Afghanistan may never get a solid narrative for its 20-year war

Afghanistan's Taliban administration marked the third anniversary of the end of US occupation of the country on August 15. EPA

Last month, the Afghanistan War Commission held its first public hearing since it was established by the US Congress in 2021. The commission’s first goal is essentially to produce, within the next two years, America’s official narrative of its longest-ever war.

For America’s harshest critics, that narrative will inevitably be too charitable. But Colin Jackson, one of the commission’s co-chairs, has said his team intends to be “unflinching” in the way it approaches the legions of diplomats, generals, politicians, civil servants and contractors who shaped US involvement in the war. “No one will look like an unblemished hero, and nobody will look like a complete scapegoat,” Mr Jackson told Politico last month.

An unflinching narrative will be important if the commission is to achieve its second goal: to produce lessons for future American policymakers so that they avoid repeating the same mistakes.

But there are two sides to every story. The other in this case, the Afghan side, will not be told fully for a long time – if ever. Three years on from the collapse of the Afghan republic there is no common understanding among Afghans about what exactly happened to them over the course of 20 years, why it happened, who was responsible and what their future looks like.

Of course, if you are in Afghanistan this month – as the country celebrates two “independence days”, one from British suzerainty in 1919 and one from US/Nato occupation in 2021 – you will hear a story being told. But it is the Taliban’s story.

It’s not entirely wrong. It focuses not on America’s mistakes, but on its crimes – proved and alleged. International media and western government inquiries have told many stories of Afghan civilians being abused or wrongfully killed by American soldiers. If you speak to villagers in large swathes of the country, you will hear many more.

The propaganda banners that adorn every major city centre in Afghanistan nowadays remind the public of these crimes and cast the militants as the country’s liberators. But even this picture is painted in broad strokes rather than granular detail.

Right now, there is no comprehensive effort by the Taliban administration to account for all the civilians killed during the war, the manner of their killing and or how some kind of justice can be pursued. That’s not surprising, of course, given the lack of resources available for such a task.

Even if the Taliban were better resourced, however, pursuing justice or reparations for Afghan civilians – say, by giving access to legal NGOs to lobby for prosecutions in foreign courts or co-operating with the International Criminal Court – would be almost impossible, geopolitically. The US retains a lot of financial and security leverage over the Taliban, and the ICC has already said it won’t prosecute western forces for crimes in Afghanistan.

It is also difficult ideologically; pursuing reparations in international tribunals would jar with the Taliban’s assertion that secular courts cannot deliver justice.

But more to the point, the Taliban just don’t seem interested in this level of elucidation of Afghanistan’s recent history. It is enough that Afghans know they were mistreated by America and its “puppet regime”. The past is only useful insofar as it contributes to their greater project – the creation of a new national myth that fits around their authoritarian and theocratic system of governance.

There is also a certain pragmatism in discouraging Afghans from dwelling too much on the war. The Taliban messaging to the Afghan public emphasises infrastructure projects and public security, and that – for now – has largely succeeded in uniting the Afghan public around that programme, widespread despair over the annulment of girls’ education rights notwithstanding.

Putting ideas like national truth and reconciliation (and, by extension, old grievances) on the table could risk undoing that. It would be naive to mistake Afghan unity about the end of the war and the prioritisation of public order for true harmony and reconciliation.

For Afghans looking for an alternative national storyline, the only other prominent source is the large group of exiled former officials and officers of the now-fallen Afghan republic. Like that of the Taliban, their narrative is not entirely wrong. The two most common refrains are that the Taliban brutalised civilians during the war and that the republic was a noble project undone by US betrayal. We know that the Taliban have killed many civilians, and we know (or, at least, I do) that there were many good people serving the republic.

But I am not sure the republic will ever come to be remembered by most Afghans in Afghanistan as a high point in their history. Far too many of the former officials who pontificate on social media are suspected of corruption, and far too many of the former officers are accused of grisly war crimes. Many of them are now hosted by western governments and employed in western universities, so investigations are unlikely.

Some of these exiles have tried to organise themselves and their mythology into so-called “resistance movements”. The biggest is the National Resistance Front (NRF), which is led by the 30-something Ahmad Massoud and his uncles. Its network of allies (they have regular meetings together) includes a group of warlords-turned-politicians and some former Afghan army officers.

One of the warlords-turned-politicians is Rashid Dostum, who has been accused of such crimes as massacring 2,000 prisoners of war by locking them in shipping containers in the desert and arranging, during his tenure as vice president, for a political rival to be kidnapped and sexually assaulted.

The NRF has campaigned for support and money in western capitals all summer, casting itself as a vestige of the republic and a defender of Afghan democracy and Afghan women. Mr Massoud’s new book describes his movement’s “relentless fight for human rights”, “a free and democratic Afghanistan” and promotion of “a moderate and rationalist Islam”.

A few months ago, I asked one of his closest advisers how Afghans are supposed to believe any of that when the NRF’s friends include people like Mr Dostum. I also asked how the NRF can call the Taliban terrorists and war criminals without also calling for Mr Dostum’s prosecution.

His answer to the first question was that the NRF must be practical: “Our priority is to get all these forces together to confront the common enemy [the Taliban].” In the same breath, he commented that the NRF would be open to being in a government with the Taliban if the latter “were only willing to talk”.

To my second question about prosecuting Mr Dostum, he said: “Once Afghanistan is free, then we can make courts and investigate [him].”

I revisit this conversation often in my mind to try to make sense of this story – that there can be an Afghanistan founded on human rights, but getting there must involve embracing alleged perpetrators. That everyone is an eternal enemy until they are a partner, and a partner until they are the enemy. It’s not that we should be surprised by this Machiavellianism. It’s that we should be disappointed. It just doesn’t seem like a story worth fighting for.

And maybe that explains the reluctance among Afghans right now to try to form a narrative for the past 20 years – the lack of hunger for an Afghan version of Washington’s Afghanistan War Commission.

From the American perspective, Afghanistan was a costly misadventure, but if it had gone right then the benefits were obvious: justice for 9/11, a new democracy in America’s image, greater prestige and further proof of the superiority of America’s vision for the world. That makes it likely that, however many mistakes (and potentially crimes) the commission uncovers, part of the American story will be a sigh for what could have been.

From the Afghan perspective, however, it is a real challenge to try to wade through this generation-long war and find any potential upside. For Afghan society as a whole, no one narrative could have presented a happy ending.