By Peter Preston (THE GUARDIAN, 10/07/06):
The trouble is that we deceive ourselves. So a nation stands silent for two minutes in honour of the 52 who died, while TV commentators and politicians invoke the rhetoric of "the war on terror". So, in a faraway places like Helmand province, British soldiers perish for the same supposedly simple cause. We must "let the writ of the Afghan government run", according to our defence secretary. We must, in the parlance, rescue "a failed state".
But nobody pauses to observe that Afghanistan has never, ever, been a successful state. It hasn't failed, for there has seldom been a worthwhile period of steady governance and legality, let alone freedom, throughout its tortured history. It is, and always has been, a dust bowl of violence, lawlessness and profound instability. And the fact that we don't see that instantly, that we bumble along hoping to create some new civil society at gunpoint, comes straight back to George Bush's original 9/11 formulation and the "war" word. Wars - even wars against terrorist groups like Eta or the IRA - are waged between finite, coherent forces. They may end, as those two have ended, via submission or negotiation. There is a structure to them.
But the particular difficulty with al-Qaida is that it doesn't fit that pattern - and thus any eventual resolution is non-negotiable. And the particular, grievous difficulty with Afghanistan, far worse than Iraq, is that there is no structure in place to build on. Plaster it with aid and the benign patter of the ballot box, and you'll still see your dreams come to nothing. This, in so many ways, is a medieval country, a land that time has passed by. It cannot be spun five centuries forward by bemused brigades from Nato who can't understand who the enemy is or why it hates them so. It pays no heed to the collected speeches of Tony Blair. Try a history of the hundred years' war instead.
Of course, these differences are difficult to comprehend. They don't feature in standard military textbooks where battles for hearts and minds have an honoured place. They don't even fit with Baghdad, where an uncivil society still somehow exists among the debris. Watch an Afghan tribesman on the hillside using the Stingers that the CIA showered on him 20 years ago and you may think you see a sophisticated (if dishevelled) fighting man. What you don't see is a sophisticated political operator ready to trade in his hardware for a tractor, World Bank grant and single transferable vote.
Democracy simply has no roots in this soil. Perhaps, you could say, King Zahir Shah tried to plant a few seeds of it during his 40 years of feeble power, but they blew away at the first puff of ambition from the zealots and gangsters who ousted him. And remember always that Kabul, with its assassinations and plots, is more of an old city state, cut off from an unchanging countryside - and that the countryside in the south-east stretches, without physical borders, into the wastelands of a Baluchistan where Pakistan's own writ barely runs.
Yet again, the terminology of conventional conflict deludes. Why doesn't General Pervez Musharraf "clamp down" on the Baluchis and Pashtuns? Because, politically and militarily, that's impossible. His command and control levers don't function out here. And see how the words we use also suffer from precision creep. Once upon a very recent time, the Taliban came to prominence, with some popular support, because they tried to clean up a land of drug warlords, the same people who are back in big business since their fall. Now defence secretary Browne talks earnestly about vanquishing "the Taliban drug warlords".
It's an idiotic conflation. What we're really talking about is a melee of different groupings, some idealistic, some criminal, uniting as usual against any outside force. The Taliban, with a little malign help from their Pakistani friends, were and are young Afghans, not some foreign implant: the warlords who still run so much in a nation of bewildering ethnic mixes, over 70 languages spoken, are often tribal leaders too. When British soldiers die in Helmand, they are killed by Afghans, just as Red Army soldiers were once killed. Why don't their killers see that we're only trying to help? Because they don't.
In the end the Taliban would have fallen anyway. That's what happens to every Afghan regime. It implodes, and is replaced. Communism came and went. Mullah Omar's own brand of militant Islam would have gone too. But "wars" against terror dictated something more proactive, more surgical, more supposedly glorious. Forget it, alas. And forget also the thought that "more" troops will "finish the job". This is Afghanistan: and the job, whatever it is, has barely begun.