An uplifting country, a worthy cause – but the mission will never work

By Matthew Parris (THE TIMES, 21/01/06):

APPROACHING Heathrow, have you ever looked down, far down, from your aircraft window? Have you seen commuter trains at rush hour snaking like tiny worms across a big, wide plain? Two of these, just two, could carry the whole contingent of British troops we are planning to send to Afghanistan soon, to replace the Americans, at Washington’s request.

With these 3,000 we are this spring to begin pacifying the most rebellious province in that wild country. We are to control plains and mountains whence the whole armed might of the Soviet Union was forced to retreat in despair and ruin. An advance guard is already preparing. And the whole enterprise is predicated on the assumption that no serious insurgency will arise.

That surely must be the assumption. For let me take you now to another aircraft seat. A little more than a year ago I flew over southern Afghanistan en route to explore and report for The Times.

The terrain of that country is in itself a natural wonder. I noted the sublime violence of the landscape which rose beneath us: the broken yellow blades of high, lonely ridges; the torn shadows of deep canyons; the vast dry rivers and gashed, crumpled mountains of Afghanistan.

I looked across the cabin of the ancient Boeing 727, and at the faces of the Afghan people around me. Cigarette smoke drifted past the illuminated no-smoking signs. Something of that jagged mountainscape was reflected in the men I saw: a kind of nobility. Vigour and ingenuity, defiance of regulation, carelessness of life or limb, high intelligence and a fine disregard for personal safety, jostled together. The picture hinted at huge strengths of spirit and terrible failures of organisation, at genius and senselessness. In the land beneath and the faces of its people around me there was a savage, madcap quality.

We are going there because the Americans want to pull out. They will keep their enormous base at Bagram to continue their hunt elsewhere for Osama bin Laden; but they will hand over other “peacekeeping” duties to Nato. Ours is to be the biggest contribution to the Nato International Security Assistance Force — Isaf. Most other Nato members have run a mile from this but the Dutch had agreed to help. Now they are having second thoughts: their parliament will decide next month. Two suicide bombs killed 25 people on Monday. The effect on the decision may be guessed at.

Our Defence Secretary, John Reid, insists there will be no such wavering here. But Britain has been equally insistent that two trainloads is the limit for us. There will be pressure on Washington to delay the withdrawal of troops. Indeed, this newspaper has called for that.

There is a strong possibility that we will end up stuck in Afghanistan, as in Iraq, alongside the Americans in a Washington-dominated “coalition of the willing”.

There is a UN mandate for peacekeeping there, and the international nature of the effort has drawn some of the sting of “US-led occupation” from the Isaf operation. But I found that ordinary Afghans still hated the presence of foreign troops in their country. As other countries’ troops avoid areas of insecurity or withdraw altogether, British heads look likely to appear ever higher above the parapet. And now we are sending some 3,000 more.

Three questions arise, and MPs on the Commons Defence Select Committee have been asking some them of Mr Reid’s officials this week. They are: (1) What are we there to do? (2) Can this role be justified in principle? And (3) Are we up to it in practice?

We are there as peacekeepers, Mr Reid says, though rather confusingly he has also insisted that we have no combat role and will not be chasing after Taleban fighters. He adds that promoting security is inextricably bound up with confronting Afghanistan’s burgeoning opium poppy production and narco-trading economy, and that we will be steering people towards alternative crops on which to base their livelihoods. In the province where our troops are to be deployed, Helmand, there will be some limited infrastructure work for troops (it is mostly too dangerous for NGOs) and we shall presumably be putting in a presence on street patrols as back-up to government forces. In summary, this is all about helping to extend and consolidate the Kabul authorities’ tenuous control over the rest of their country. Classic hearts-and-minds stuff.

So how does one answer the second question: can this role be justified in principle? I think it can. I say this not mainly because — unlike in the invasion of Iraq — our presence in Afghanistan is probably consistent with international law.

That helps, of course, but an intervention, though not unlawful, may still be wrong. Before I visited Iraq I was dismissive of the idea — lawful or not — of trying to steer that country into the light; and after I had visited I was utterly despairing of the project. I found Iraq an awful place, and not really a country at all. There was something destructive in its very soul. It was hard to detect there anything strong and hopeful enough to be worth fostering and supporting. I arrived in Afghanistan ready to reach a similar conclusion.

But, like so many who have known the far country better than I, I found the reality of Afghanistan strangely moving. Something there fired the spirit. It was impossible to feel wholly negative about Afghans or their country. I ended my short trip and my travels across the mountains fervently hoping that the situation carried on improving, and that we could help.

If the answer then to the first question — what are we there for? — is a little hazy but not entirely meaningless, and the answer to the second — is it justifiable? — is yes, then we must move to the third. Is it practicable?

I fear it is not. Much of Helmand itself is flat, though there are mountains, and it has become a prime poppy-growing province. The whole local economy is based on opium. Stopping this will need more than overwhelming force: it will need a realistic alternative source of income for Helmand’s inhabitants. The arrival of a small British contingent offers neither. It does not help that the Americans support drugs warlords in other parts of the country.

I am worried, too, by the way in which British and American politicians and the military tend to talk about (and perhaps conceive of) the Taleban. They are spoken of as a kind of army. The unspoken corollary is that they can be rounded up and eliminated. But in talking to Afghans I thought I encountered something far cloudier.

Certainly there exist identifiable Taleban fighters, but Taleban is also a way of thought — a strand of fundamentalist philosophy deeply woven into the confusing fabric of the culture. When the Northern Alliance and the Americans “beat” the Taleban in places like Helmand, the Taleban did not run away over the border, or die. They were local young men from local villages, and they went back to their villages. They are there today. They can move in and out of active engagement.

In short, I don’t think we can do this job. I don’t think we can do it with 3,000 men and I doubt we could do it with 30,000 men. I have seen Soviet equipment worth billions of dollars rusting across the hills and valleys of Afghanistan, and I feel for the lonely little band of young men with a modest carparkful of vehicles and equipment we shall be sending to Helmand. The ordinary British bear a heavy burden in the post-imperial pretensions of their political establishment.

This and next month in Afghanistan we have the chance to do what we failed to do before entering Iraq: to think about the exit strategy. What is it, please, Mr Reid?