They meant well: how the West lost in Afghanistan

One of the lessons of the war in Afghanistan is that negotiating tribal politics in a country like Afghanistan requires a lifetime of knowledge of local history and proficiency in the language, Alan Philps writes

America's "long war" in Afghanistan is about to come to an end. Whether all the troops leave by the end of the year, or a residual force of a few thousand international soldiers stays behind, will be decided by the next president of Afghanistan.

But even as the troops pack up to leave, the history of this conflict is being written, and not in a way that will please the generals. The top brass of the US and British contingents are working hard to stamp on any suggestion that they are retreating in defeat, as US forces did in Vietnam and the Soviet 40th Army did from Afghanistan in 1989. US General Joseph Dunford, commander of international forces in Afghanistan, insists: “We are not leaving. We are transitioning – there’s a big difference.”

The word “transition” has an odd sound in a military context, where victory – or its absence – is the usual measure of success. It is right to talk of a transition in Afghan politics. The election of a president to succeed Hamid Karzai, after an expected second round of voting, will mark a significant transition in political life, particularly given the enthusiasm of voters to cast their ballots. The presence of foreign troops may have contributed to that success. But it is likely that historians will use a more caustic word when they sum up the bloody and expensive war fighting undertaken by the troops.

Two new books, one by a British army officer and the other by a New York Times correspondent, look at the war from very different viewpoints, but reach a conclusion similar in one respect: since 2001 the foreign military has been fighting the wrong enemy.

Captain Mike Martin is one of the few British army officers to have mastered the Pashto language. He spent six years working in Helmand province, where British troops were based from 2006, or studying its tribal make-up. His book, An Intimate War: An Oral History of the Helmand Conflict 1978-2012, takes a worm’s eye view of Afghanistan’s modern history.

While it is usually seen as a series of discrete episodes – the Soviet invasion and retreat, the rise and fall of the mujahidin, the Taliban era, and then the American attempt to reconstruct the country – Captain Martin describes it as one long civil war, with a changing cast of foreign intruders. With limited cultivatable land, scarce and unevenly shared water resources, and an economy distorted by opium, local rivalries are endemic. Clan-based feuding is an expression of manly endeavour and a rare alternative to the thankless toil of farming.

Into this cauldron, British troops blundered with the goal of defeating the Taliban, eradicating opium cultivation and introducing the government’s security forces. With this impossible mission, the troops were easily manipulated by local leaders. One clan would point out their rivals as Taliban, and stand back and watch as the soldiers gave them a pounding. Local leaders on good terms with the intruders reaped huge profits from development projects. In Captain Martin’s conclusion: “We often made the conflict worse, rather than better: this was usually the result of Helmandis manipulating our ignorance.”

The so-called Taliban were often opium farmers protecting their crops, or villagers fired up by the age-old distrust of intruders. Most of the Afghan interpreters used by the army preferred to tell the officers what they wanted to hear rather than to try to explain the knotty politics of the province.

To the Helmand villagers, it seemed as if the British had come to destabilise the province, encourage the Taliban, and impose on them a corrupt police force which set about extorting money and raping their children. To an outsider, this is an absurd assessment. But the villagers judged the situation by what they saw on the ground. They were not guided by Ministry of Defence press releases or the heroic reports of embedded reporters.

The officer’s conclusions apply strictly to one province but that is not to deny the existence of the Taliban as an organised force. They set off bombs in Kabul and have spokesmen to relay message to the media. They are not a figment of the imagination. But how do you fight them?

That is the question that Carlotta Gall, a New York Times correspondent who covered Afghanistan since 2001, answers in her book: The Wrong Enemy. The title is taken from Richard Holbrooke, the US special representative to Afghanistan and Pakistan, who concluded just before he died, “we are fighting the wrong enemy in the wrong country”.

Last week Ms Gall said she was prompted to write the book by her feeling that the US-led coalition forces were tackling the symptoms of the disease while the source was in the training camps of Pakistan. This has led to the US military and its allies to pursue a “perceived enemy” in Afghan villages, many of whom were total innocents. Much of the war has been an expensive military sideshow.

It is no secret that the Taliban were created as the spearhead of Pakistan’s policy in Afghanistan. Pakistan feels that Afghanistan is its strategic hinterland, and is therefore bound to exercise control over it. Failing that, and concerned about Indian influence there, it has to keep the country eternally unstable.

Ms Gall knows what this means: she was harassed and abused by Pakistani security agents – and understood under what conditions Pakistani journalists operate in – as she traced back to the madrasas of Pakistan the stories of the boy suicide bombers who blew themselves up in Kabul.

One of the lessons of the long war in Afghanistan is that negotiating tribal politics in a country such as Afghanistan requires a lifetime of knowledge of local history and proficiency in the language. British colonial servants had that, and so do the Pakistani specialists. Military officers rotating in and out from Europe or the United States will never achieve that, particularly if their own local politics determines that their stay will be brief and everyone, down to the humblest villager, knows that.

Alan Philps is a commentator on global affairs.

On Twitter: @aphilps