BY Jan. 1, 2015 the last NATO combat soldier is due to have departed Afghan soil, leaving behind a scattering of military advisers and trainers. Listen to NATO leaders, like the UK’s Premier David Cameron, and you will be told that the 135,000 foreign troops will be marching home, heads held high, with their mission accomplished.
The story is that Afghanistan will, within the next two years, achieve an effective army and a reliable police force. It will be able to take over for itself, the task of combating the insurgency. That’s what the NATO’s politicians protest. Their generals however, despite the need publicly to be towing the official line, have long been admitting privately that the rosy picture being painted by their political bosses, is far from reality.
And perhaps, most importantly, the Taleban insurgents are well aware that, even though they cannot defeat NATO militarily, they have only to wait, while continuing their pin-prick attacks on soldiers and civilians of all nationalities, before they will be able to claim that they have humiliated the foreign solders and driven them from their land.
The problem behind the whole NATO intervention was that, once the Taleban has been ousted in 2001, it should never have been allowed to become a military confrontation. What was needed was a genuine case of nation-building with the creation of all the institutions and infrastructure that this war-torn country lacked so spectacularly. Huge pledges of international aid were made. Afghan leaders came together in the Jirga and agreed to bury their differences and back an electoral process. The outcome was the election of Hamid Karzai as president and the formation of what was supposed to be a government of national unity. It turned out to be more a government of national plunder. Well-intentioned politicians quickly discovered that they were powerless in the face of ethnic rivalries and a political system, that quickly become engrossed in the business of enriching itself, rather than the wider country.
Perhaps Afghanistan is too disparate a place with ethnic Pashtun, Tajik, Uzbek and Hazara regions, who only really meet in the capital Kabul, which itself steadily acquired a reputation for payola and graft. So many of the noble initiatives started by outside governments and NGOs, quickly mired in an inefficient bureaucracy, that generally held out its hand, not in friendship, but for payment.
And there was something else very important missing from the new Afghanistan, that the international community fondly imagined that it was building — the Taleban. In their moment of triumph, with the Taleban and the Al-Qaeda guests scattered into the Tora Bora mountains, NATO and the bulk of the Afghan leaders, not least Karzai himself, wanted no truck with the former government, who had happily bolstered their own rule with the profits from opium poppy cultivation. This was a fundamental error. It should have been accepted that the Taleban, however ruthless its rule and however appalling the company it kept, represented a genuine stream of Afghan life. Maybe they would have been too uncompromising to sit down at the negotiating table with other Afghans. But we will never know now.
What is certain is that when NATO withdraws, unless something remarkable occurs, the fighting will continue, with the government in the cities and the insurgents in the hills, which is the way of every conflict in this country. The only difference will be that from 2015, it will be exclusively Afghans and not a mix of Afghans and foreign troops who will be maimed and killed.
Afghanistan might, however, be given a chance of peace when foreign troops quit, if NATO leaders stop pretending that their intervention has been an unmitigated success and that the country is set firmly on the road to stability, with a strong and effective central government. Tragically nothing could be further from the truth. If NATO politicians can bring themselves to face up to and admit their failure, then maybe the closing months of their war can be used to establish a realistic solution, which has a reasonable chance of lasting. And that process simply has to include the Taleban, or at least those elements within its diverse ranks, that are prepared to talk.
Anything less would be to compound the long list of failed promises from both NATO; on development aid, military security, peace and sound government for all Afghans, and the Karzai administration; that they were intent on building a new Afghanistan with strong institutions, an independent judiciary and the rule of law.
Editorial: A last chance to get real
