Hubris, blunders and lies characterised the war in Afghanistan from the start

And so the reckoning begins. As frantic Afghans wrestle with the agonising, life-and-death choice between staying in Kabul and risking execution by the Taliban or running the gauntlet of checkpoints around the airport in search of freedom overseas, it’s noises off in the West. Pundits and policy- makers pontificate, grizzled generals rue another foreign adventure ending in defeat and the media provide a live stream of grief and anguish.

‘I’m terrified,’ an Afghan friend and former colleague in the Ghani government WhatsApped me as Kabul fell. The Taliban had already killed two of his close colleagues and were searching for him. ‘I need to get out. Now it is time that our international friends do something to support me.’

But we won’t, will we? Headline figures of 20,000 Afghans being given the right to resettle in the UK over five years will be far too little far too late — almost certainly no use to my friend and untold others like him. President Biden has pulled the plug, and the Afghans, together with the Brits and other Nato allies, have gone out with the bathwater.

Two books offer radically different perspectives on the war in Afghanistan. Craig Whitlock, a seasoned national security reporter for the Washington Post, provides the macro view from 40,000-feet, an unputdownable account of imperial hubris, blundering and deception. Toby Harnden, an Anglo-American author and journalist, chooses a micro focus with an on-the-ground, action-packed, shoot-’em-up, all-American gunslinging adventure.

First Casualty is the highly charged story of the CIA-led first American incursion into Afghanistan in the immediate aftermath of al Qaeda’s 9/11 attacks in 2001. Harnden writes of how the CIA pipped the Pentagon to the post, to the intense fury of the defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld. On 13 September, just two days after the largest terrorist attack in US history, Joseph Cofer Black, the head of the CIA’s Counter-terrorism Center, advised President Bush that CIA teams and special forces could take down the Taliban and eject al Qaeda from Afghanistan: ‘When we’re through with them they will have flies walking across their eyeballs.’