, but also contained and manageable, something that does not demand that it is addressed directly (as our intimate involvement does now). What follows from that is impossible for me, with my limited knowledge, to predict - but what is certain is that we will not really care. The issue of Afghanistan in popular thought will simply be finished without a conclusion to the real questions ever being reached - hence we will learn nothing.