[Reader-list] Review of a new book on Afghanistan

[S. Jabbar]

The killing fields

John Sweeney

Published 23 October 2008


What are we doing in Afghanistan? A superb new history shows how successive
invaders have tried, and failed, to bring order to the country through force



Butcher and Bolt: Two Hundred Years of Foreign Engagement in Afghanistan
David Loyn
Hutchinson, 351pp, £18.99

The Duke of Wellington was a cantankerous reactionary but he knew a thing or
two about Afghanistan: "a small army would be annihilated and a large one
starved". On 13 January 1842, a sharp-eyed sentry in Jalalabad saw the
more-dead-than-alive figure of the British army surgeon Dr William Brydon
crossing the plain, struggling to stay on his pony. He had a bad head wound
and was bleeding from the hand. When eventually the pony was taken into a
stable, it lay down and died.

Roughly 16,000 British troops and camp followers hadn't made it from Kabul -
one of the most terrible defeats of British military might in the 19th
century, commemorated in Lady Elizabeth Butler's painting Remnants of an
Army. Brydon was the sole survivor. The massacre of Lord Elphinstone's army
prompted a series of revenge attacks by the British, which developed into
wars. In 1849, 1850 and 1851, huge numbers of British troops swarmed into
Afghanistan, butchered and then bolted. And still the Afghans fought back.

In 1860 the British took Peking but a few years later they were back in
Afghanistan's borderlands with 12,500 troops - more than the army needed in
order to subdue the Chinese capital - and still the Afghans fought back.

In 1878 came the Battle of Sangin. The British had immense advantages in
material - better guns, better communications, better everything - but still
the Afghans fought back.

On 17 January 1880 a small and extremely emaciated Talib, or religious
student, approached a group of British Royal Engineers in Kandahar and tried
to stab Sergeant Miller to death. This incident was the first recorded
suicide attack in Kandahar. The Afghans were fighting back, asymmetrically.

The British looked at the map and drew a line - a smudge, more like - along
the highest ridges of the Suleiman Mountains, dooming generations of local
people yet unborn to almost constant war. Right now, US drones are buzzing
along that very line between Pakistan and Afghanistan and getting shot down.

In 1893 the Amir of Afghanistan, a "cunning rogue" named Abdur Rahman,
talked sweetly with the British but also wrote a book in which he attacked
the infidel and called for jihad, using exactly the same extracts of the
Quran as Osama Bin Laden did a century later. The Afghans were fighting
back, ideologically.

At the fag end of the 19th century Sir Lepel Griffin, a man of rare
sceptical intelligence, wrote to the Times, thundering: "this policy
consists in spending a quarter of a million annually on a post of defence
and observation which defends and observes nothing, and on the maintenance
of a road which leads nowhere".

Oh dear. And after that came the Russians in 1979, and exactly the same
thing happened to them. And now it's happening to the Americans and the
British. Captain Leo Docherty, an officer of the Guards, fought battles in
Sangin in 2006 that were first fought in 1878. He reflected on British
policy: no proper plan, but "disjointed ill-considered directives from
headquarters . . . an illusion . . . the time spent there now seems to be an
egotistical folly . . . a tragic replay of Soviet clumsiness".

Oh dear me. David Loyn, a long-time BBC foreign affairs reporter, has
written a brilliant history book of Afghanistan's wars of the past two
centuries, but more importantly the evidence he amasses poses a primary
question about the war being fought inside Afghanistan: are we sure this is
a good idea? The lesson from history suggests it might not be.

This presents a horrible quandary. Al-Qaeda committed mass murder in
Manhattan on 11 September 2001 and the whole operation was cooked up in Bin
Laden's bases in Afghanistan. If the west's forces - chiefly the United
States, Britain and Canada - pull out, it is inevitable that the Taliban
will return to power and that al-Qaeda won't be far behind.

General Sir Mike Jackson, the most thoughtful British soldier for a
generation, said a few months ago that the war must be fought, because
otherwise we hand over Afghanistan to the Taliban and then on to al-Qaeda.
Anyone who believes that the Taliban/al-Qaeda don't pose a threat to the
western world is daft. Too many people have died in Baghdad, Islamabad,
Madrid, Bali and London since the 11 September 2001 attacks for anyone to
hold the idea that the threat is imaginary or that the US will just turn the
other cheek.

On the other hand, the Afghan narrative is almost absurdly unchanging. Any
foreign military adventure in Afghanistan is doomed to fail: the land is
unforgiving and the people are hostile, secure in their Islamic faith -
which ratchets up to a fresh level of purist absolutism with every bomb that
falls. They may lose battle after battle, but still they fight.

Loyn writes well of the Soviet invasion, of how the Soviet generals bombed,
tortured and shot civilians willy-nilly, and yet still they lost and had to
leave Afghanistan in defeat. He quotes the great Italian journalist Tiziano
Terzani: "War is not a profession for Bin Laden and his people. It's a
mission. Its roots lie in the faith they acquired in the close-minded
Quranic schools, and above all in their deep feelings of defeat and
impotence, in the humiliation of a civilisation, Islam, which was once great
and feared but which now finds itself increasingly marginalised and offended
by the overwhelming power and arrogance of the west."

Is there a solution? Probably not. Absolutist Islam lacks the means but not
the will to defeat the west. The west has the means but not the will to
defeat absolutist Islam, least of all inside Afghanistan. However, it might
help if we dumped well-intentioned fantasy. Loyn makes the point, again and
again, that first British, then Soviet, and now US policy on Afghanistan has
been formed by tellers of fairy tales in London, Moscow and Washington and
not by the complicated and difficult reality on the ground. It is clear that
he admires much about Afghans. He is one of very few reporters who have
spent time with the Taliban - and found the men who protected him personally
honourable, respected by their communities and very much in control on the
ground. He is not mindless of the dark side in Afghanistan: of how, in the
chaos after the Russians left, a tank battle took place between two
commanders as they both wanted sex with the same boy; how the Taliban
murders schoolteachers who seek to give girls an education; how the
Taliban's logic acts like a kind of "anti-matter", a black hole that engulfs
the western mind.

Loyn is clear that much of the "mud" attached to the Taliban can more
accurately be applied to the entire Afghan mindset, especially that of the
Pashtun heartland: deeply conservative, contemptuous of externally imposed
"democracy", unbothered about liberal rights or the education of women. He
writes that "the simple narrative of heroes and demons - 'mujahedin good,
Taliban bad' - imposed on Afghanistan was another externally drawn picture:
an Afghanistan of the western mind".

In 2001, a few days after western troops marched into Kabul, some BBC
colleagues and I drove up from the south through the Khyber Pass and entered
Afghanistan. The people didn't look overjoyed to see us. Near Jalalabad,
going in the opposite direction to Dr Brydon on his dying pony, our driver
suddenly picked up speed and began to drive murderously fast. We were being
chased by the Taliban. A few hours later, four foreign journalists were
murdered on the same road, almost certainly by the people who had pursued
us. If this was a liberation, it wasn't universally popular, to put it
mildly.

I remember listening, once we arrived in Kabul, to people like William
Reeve, the BBC reporter in Kabul before, during and after the 11 September
attacks who got bombed out of his chair by the Americans, got back in it and
carried on broadcasting. He said that the Taliban had stopped poppy
production, had stopped corrupt roadblocks springing up everywhere, had
enforced "sharia" law - and any form of justice is better than the anarchy
that flows from gun law. As far as Afghans were concerned, the Taliban
weren't as black as they had been painted.

The solution for people who have spent a long time in Afghanistan was a
different one: to work with the Taliban and somehow to uncouple the Afghan
fighters from al-Qaeda. Seven years of killing later, it feels a bit too
late to try that now. So, western policy seems glued to fighting a war that
many people in the know are now saying the west is never going to win:
"We're here because we're here because we're here . . ."

Butcher and Bolt challenges such rigidity of thinking. Loyn rubbishes the
Americans' supernatural belief in technology above all things, and points
out that the Taliban have one and a half million recruits in Pakistan's
madrasas, just over the border. It is a bleak conclusion to a book that
should be a must-read for every politician who sends our squaddies into
Afghanistan - but one based fairly and squarely on the weight of history.

John Sweeney is an award-winning investigative journalist