Diarmaid Ferriter: What will historians make of the Afghan conflict?

“I don’t care what the international lawyers say,” declared US president George Bush in 2001 before the invasion of Afghanistan, “we’re going to kick some ass”. Any suggestion from his state department of a diplomatic approach was greeted with similar derision from Bush: “F**k diplomacy! We’re going to war!” The horror of the 9/11 attacks on the Twin Towers and the distress, febrile atmosphere and fear they generated inevitably prompted macho posturing from a dim US president with no foreign policy experience and inaugurated a 20-year engagement, the US’s longest war.

What will historians make of that conflict? Perhaps that slogans and war-cries took the place of properly defined missions; that the urge to topple took precedence over a rebuilding plan; that the consequences were devastating and the postmortems deliberately selective and disingenuous.

In June 2009, president Barack Obama insisted 'we can't rebuild Afghanistan into a Jeffersonian democracy'; that same year he committed 30,000 more troops

In parallel with Bush’s infantile declarations there were also his attempts to sound vaguely presidential: “We have a strategic interest and I believe a moral interest in a prosperous and peaceful, democratic Afghanistan, and no matter how long it takes, we will help the people of Afghanistan succeed.” It is convenient now, of course, for President Joe Biden to leave that part out as he engages in self-serving revisionism. On Monday, he declared: “We went to Afghanistan with clear goals; get those who attacked us on September 11th, 2001, and make sure al-Qaeda could not use Afghanistan as a base from which to attack us again. We did that.”

Seth Jones’s book In the Graveyard of Empires, published in 2009, highlighted the accumulating misjudgments and blunders and a counterinsurgency campaign “hamstrung” by the war in Iraq, the overall mess a testament to “America’s inability to finish the job it had started . . . American and other international assistance was among the lowest of any state-building mission since World War II”.

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It is a mistake to begin the story in September 2001, however, a point forcefully underlined by the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Roy Gutman in his 2008 book How We Missed the Story. He focuses on the 1990s and the mistake of allowing the Taliban to fill the power vacuum left in the wake of the Soviet withdrawal in 1989 and, with the emergence of Osama bin Laden, leaving the approach to Afghanistan in the control of counterterrorism chiefs rather than those with diplomatic and political experience: “They preferred to view bin Laden as a lone terrorist to be extradited or assassinated, rather than as a political player who had planted deep cultural roots and created a wide political following.” Gutman also highlights media neglect of coverage of Afghanistan during that period.

There was also the issue of oil. Pakistani journalist Ahmed Rashid described the US as “romancing the Taliban” even before Islamist hardliners established full control over Afghanistan in 1996. The Bush administration ignored UN sanctions against Taliban and the American oil giant Unocal entered negotiations with the “rogue regime” from February to August 2001 before the realisation that the Taliban could not be relied on to advance their interests in central Asia.

One academic expert on the US handling of Afghanistan, Sharifullah Dorani, who has lived and worked there, has closely documented the “bewildering changes” in US policy but also seeks to give voice to the Afghanis themselves, describing a discussion with a middle-aged man at Karzai airport in 2017, by which time the US had spent about $6 trillion (€5.1 trillion) on the Afghanistan and Iraq wars. This man had sold his business and was heading with his wife and teenage children to Germany, as, despite the initial optimism, Afghanistan had become what he described as a “Valley of the Wolves”.

Some senior American politicians became dismissive of the idea that they should be 'nation builders'

Many Afghans had concluded, suggests Dorani, that the US had “employed policies capable of keeping the war on to justify its presence”. In June 2009, president Barack Obama insisted “we can’t rebuild Afghanistan into a Jeffersonian democracy”; that same year he committed 30,000 more troops. Policy assumptions during the Bush and Obama administrations were derived from rigid ideologies rather than “realities on the ground in Afghanistan”, according to Dorani.

It was not all about America of course, but also Pakistan, as it ensured its strong influence “in tribal areas to which the US’s anti-terrorism war did not extend” and both the Bush and Obama administrations “remained hopelessly unable to stop Pakistan supporting a host of terrorist groups in Afghanistan”. Nonetheless, Dorani found America to have been “naive, ignorant, unclear, lost, arrogant and parsimonious in its dealings in Afghanistan”.

Some senior American politicians became dismissive of the idea that they should be “nation builders”. After the botched Somalia intervention in 1992 former US national security adviser Anthony Lake asserted “it is a dangerous hubris to believe that we can build other nations. But where our interests are engaged, we can help nations build themselves and give them time to make a start at it”.

They can also leave them to the wolves when convenient.