What we can learn from our mistakes in Afghanistan

After two tours of Iraq as a soldier, I spent six months in Afghanistan in 2007 as part of Operation Herrick VI. My deployment came a year after the then Defence Secretary, John Reid, said we would be ‘perfectly happy to leave the country in three years’ time without firing one shot’. However, the very first night I arrived in Lashkar Gah, the capital of Helmand, troops were battling the Taleban across the province, with thousands of shots fired every day. Plans were being made about how we would evacuate our camp if it was overrun.

Today, 14 years on, as the final US troops depart, left behind are more than 47,000 dead Afghan civilians, more than 3,500 dead soldiers from the coalition, and a country on the cusp of civil war. Lashkar Gah will probably become one of the first major cities to fall to the resurgent Taleban.

The ‘War on Terror’ is yesterday’s news, politicians say, having been replaced by the return of the great power rivalries. The rise of China, Russia’s disinformation war and the increase in cyberwarfare are the issues that now dominate. George W. Bush’s misguided war in Afghanistan in the aftermath of 9/11 now seems as much a part of history as the Victorian Great Game. For many, ‘Do not intervene’ is the obvious lesson. But war is inevitable. We need to learn from our failures in Afghanistan, or we will find ourselves once again fighting with no coherent strategy, against an enemy whose aims and objectives are alien to us, in a country whose culture we know nothing about.

In Afghanistan there was no clear and measurable strategy. This is a basic requirement if you want to unite a disparate set of allies behind a single purpose. At different times, the mission was to capture those behind the attacks on the Twin Towers, remove the Taleban, halt opium production, establish a democratic government and install western human rights.