Shall we try and keep a grip here? Terrorist regime flies planes into office blocks killing many. Lets punish them for murdering our people! oh hang on the Anglo Afgham war of 1839 to 1919 didn't go well. Yeah, just send out a strongly worded statement. That will learn them.
Quite. You don't get to kill 3,000 people and get away with a stern telling off. Launching airstrikes and using special forces to attack Al-Qaeda in Afghanistan for launching such an attack and then turning fire on the Taliban for sheltering such an organisation was a legitimate response. We can certainly argue about whether an "eye for an eye" is a sensible foreign policy strategy overall but if that had been the limit of Western involvement (a month or so of airstrikes and special forces operations) then it would be hard to argue that it would have been anything other than a successful mission. Al-Qaeda have, after all, never really recovered from the pasting they got in late 2001 and the Taliban regime fell only a few months after 9/11.
Of course Bush, Blair and, perhaps more importantly, their advisers (for these were not men who acted entirely on their own initiative) decided for, whatever reason, that we could actually build something in Afghanistan. Now, I was only very young when this was all going off, but in the years since I cannot recall a politician ever being honest and admitting that, whilst this is certainly a noble goal, it is one that would have taken generations to achieve. To do it would have meant Western soldiers being in Afghanistan and Western aid money being spent for maybe fifty years. Maybe even a bit more. As soon as we decided that we wanted to build a Western style democracy in Afghanistan that meant we began a multi-generational project from which there could be no swift exit without scenes like we've seen.
Admitting that, however, I don't think was ever high on the agenda.
Perhaps there was some third path between a month of airstrikes and then leave them to their own devices and twenty years of blood and treasure spilled to end up back where we began. Perhaps something funky with restoring the monarchy or perhaps something more akin to a Tribal council (my understanding remains that Afghanistan remains very rooted in tribal politics and people feel more kinship to their Tribe than to Afghanistan, at least outside of somewhere like Kabul). Or heck, maybe we could have done something novel like asked some regular Afghans for their thoughts...
But in any event we are where we are. The main thing that angers and upsets me now (apart from the waste of lives be they British, American, Canadian, New Zealander or, lets not forget who has lost the most, Afghani) is the way that we seem to be leaving behind those who helped us and took us at our word to die. Often, it appears, for want of the correct paperwork. A noble exception to the British Ambassador to Afghanistan who appears to have remained behind at the airport in order to personally process as many applications as possible. In some respects it's this which probably has the longest term implications. Next time we need someone's help in some far away country are they really going to trust us again? After seeing what we did to so many Afghani's who did help us?
You don't punish one terrorist group by invading the country where another is hiding in public.
I think you'll have to expand that slightly but I believe it's pretty settled that Al-Qaeda absolutely were in Afghanistan and that the Taliban did allow them to base and operate in Afghanistan. So attacking Afghanistan was a perfectly rational response to the attack on the World Trade Centre.
I've been taken aback at the utter speed of capitulation
It will be interesting to find out how that happened. There's plenty of rumour and speculation swirling online at the moment from stuff alleging that various Afghan government officials were paid off or secretly cut deals to claims that the security situation has clearly been far worse for far longer and it was not being made public. But whatever the cause of the collapse it has been spectacularly swift. Was it really only the middle of last week people were talking about how Kabul would only likely be under threat,
under threat not fallen, in ninety days?
