A review of the book ‘Kabul: Final Call’
By Steve Bell
Written by the last British Ambassador to Afghanistan, this book gives the inside story of the British withdrawal in August 2021. Only taking up the position in April 2021, the writer concentrates the body of the narrative on the physical withdrawal of the armed forces and embassy, and the on-site processing and evacuation of 15,000 Afghan nationals for asylum in Britain.
There is no doubt that this close-up will make the book an essential reference for historians wishing to understand the withdrawal. This is valuable, and Bristow places the actions of the British government within the context of the wider NATO withdrawal, both armed forces and allied embassies (only the Turkish embassy remained). Because of the authors role, there is genuine insight into the diplomatic and political complexities of the withdrawal. For students of government, there is much to learn here.
However, the limitations of the book are clear whenever Bristow attempts a broad explanation of the failure of British government policy, or more significantly, of the debacle of two decades of NATO policy. Despite his critical eye towards politicians, his analysis shares much of the bipartisan consensus at Westminster.
Where he differs is more squarely blaming Trump for having negotiated the February 2020 Doha Agreement with the Taliban, and in blaming Biden for not renegotiating it. In that agreement the US agreed to withdraw all NATO forces by May 2020, later extended by Biden to August 2020. In exchange the Taliban agreed not to allow for Afghan territory to be used for attacks upon “the security of the United States and its allies”, including by Al Qaida or other forces. There were to be intra-Afghan negotiations leading to a negotiated settlement on future government, which would be linked to ending sanctions on Afghanistan.
Bristow regards the agreement as bad, having imposed no conditions on withdrawal, allowing the Taliban to drag out negotiations with the Afghan government. Now there is truth in such a criticism. The Afghan government was unable to change the military balance of forces, the Taliban waited until the withdrawal was irreversible. But Bristow doesn’t grasp that the Doha Agreement merely gave expression to the actual failure of US and NATO policy in Afghanistan. It was not the cause of that failure.
The author does place earlier decisions as laying the basis for long term failure. Hence we read: “The diversion of political attention and resources to the war in Iraq, which quickly went badly wrong, had a lasting effect on the ability of the USA and its allies to carry out the campaign in Afghanistan with the clarity of purpose needed, above all to put in place a stable political settlement and a viable military exit strategy.” (P.xviii) Which reads nicely, until one considers the failure to achieve such a settlement not just in Afghanistan and Iraq, but also in Libya, Syria and Yemen.
There is a general problem with post 9/11 US regime-change wars. Despite its monstrous military power, the relative economic decline of US imperialism means it no longer has the resources to stabilise complex societies through economic and technological assistance. Indeed that decline leaves it preferring states left in chaos, to states exercising policies contrary to US policy.
Like the bipartisan politicians in Washington and London, Bristow can’t grasp that societies like Afghanistan do not wish to be remade as a pauper relative. The significance of sovereignty is overlooked, which leads to a traditional coloniser’s assessment. “The size and posture of Western military presence and aid flows created a dependency culture… the aid flows did not translate into a vibrant economy or the lasting human development that is meant to follow from this. The military capacity in which we had invested so much melted away the moment that direct NATO military support was withdrawn… There were long-standing issues around legitimacy and public support for the Afghan Government and its leaders. This is a story of corruption, and predatory behaviour, of weak state institutions, and of compromised political leaders.” (P.195)
This blithely overlooks the fact that the source of corruption is the action of foreign governments attempting to build a state suitable for their purpose, without any popular legitimacy inside Afghanistan. The denial of self-determination to a people guarantees that the government built from abroad will be an instrument of national subordination, not sovereign development. In the end, an army of hundreds of thousands, together with an armed police force, could not be persuaded to do the bidding of the departing masters. Their uniforms were a condition of employment in a poverty stricken society, not an emblem of their commitment to the foreign-built Republic.
The author refuses to grasp the fundamental debacle of NATO’s intervention. “What happened in Afghanistan was not a military defeat for the US-led allied forces, nor was it the outcome of great power competition. It was a consequence of changing US defence and foreign policy priorities. It was a failure that stemmed from, and illustrated, a loss of will.” (P.194) According to Brown University “Costs of War” project, 241,000 people were killed in the Afghanistan/Pakistan war zone between 2001 and 2021. The U.S. war costs are given as $2.261 trillion, which does not include long term veteran care, or interest payments on war loans. For the British government, the National Army Museum estimates £37 billion was spent on pursuing the war. But the ambassador puts it all down to someone in the US losing the will to win.
At the time of the evacuation, after twenty years of NATO “help”, Afghanistan was left in a state of humanitarian crisis only then comparable to the situation in Yemen, itself described by the UN as “the worst humanitarian crisis in the world”. Yet the author continues to insist that there was substantial progress due to the NATO occupation. But even the vaunted achievements in education were hollow. The UN Human Development Report for 2020 gives some revealing figures. Actual schooling for girls aged from 5 to 16 averaged less than two years – that was less than a third given by other countries in the region. The subsequent repression by the Taliban does not erase the preceding failure.
How then can we take seriously statements about “continuing to stand alongside the people of Afghanistan”? NATO aligned countries have seized $9 billion of Afghanistan’s assets, have withdrawn aid programmes, and are sanctioning the country. Continuing the war by other means demonstrates that no lessons have been learnt from the military failure. Only a new dialogue and engagement with Afghanistan will help the people of that country. As the book makes clear, as yet, neither politicians, nor ambassadors, in the West have grasped this.
“Kabul: Final Call”, Laurie Bristow, Whittles Publishing
Steve Bell is a Liberation member and Treasurer of the Stop the War Coalition.
Image: British Army Troops at the Start of Op Moshtarak; Photo by SSgt Will Craig RLC; Flickr; Defence Imagery; licensed under the Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.0 Generic license; cropped.
The above article was originally published here by Liberation.