Sherard Cowper-Coles - Cables from Kabul - The Inside Story of the West’s Afghanistan Campaign

11 The RSM dismissed the parade. The obsequies were over. It was now dusk. A great crush of men and vehicles pressed back into Britannia Lines, and the work of this war.

COWPER-COLES

Ah, love, let us be true

To one another! for the world, which seems

To lie before us like a land of dreams,

So various, so beautiful, so new,

Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,

Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;

And we are here as on a darkling plain

Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,

Where ignorant armies clash by night.

Matthew Arnold, ‘Dover Beach’

Some 2,000 years ago, a Greek recorded a conflict which had convulsed the Hellenic lands for more than three decades. The writer wanted his work to be a possession for all time. He hoped that men would use it as a guide to avoid the mistakes that had precipitated the events through which he had lived. But he noted that human nature never really changed. Men probably would therefore ignore the lessons of his history, and repeat the errors he had reported. Nevertheless, he thought it worth setting down his account anyway, just in case expectation might for once be confounded by hope fulfilled.

The conflict in Afghanistan is no Peloponnesian War, although it has lasted even longer. And I am certainly no Thucydides. But for three and a half years, from May 2007, I experienced at first hand a struggle that was by the spring of 2011 swallowing each year some $125 billion of US taxpayers’ money and getting on for £6 billion a year from the British Exchequer. This was a real war that had by then taken the lives of more than 2,000 coalition soldiers and of some 350 British servicemen and women, as well as those of tens of thousands of Afghans in and out of uniform. More than 10,000 American soldiers had been wounded in Afghanistan.

As British ambassador in Kabul from 2007 to 2009, and then as the Foreign Secretary’s special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan from February 2009 until September 2010, I saw politicians, generals, diplomats and officials struggling with successive strategies which never seemed to deliver what we wanted, and with military tactics which – we all knew – could not, without a credible political strategy, resolve Afghanistan’s underlying problems.

In London, in the English shires, and in the border areas of Scotland and Wales which supply so many of our fighting men and women, as well as in Washington and the fifty states beyond, there was an uneasy sense that this war was misconceived. Many people shared the sentiment attributed to one of the wisest of British prime ministers, Harold Macmillan, that the first rule of politics is ‘Don’t invade Afghanistan.’ For Britons especially, the unhappy history of earlier military expeditions into Afghanistan weighed heavily. Most press commentators were sceptical.

And yet we carried on, as part of a great US-led coalition, with a mainly military, and hugely expensive, campaign to stabilise a faraway country of which we truly knew little. We stuck at it because Britain couldn’t and wouldn’t let down its coalition partners, especially the Americans. We kept going because we wanted to support our troops. We stuck at it because we wanted to believe our generals. Each year they assured us that, at last, they had the strategy and the resources they needed to do the job. This year at last, they said every year, we were going to turn the corner. The Americans had a new plan, a new general, a fresh surge. ‘Astronomical progress’ was being made. The momentum of the insurgency was being reversed. There was reason for cautious optimism. Finally, it was safe to stroll (in body armour) in the bazaar of some fly-blown village in the Helmand Valley. Nobody, especially not politicians seeking votes in Middle England, wanted to be accused of not backing our boys.

But Middle England took a more nuanced view. The same people who were so fiercely loyal to the regiments woven into the fabric of British society had doubts about why those regiments were in Afghanistan at all, and about what lasting good they were doing there. Middle England, and Scotland and Wales and Ireland as well, had folk memories of what had happened to British battalions which had ventured too far, or stayed too long, west of the Indus. Among some of the armed forces’ most loyal civilian supporters there was a consciousness about Afghanistan that combined Carry On up the Khyber and Flashman with ancestral memories of forebears who had fought and died on India’s North West Frontier.

Most other books on the present conflict in Afghanistan have fallen into one of two categories. On the one hand, there have been dozens of breathlessly whizz-bang accounts of the fighting by journalists embedded with the troops. Each of those books is a potent and richly deserved tribute to the sacrifice and courage of our fighting men and women. But, precisely because such war stories focus so closely on combat, they sometimes miss the broader perspective of the war. Moreover, when a journalist has put his life, literally, in the hands of the men and women about whom he writes, it seems like bad manners or worse to ask what wider purpose is served by one’s hosts’ superhuman sacrifice. On the other hand, there have been some outstanding semi-academic descriptions of the conflict and of the lands, not just Afghanistan, in which it is taking place. But, by their nature, neither set of books has offered the picture of the strategic direction of this war which I hope here to provide. Thus this book tries, through the prism of my small part in the enterprise, to illuminate some of the political and diplomatic aspects of Britain’s and America’s mainly military engagement in Afghanistan.

I try to address some fundamental questions about the nature of the West’s Afghanistan project. I explain how the doubts I had, even before I had left London, about the strategy we were supposed to be pursuing were confirmed by experience on the ground. I describe my growing admiration for the extraordinary courage and professionalism of our fighting men and women in Helmand. But I also explain how I came gradually to understand that the problems we faced went far beyond ‘merely’ countering the Taliban insurgency in the south and east. I tell how I came to see that the Taliban had never been defeated in 2001–2; that the Bonn settlement that had followed had been a victors’ peace, from which the vanquished had been excluded; and that the constitution resulting from that settlement could last only as long as the West was prepared to stay in Afghanistan to prop up the present disposition.

More specifically, the book pays tribute to the tactical success our soldiers are undoubtedly having. But it also illustrates the deficiencies of a strategy focused on pacifying and garrisoning with Western troops selected areas of the country where the insurgency is strongest, in order to hand those areas over to the civil and military agencies of a half-formed central Afghan state. It suggests that, even if our military achieve local, tactical and temporary success in Helmand or Kandahar, that will be far from enough to achieve within three years our wider strategic goal of stabilising Afghanistan to the point where the Afghan authorities can secure and govern the country with only money and advice from outside. It points out that the ‘Government’ to which we plan gradually to transfer security responsibility, province by province, is far from being either able or willing to secure, let alone govern, such a legacy. And it shows how my then boss, the Foreign Secretary, David Miliband, and I became convinced that the only sensible strategic approach had to be a political one, drawing in all the internal and regional parties to a conflict with roots far deeper than the Western intervention of October 2001.