‘This time it will be different’

There used to be two rules of successful imperialism. First, don’t invade Russia. Second, don’t invade Afghanistan. As Rodric Braithwaite points out, invading the latter country itself offers no real difficulties. The Afghans abandon their strongholds and take to the hills, allowing the invader to enjoy the illusion of power in Kabul, with a puppet leader installed in the Bala Hissar, the old palace fortress. The problems come later, as a long war of attrition achieves little and finally obliges the invader to cut his losses and run.

Anyone can see that this is what is happening at present to the British and American forces. And it has happened before. It happened to the British in the 1840s — a tragic venture about which I wrote a novel, The Mulberry Empire. And it happened to the Russians in the 1980s. No one could regard this last episode as a success for the invaders, since it led almost directly to the collapse of the Soviet Union. It also placed the United States in a position of funding and arming the mujahedin, who — as the Taleban — would ultimately turn round and bite their sponsors.

The meaning of this campaign has been much debated since, and it certainly resulted in some strange international bed- fellows. As late as 1998, Zbigniew Bzrezinski, the national security adviser to President Carter, was justifying that administration’s aid to the mujahedin thus:

What is more important in the history of the world? The Taleban, or the collapse of the Soviet empire? Some stirred-up Muslims, or the liberation of central Europe and the end of the Cold War?

By September 2001 that question no longer looked so rhetorical. Charlie Wilson, the well-known sponsor of the mujahedin in the US Congress, was happy to describe the warlord Jalaluddin Haqqani as ‘goodness personified’.