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    The west’s nation-building fantasy is to blame for the mess in Afghanistan | Simon Jenkins

    OpinionAfghanistanThe west’s nation-building fantasy is to blame for the mess in AfghanistanSimon JenkinsBritish MPs have turned on Boris Johnson – but what tidy end did they expect from this imperialist experiment? Fri 20 Aug 2021 03.00 EDTLast modified on Fri 20 Aug 2021 04.32 EDTBritain’s MPs this week uttered one long howl of anguish over Afghanistan. Their immediate targets were Joe Biden and Boris Johnson, politicians who just happened to be on the watch when Kabul’s pack of cards collapsed. But their real concern was that a collective 20-year experiment in “exporting western values” to Afghanistan had fallen into chaos. MPs wanted someone other than themselves to blame. A politician is never so angry as when proved wrong.Even the crisis in Afghanistan can’t break the spell of Britain’s delusional foreign policy | Owen JonesRead moreLike their fellow representatives in Congress, MPs somehow hoped the end would be nice and tidy, with speeches and flags, much like Britain’s exit from Hong Kong. Instead, tens of thousands of Afghans who had lived in an effective colony under years of Nato occupation had come to believe the west would either never leave or somehow protect them from Taliban retribution. They were swiftly disabused.In 2006 I stood at dusk on a castle wall overlooking Kabul with a young UN official. He had just heard the Kandahar road was no longer safe. “Why,” he sighed, “can’t Afghanistan be more like Sweden?” I tried to see if he was smiling, but he was grimacing. For another 15 years, armies of western soldiers and civilians hurled stupefying amounts of money at the country. They created a wildly corrupt western dependency, where some 50,000 Afghans have links with the west that are now lethal. As for the “western-trained” army, one of its trainers told me it was mostly for show. An occupying power could not possibly motivate local youths to kill their fellow countrymen who might soon be ruling them. He rightly predicted: “They will just walk home.”It is now 22 years since Tony Blair gave a speech in Chicago lecturing the US on his doctrine of international intervention. He wanted the west to invade countries across the world not in self-defence, but to save people everywhere from oppression. It was a reformulation of Alfred Milner’s Victorian concept of moral imperialism. British politicians on both the left and the right have long been uncomfortable about the abandonment of Milnerism as the acceptable face of empire. Global policing is somehow embedded in Britain’s political DNA. All Blair’s wars of aggression were cheered on in the House of Commons.Many people have spoken this week of the “decline of the west”, lamenting the collapse of US moral authority. Yet these theories are beside the point. The belief that our moral values are somehow meaningless unless they are enforced upon those who do not share them is imperialist bigotry. It also leads to absurd biases. Iraq is now thought of as “bad interventionism”, as opposed to Afghanistan’s “good” version. The virtue of the latter invasion led President Obama in 2009 to bless the war in Afghanistan with a “surge” of soldiers, taking the US total to 110,000, mere target practice for the Taliban.American gunboat diplomacy, initially supposed to salve the wounds of 9/11 in 2001, opened the door to fake morality and a trillion-dollar nation-building fantasy. The catastrophic return of Taliban autonomy became its inevitable conclusion. The US – with Britain as its lackey – committed liberal interventionism’s cardinal sin: half-heartedness. The craving to intervene is always followed by a craving to withdraw. Traditional empires at least pretended they would never leave. As it was, Afghanistan replicated departures from India, South Africa, Hong Kong and Iraq. If you invade and conquer an alien state, you own it, but must then disown it. Western rule has killed an estimated 240,000 in Afghanistan since 2001, more than the Taliban ever did. It has not left morality, just a mess. We must assume strategists in Washington and London are now planning interventions in Taiwan and Ukraine against possible Chinese and Russian expansion. If you ask taxpayers to spend billions on defence, you need something to show for it. So you pretend, as Johnson did in his bizarre conversation with Biden this week, that “gains” were made in Afghanistan. You accuse non-interventionists, as did the former Tory leader William Hague, of demonstrating “the enfeeblement of the western mind”. In a recent column, Hague called on Britain to continue invading foreign countries when “our common humanity demands it”. In doing so, he sounded like Pope Urban summoning the First Crusade.The concept of a global police force, so often cited, requires some framework of global consent. When the United Nations was founded, that consent was rooted in the first chapter of its charter. This stated that all members “refrain from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of another state”. On that basis it achieved general consent, if not always obedience. The end of the cold war and the assumed superiority of liberal western values emboldened the US and Britain to declare a “responsibility to protect” all those oppressed by their governments. The authority of the UN charter – rooted in national sovereignty – collapsed, and the UN gave way to the US as a self-declared policeman.The American cold war historian Francis Fukuyama wrote recently that the US “is not likely to regain its earlier hegemonic status, nor should it aspire to”. There is no such thing as a global policeman. Individual nations best serve humanity by example or charity, not by war. Military intervention is rarely, if ever, humane. Western regimes have enough woes to confront in their own countries. If they crave moral outreach, it should be through the imperialism of ideas, of receptive minds and open doors, not of guns and bombs.
    Simon Jenkins is a Guardian columnist
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    Why did we ignore the lessons of history in Afghanistan? We need a public inquiry | Jonathan Steele

    OpinionAfghanistanWhy did we ignore the lessons of history in Afghanistan? We need a public inquiry Jonathan SteeleThe US and Britain’s dogged pursuit of reform and regime change made the return of the Taliban almost inevitable Wed 18 Aug 2021 12.30 EDTLast modified on Wed 18 Aug 2021 12.32 EDTWhen rising British casualties in Afghanistan and Iraq started to raise public doubts 15 years ago, a new mantra began to be heard: Iraq was a war of choice, Afghanistan a war of necessity. The argument was that the US and its faithful ally, Britain, had launched an invasion in Iraq that was unjustified as it was based on a false premise: the hollow claim that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction.Fear of refugees must not shape the response to Afghanistan’s crisis | Daniel TrillingRead moreThe intervention in Afghanistan was different, it was said, even by many who opposed the Iraq war. Al-Qaida had organised the atrocities of 9/11 and its leader, Osama bin Laden, was based on Afghan soil. George W Bush was right to give the Taliban an ultimatum to hand him over or face invasion.But here, too, there was a false premise, or indeed several. Mullah Omar and the Taliban leadership were as surprised to see the twin towers crash to the ground in New York as everyone else. They had never been consulted by Bin Laden on his strategy, let alone his targets. Anticipating US reprisals, Bin Laden and his large entourage of Arab fighters left Kandahar and hid in the Tora Bora mountains. Bush’s call on the Taliban to arrest him was unrealistic. So going after the Taliban was just as unnecessary as bringing regime change in Iraq.It was also equally dubious from the standpoint of international law. There was no UN security council resolution authorising the US assault on Afghanistan. It was clear that Bush would want to punish al-Qaida for 9/11, but international law does not permit armed force for revenge or retaliation. The US claimed that al-Qaida had declared war on the US and it was entitled to respond with force in self-defence. International law only allows this if an enemy attack is imminent. In the autumn of 2001, imminence was hardly a relevant concept. None of the 19 9/11 hijackers was Afghan and they had mainly trained in Germany and the US. It had taken two years to prepare the attack, so there was no way al-Qaida could have mounted another similar atrocity imminently.After 9/11, a few analysts argued that if the US was determined to use force it should have limited it to a search-and-destroy operation against al-Qaida in Tora Bora. Their view was ignored and Bush added a new war aim: the building of a modern democracy in Afghanistan. Joe Biden repudiated that in his speech on Monday when he stressed that US policy should be based on security from terrorism rather than any humanitarian reforms. His remarks are sparking a furious debate, but they are correct.Britain, too, needs to re-examine its Afghan policies. It should hold an inquiry along the same lines as the Chilcot report into Iraq (except that it should report much faster). The first item on its agenda must be whether the decision to go for regime change in 2001 was wise or foolish. The events of the past two decades, culminating in the triumphant return of the Taliban that we have just witnessed, flows from that decision.It is true that Kabul and other major Afghan cities have enjoyed 20 years of patchy progress. Women in particular have benefited and a generation of young people has grown up with the expectation of secure and free life choices. If the Taliban had not been ousted from power in 2001, none of this would have happened. But the country would have been spared the ravages and killing of the civil war that resumed in 2003 once the Taliban recovered from the shock of defeat. Like the Ashraf Ghani administration, it also just gave up in 2001 under the weight of US bombing with barely a shot fired. It was bound to seek ways to reverse it, however long it took.In the century since Afghanistan gained independence from Britain in 1919, the country’s tragedy has been the constantly repeated cycle of defeat for the minority of Afghan modernisers who have sought to break the hold of conservative rural patriarchy. It happened with the first post-independence leader, Amanullah Khan, who took power on a wave of popularity but lost it after he introduced co-educational schools and stopped women wearing hijab, let alone the full burqa. Conservatives marched on Kabul in 1929, the army deserted and Amanullah abdicated.Resistance to a new wave of reform arose again in the 1980s when Afghanistan’s communists, the People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA), expanded education for girls and increased opportunities for women to work outside the home. When they took Soviet support, they opened the door for an alliance of religious and tribal leaders (helped by western governments at the height of the cold war) to rise up as mujahideen warriors and brand the PDPA as atheists and lackeys of the Kremlin. When Moscow withdrew its aid in 1992 (like Trump and Biden today), the modernising regime quickly fell. Now we are seeing a third turn of the wheel of conservatives ousting reformers.Observers wonder how the Taliban managed to achieve so sweeping a victory. The sad fact is that its patriarchal views are popular in rural and small-town Afghanistan and it could never have made its stunning military advances without local support. People had also lost faith in a corrupt central government and an army that the Pentagon was well aware was ineffective and unmotivated – as revealed in the “Afghanistan Papers”, hundreds of confidential interviews with US military and diplomatic leaders obtained by the Washington Post.Many Afghans felt the Taliban produced quicker and more honest justice in village disputes between families. The UK government should have known this. Surveys commissioned for the Department for International Development in Helmand in 2010 showed that people preferred Taliban courts to the Kabul-appointed ones, where they had to bribe prosecutors and judges.Afghans do not like invaders, whatever their motives, and the Taliban were able to exploit the narrative of patriotic resistance. Why did Britain ignore the lessons of history and follow the unhappy experience of the Soviet invasion and occupation? That must be the central issue in the public inquiry we need.
    Jonathan Steele is a former Guardian correspondent and author of Ghosts of Afghanistan: The Haunted Battleground
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    It has taken 20 years to prove the invasion of Afghanistan was totally unnecessary | Simon Jenkins

    OpinionAfghanistanIt has taken 20 years to prove the invasion of Afghanistan was totally unnecessarySimon JenkinsWestern involvement in the country was a post-imperial fantasy that has led to the current ghastly situation Mon 16 Aug 2021 09.37 EDTLast modified on Mon 16 Aug 2021 11.57 EDTThe fall of Kabul was inevitable. It marks the end of a post-imperial western fantasy. Yet the west’s reaction beggars belief. Call it a catastrophe, a humiliation, a calamitous mistake, if it sounds good. All retreats from empire are messy. This one took 20 years, but the end was at least swift.The US had no need to invade Afghanistan. The country was never a “terrorist state” like Libya or Iran. It was not at war with the US; indeed the US had aided its rise to power against the Russians in 1996. The Taliban had hosted Osama bin Laden in his mountain lair through his friendship with the Taliban leader, Mullah Omar. At an immediate post-9/11 “loya jirga” in the southern city of Kandahar, younger leaders pressed the mullah to expel Bin Laden. Pakistan would probably have forced his surrender sooner or later. After the 2001 invasion the US defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld demanded that George Bush “punish and get out”. Yet neither Bush nor Tony Blair listened. Instead they experienced a rush of blood to the head. They commandeered Nato, which had no dog in the fight, and began “nation building”, as if nations were made of Lego. It would be an age, said the political scientist Joseph Nye, of the “velvet hegemon”. For reasons never fully explained, Blair declared a “doctrine of international community” and pleaded for Britain to be in the first bombing run over Kabul. He then sent Clare Short as the minister for international development to stop the Afghans growing poppies. Afghan poppy production soared to an all-time high, spreading from six to 28 provinces, probably Britain’s most successful farm product of all time. Opium floated the Taliban back to power.When I visited Kabul in 2006, I had heard nothing but bombast about what already seemed a doomed venture. A British army of 3,400 volunteered to suppress resurgent Taliban rebels in Helmand. The defence secretary John Reid promised that only “remnants” of the Taliban remained and that “not a shot needed firing”. His general, David Richards, said it would be “just another Malaya”. Seven year later, British troops left defeated and the Americans took over before also being defeated. The local Pashtun are masters at humiliating outside powers.From then on, retreat was only a matter of time. What is happening now is ghastly. Twenty years of dependency on lavish western taxpayers means that soldiers, interpreters, journalists, academics and aid workers are seeing friends threatened and killed. Years of assistance and training is at risk. A reputed trillion dollars of American money has been wasted. Britain alone has wasted £37bn. How many times must it be drummed into British heads that the British empire is over? It is dead, finished, outdated, not to be repeated. Yet Boris Johnson has just sent an aircraft carrier to the South China Sea. Britain has no need, let alone right, to rule other countries, to “make the world a better place”. No soldier need die for it, let alone 454 British soldiers and civilians in Afghanistan. The best Britain can now do is establish good relations with a new regime in Afghanistan – in liaison with Kabul’s neighbours Pakistan and Iran – to protect at least some of the good it has attempted to do this past 20 years. The world is not threatening Britain. Terrorism does not need state sponsors, nor will it be ended by state conquest.
    Simon Jenkins is a Guardian columnist
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    UK media unite to urge visas for Afghan reporters at risk from Taliban

    AfghanistanUK media unite to urge visas for Afghan reporters at risk from TalibanNewspapers and broadcasters send open letter to Boris Johnson raising safety fears about locals who did vital work for the west

    Open letter warns of brutal Taliban reprisals against Afghan reporters
    Emma Graham-HarrisonWed 4 Aug 2021 14.59 EDTFirst published on Wed 4 Aug 2021 12.10 EDTA coalition of British newspapers and broadcasters has appealed to the government to expand its refugee visa programme for Afghans, to include people who have worked for UK media over the past 20 years.In an open letter to the prime minister and foreign secretary, more than 20 outlets outlined the vital need for a route to safety for reporters whose work with British media could put them at risk of Taliban reprisals.“There is an urgent need to act quickly, as the threat to their lives is already acute and worsening,” the letter said.“If left behind, those Afghan journalists and media employees who have played such a vital role informing the British public by working for British media will be left at the risk of persecution, of physical harm, incarceration, torture, or death.US media came together to make a similar appeal last month, unifying outlets as diverse as Fox and the New York Times. The Biden administration has since expanded its visa programme for Afghanistan, to cover people with links to the US media, and US-funded aid projects.The signatories to the British letter represent an equally broad coalition. They include broadcasters Sky and ITN (which makes news for ITV, Channel 4 and Channel 5) and all major British newspapers from the Guardian, the Times and the Financial Times to the Daily Mail and the Sun, and weekly magazine the Economist.The National Union of Journalists and press freedom organisation Reporters Without Borders have also put their names to the demand for a path to safety for journalists with UK links, modelled on the visa route for military interpreters.The letter was sent to Boris Johnson and the foreign secretary, Dominic Raab, who did not immediately respondThe Labour leader, Keir Starmer, promised his party’s backing for the effort to expand protection to Afghan journalists.“The Labour party strongly supports this campaign. These brave Afghans helped the British media report news of the war to the world. They stood up for media freedom and democracy, values that we rightly champion around the world,” Starmer said.“The UK must not abandon them. We urge the government to do the right thing and provide these Afghan journalists, support staff and their families sanctuary in the UK.”Afghans who worked as reporters, translators or “fixers” – multi-skilled journalists who do everything from research to driving for foreign correspondents from outside the country – have been vital to public understanding of a war that has claimed hundreds of British lives and cost billions of pounds.That work, and their links to the UK, also created unique security risks for them. Afghan reporters say their reporting is regularly cited in insurgent threats.The letter notes that the UK government’s own panel on press freedom “recommends a visa programme for journalists at risk in their home state”.The Taliban have for years targeted journalists in campaigns of assassinations and intimidation, which intensified last year, when a wave of attacks in urban areas picked off reporters along with human rights workers, moderate religious scholars and civil society activists, as they went about their daily lives.Helmand-based Elyas Dayee, a key contributor to much of the UK media coverage from the province where most British troops served, was killed in a bomb attack claimed by local Taliban commanders. Other victims included three women who worked for Enekass TV in eastern Afghanistan, gunned down on their commute.The threats have become even more urgent since the Taliban launched a military campaign in May that has swept through the country.They have seized more than half of rural Afghanistan and are threatening several major cities. The group have carried out targeted killings after taking control in some areas, and journalists fear they are likely to be on hitlists.The body of the Pulitzer prize-winning photographer Danish Siddiqui was multilated while in Taliban custody, after he was killed near the southern town of Kandahar last month.Underlining the gravity of the current security situation in Afghanistan, the US has started airlifting out former employees even before they finish their visa process, and UK military officials are appealing for a broader visa programme.TopicsAfghanistanTalibanSouth and Central AsiaUS politicsJournalist safetynewsReuse this content More