Sunday, August 29, 2021
Paddy Ashdown's prescient memo about Afghanistan
Yesterday a Facebook memory threw up a blogpost I wrote in 2009. It quoted a rather prescient passage about Afghanistan from Paddy Ashdown's 2009 Autobiography in which he quotes a confidential minute he submitted a few years earlier when he was being considered as the UN Special Representative in the country. It is worth reproducing again in light of recent events:
1. We do not have enough troops, aid or international will to make Afghanistan much different from what it has been for the last 1,000 years - a society built around guns, drugs and tribalism. And even if we had all of these in sufficient quantities we would not have them for sufficient time - around 25 years or so - to make the aim of fundamentally altering the nature of Afghanistan achievable.
2. In 5-10 years it seems very probable that troop numbers and aid in Afghanistan will, at best, be half what they are now. The international communities will have other priorities, and Afghanistan will no longer be top of its agenda.
3. So our task now is to shape our actions towards the kind of Afghanistan which can be managed on these diminished resources.
4. This will be an Afghanistan in which:
He continues by suggesting that we have to abandon the notion that we can make Afghanistan into a well-governed state, with gender-aware citizens and European-standard human rights. It raises expectations we cannot fulfil and wastes resources better deployed elsewhere. A better governed state is the limit of the achievable.
On the military side we also need to understand that we probably cannot defeat the Taliban - probably only the Afghan people can do this. And at present, especially in the south, they do not seem ready to do so. Nor can we force them. They change their mind on this in their time, not ours. The best we can do is to give them space, help where we can and hope for the best.
1. We do not have enough troops, aid or international will to make Afghanistan much different from what it has been for the last 1,000 years - a society built around guns, drugs and tribalism. And even if we had all of these in sufficient quantities we would not have them for sufficient time - around 25 years or so - to make the aim of fundamentally altering the nature of Afghanistan achievable.
2. In 5-10 years it seems very probable that troop numbers and aid in Afghanistan will, at best, be half what they are now. The international communities will have other priorities, and Afghanistan will no longer be top of its agenda.
3. So our task now is to shape our actions towards the kind of Afghanistan which can be managed on these diminished resources.
4. This will be an Afghanistan in which:
- guns will, especially in the south, probably still be a greater factor in the exercise of power than the ballot box.
- there will still be tension, especially in the south, between governance through tribal democracy and government through formal Western-style democratic structures, with the former being more influential than the latter, unless we can find a way to synergise the two.
- War lords especially in the south will still be a feature of Afghan governance and government.
- drugs, especially in the south, will still be a feature of Afghan life and the Afghan economy.
- corruption will still be deeply embedded in government
- the Taliban will still exist as an armed force, especially in the south. Because here the insurgency is actually not about Al Qaeda but about deeply conservative Islamic Pashtun nationalism, with most locals preferring the Taliban, even if they do nasty things to them, to foreign troops, even if they do nice things for them.
He continues by suggesting that we have to abandon the notion that we can make Afghanistan into a well-governed state, with gender-aware citizens and European-standard human rights. It raises expectations we cannot fulfil and wastes resources better deployed elsewhere. A better governed state is the limit of the achievable.
On the military side we also need to understand that we probably cannot defeat the Taliban - probably only the Afghan people can do this. And at present, especially in the south, they do not seem ready to do so. Nor can we force them. They change their mind on this in their time, not ours. The best we can do is to give them space, help where we can and hope for the best.
He concludes that the realistic aim in Afghanistan, with current resources, is not victory but containment. Our success will be measured not in making things different but making them better, not in final defeat of the jihardists, but in preventing them from using Afghanistan as a space for their activity.
