Afghanistan After the West’s Withdrawal

good afternoon everybody uh welcome to the daily maverick brentos foundation seminar on what is going to happen in afghanistan i know there has been a tremendous response to this seminar and we have over 3000 people signed up to it not because of me i'm sure but because of our two very distinguished guests who i'll introduce in the moment my name is greg mills i head the brenthos foundation which is based in johannesburg in south africa my connection with afghanistan is that i spent four assignments there as an advisor to the commander both alternatively in in kabul and in kandahar and then i recently returned from two uh visits there this year uh where i was completing a book uh which is about to be published called expensive poverty which is about the follies of international aid and you can probably get the drift of the book from the title but i'll be just chipping in every now and again with the occasional comment but mainly keeping the conversation going uh um and the gaining the insights of our two very distinguished guests before i introduce them uh let me say thanks to our partners uh the daily maverick africa's largest uh digital publication and uh they too would like to acknowledge the support of the friedrich norman schniften uh who have uh assisted in the setting up of these seminars let me first introduce rory stewart i met rory in kabul i met dave kilcullen through afghanistan but i met rory and kabul and his role in establishing the turquoise mountain foundation it's it's often said of people that they're a scholar and sometimes you hear the term soldier scholar and sometimes you even hear the term fairly uncommonly of soldier scholar author and in these two gentlemen we have combined elements of expertise and experience which is quite remarkable rory who very graciously stepped in at the last moment for hamdullah mohib the former i think it would be correct to say national security adviser of the islamic republic of afghanistan um he is an academic he's a diplomat he's an explorer he's an author he's a soldier and he's been a politician and he's now an academic again uh back at yale university he's produced a number of excellent books uh the places in between uh which was about a long walk which included a walk across afghanistan um the marches and then occupational hazards which was also known as the prince prince prince of the marshes he was secretary of state for international development but uh most recently uh in the united kingdom government uh he was an mp between 2010 and 2019 he served as the chairman of the defence select committee he was minister of state for africa he was minister of state for prisons uh uh perhaps it's not reflecting that he did go to oxford uh but he did serve for time as minister say for prisons he also served as director of harvard's car center between 2008 and 2010 and of course most of you will know his name probably because he served or stood as a candidate to be prime minister in the most recent election of the uk prime minister um david kilcullen is an australian and american citizen uh he is too an author a soldier a strategist a counter-insurgency specialist and a diplomat he served as an adviser to secretary of state conde rice and david petraeus in afghanistan and in iraq he's been a fellow at a number of distinguished international institutions um and he's written at least five books that i know of david uh including uh most famously the accidental gorilla he retired from the australian army as a colonel in 2005 and since then he's branched out into the academic world um i'll come back to david in a moment but i want to ask the first question of rory uh um i think it was john f kennedy who said that victory has a thousand fathers but defeat is an orphan and this was said shortly after the bay of pigs why rory did afghanistan collapse so quickly and to what extent must the blame be shared between the afghans and the west in terms of what happened well thank you greg and firstly let me just check that you can hear me clearly and everything is is working fine great um so difficult question obviously president biden is trying to put the blame swirly on afghans in his press conference yesterday he put a lot of focus on the fact that he said the afghan army had collapsed and the afghan leadership deployed the country my view is that really the blame lies squarely with the united states and its allies by withdrawing its support in a reckless fashion um i think it's important to understand firstly something that i think british and american certainly citizens have struggled maybe to understand which is that combat operations largely ceased in 2014 since then and that's quite a long time for the last seven years we've had a relatively light troop presence mainly in air bases relying on fighting air support and command and control structures the afghans and taking very few casualties it's quite difficult to get the exact figures but it appears that in the period from february 2020 until today there have been no us casualties in afghanistan and there have been no british casualties in afghanistan hostile action for many years now so and by january this year we were down to 2 500 soldiers this was a small eminently sustainable presence low risk low cost and president biden chose to pull it out he wasn't forced to pull it out he's beginning to suggest now that he was under pressure from the taliban and that if he'd stayed he would have had to ramp up to tens of thousands of troops and get himself in the middle of the civil war there's no evidence of that at all there's no evidence that this force was under significant pressure from the taliban at all as indeed the casualty rate suggests and if they'd been under significant pressure we one would expect there would have been more casualties and the pull-out basically broke the afghan army it broke it in two ways it broke its technical capacity by effectively removing its air force that was because the u.s were flying a lot of the air operations and riding a lot of the commander control but also because 16 000 u.s contractors were keeping the afghan planes and helicopters in the afghan air force in the air and they were removed one of the strange things about the modern world is we sell these very high technology platforms to other armies and we sell them with teams of contractors who maintain them and operate them and the us didn't just pull out its own planes and soldiers it pulled out the contractors that maintained the afghan air force which rendered afghan attack helicopters into essentially expensive pieces of scrap metal overnight but perhaps the most devastating effect of it was to the morale of the afghan military itself more than the capacity the u.s pulled out of bagram air base in the middle of the night and literally didn't tell their afghan colleagues and fellow soldiers what they were doing so the afghan commander woke up in the morning to find the americans literally gone and that broke the system and what we really saw was very similar to what happened around mosul in 2014 when a few hundred isis fighters routed three divisions the iraqi army it's remarkable what a relatively light force in the taliban was a relatively light force can do against the military that feels totally demoralized in many cases hadn't been paid had lost or its air support and felt that nobody was coming in to get them so this collapse this rapid collapse is very much the fault of president biden for putting those troops out and indeed for the other nato countries for going along with it and not providing an alternative uh thank you very much rory i'll come back to the issue about the failure of politics in a moment but dave kilcullen you um famously or infamously uh described the invasion of iraq as something very stupid i think it was an australian term that you used was the invasion of afghanistan the same as the invasion of iraq and is that in a sense the reason for the failure uh the the the the failure to conceptualize the operation right at the very beginning in the correct manner that's a great question greg and you know thanks for having me you mentioned i've been a fellow of numerous distinguished institutions i'm most proud of being an associate of the brenthas foundation so i'm very happy to be part of this um activity to answer your question look i think they are very different cases the invasion of afghanistan had overwhelming international support uh you know ranging from nato declaring an article 5 and supporting the u.s to the french major you know daily newspaper saying we are all americans now after 9 11. uh the invasion itself i think was justified and was carried out extraordinarily effectively right up until about the 7th of december 2001 when kandahar the last taliban stronghold fell and the taliban negotiated a surrender deal i ironically many of the same people involved now in negotiating the current deal with hamid karzai we're also negotiating with hamid karzai 20 years ago uh and hamid karzai at the time suggested we need to get these guys in we need to have a peace discussion we need to figure out a way to end the conflict and the u.s secretary of state uh secretary of defense at the time donald rumsfeld said no these people are terrorists we are not going to negotiate with terrorists we never had a peace conference with uh the taliban after their defeat and they melted away and reformed themselves in pakistan by about 2003. so it's as if we had you know the versailles peace treaty and didn't even bother inviting the germans you know so of course there was no basis for sustainable peace and that was a self-inflicted mistake but it was a mistake at the end of a justified military action that was overwhelmingly supported by the international community iraq was entirely different we decided on as it turned out wrong evidence to uh go and invade iraq but even if the evidence had been correct we were in the middle of another war in afghanistan and we dropped things turned away and went to iraq and i think a lot of what's happened in afghanistan since has reflected the fact that when things did start to go bad in afghanistan we were so over committed in iraq that we were not able to react and do anything about it for a number of years so i think they're very different cases but i did describe i don't believe i used the f word on the record uh but i did describe uh the invasion of iraq as stupid um i think that we will go down in history with afghanistan as the evacuation from afghanistan being stupid um and you know we can talk about whether it was indeed the right decision to make and i think rory's been very eloquent on that but let's assume for the sake of argument that you could make a case you know that it was the right call to leave we must be hanging our heads in shame at the way in which it was done right the manner of departure even if you decide that you are going to leave uh there's no call for what's you know an absolute humanitarian disaster that's happening on the ground right now thank you david i'll come straight back to you and then and then to rory um american strategy evolved over time with regard to afghanistan it went in as a quote unquote operation for regime change removing the taliban because they gave support to al qaeda and then it morphed into nation building of course something that donald rumsfeld was dead set against at the time and and slowly the mission gained all sorts of appendages as it were in both in terms of strategy but in terms of of things to do and you saw the development of provincial reconstruction teams among other uh aspects of the strat the development and evolution of the strategy across afghanistan um one of the the responses which is very common over the last week uh in perusing blogs and comment the commentariat on afghanistan is this is a country which always ejects its invaders it can never be governed it's not really a country at all these are very common themes do you think that nation building uh is a flawed premise by outsiders or what could this have gone differently if a different approach was adopted david it could have gone differently if a different approach was adopted i'll give you a specific example in a minute but i just want to pick up this question and i know you're not suggesting it's true but i hear people who've never been to afghanistan or even opened a book about afghanistan or know any afghans frequently saying afghanistan's not a real country it's not governable it has never been governable that's just absolutely untrue from the 1880s through the 1970s it was a unified state but it was one that functioned in a different way from a western state it had people had different expectations of their government and uh it functioned in a in a different fashion what we did was try to drop a european template over that society but even by the time that we got there in the early 2000s it had been at war for nearly 40 years at that point so it was a devastated country that had suffered through russian invasion uh the insurgency against the soviets the civil war was completely destroyed after five years of taliban rule uh and so you know i i think we we need to understand that there is a real afghanistan uh and there's a real nation there and not be become victims of sort of um what you might call taliban propaganda right like you may as well let us have it because anything's better than nothing um to the point of could we have done it differently there are many military things we could have done differently and i'm happy to talk about those but i think your question was more about development when we went into afghanistan the decision was made to do what i would describe as a red first strategy with aid we picked the most dangerous most destabilized parts of the country and we focused our efforts on that imagine how different it would have been if we'd done a green first strategy and focused on the stable parts got them functioning um worked with our allies and then expanded like a like an old spot into the areas that were unstable i and many other people i think rory as well suggested this ashraf ghani when he worked for the world bank was fully aware of this argument the aid agencies were aware of it but people wanted to demonstrate progress i don't know propaganda effect for their their publics rather than working with the afghans who were telling us what was needed to um to build things out so i think it could have been very different when people lose or when they fail there's always a temptation to say oh well you know it was unwinnable it wasn't unwinnable it was absolutely winnable we just screwed it up and we have lost rory i'm sure you'll pick up on some of those things and i just to briefly say i had a stand-up argument uh in 2006 with a american colonel at bagram air force base uh over where to spend development money and he was insistent on spending it in the areas where there was the greatest insecurity and like eventually other frustrations said to him would you plant a tree on mars and he said eventually after looking at me as if i'd been drinking the wrong tea he said no what do you mean i said well you know reinforce success you know go where there is success make that effect demonstrable across the entire country but there's this idea that if you spent and sprayed enough money um that it would then have uh a positive development impact was uh let's say naive at best but that's not what this discussion is about rory uh you can comment on on the last question and what david said but i also want you to comment if you can on on this concept of political failure i mean war is the failure of politics um it's the failure of political compacts political exchange and thus the solution is about is a political solution do you think that that this wasn't why wasn't this addressed earlier enough on in terms of building a a relationship with the taliban including them in government when they could have very easily done this in the early 2000s it became more difficult as the taliban became resurgent why was there this political uh blinkeredness if i could term it uh with regard to the taliban and what was the what has been the nature of the political failure in the west with regard to to afghanistan why did the west feel and you've served in the highest levels of government why did the west feel this urge to get out when as you've pointed out already they had so little in there in terms of of risk to treasure now um i mean the whole thing is bewildering and heartbreaking but it's partly the way in which things are framed for publix i mean looking from the outside it's completely insane if you look at it on the surface we were saying about afghanistan 15 years ago afghanistan is one of the most important strategic locations in the world it's an existential threat to global security it justifies spending a hundred billion dollars a year a hundred thousand troops a lot of the most talented impressive diplomats soldiers researchers in the world were drawn into afghanistan and now we find ourselves today basically saying it doesn't matter at all i mean essentially biden's view is totally irrelevant can't even be bothered to keep 2 500 soldiers there we'll just leave it to its own devices now if you were looking at this from mars it makes zero sense that the very same politicians who were saying this place was unbelievably important and it was worth risking thousands of lives suddenly then decide it doesn't matter at all but it is something in the nature of the way that democratic politics works that you create these very clear black and white structures so so what i'm getting to this question around why we can negotiate the taliban and david's uh issue around what happened at the end of 2001 and biden saying we don't negotiate with terrorists and i was reminded about it yesterday i was called by a member of parliament who said to me rory i remember having a standout route with you six years ago when you said we should be negotiating with the taliban how could you say that right these are horrifying people and the problem of course is and i i learned this as a politician and i'm actually struggling with this problem now in communicating in social media and interviews how do you both at the same time acknowledge that there are many things about the taliban that are to put it very mildly deeply deeply disturbing and also say and by the way we're going to have to find a way to work with them because it sounds like these two things are totally contradictory we haven't really found a way in our politics of of resolving that problem right um let me also just touch very quickly on a couple of other observations by david and by yourself this question of starting at the easier places first i believe it's so strongly i mean we ran an ngo on the ground in kabul for 15 years which was very successful but the point is that even in the easy places right working in afghanistan is really hard and you know i was trying to explain to people i remember sitting with very grand u.s figures you know secretary clinton ambassador holbrook all these kind of people and they were saying well why don't you just move your operation to rural uh helmet right run run your institute in real helmet and i'm saying you just don't get just how many problems i face running a high quality project in bamiyan or in kabul right or in mazar if i put it in a situation in which literally you're under fire in which people are being kidnapped and killed all the time you're just not gonna get anything i mean i remember the scene famously one of the most sort of comical things of all was diffid decided to fund a women's park in lashkagar it's put a million dollars into creating this thing which was supposed to be a wonderful place for for families to go and of course pretty soon it was a deserted desert wasteland when that money spent somewhere else in the country could have really made an impact um but we somehow and that of course is related to the point that we keep coming back to which was we think in such black and white binary terms so it's a very slick easy argument the problem is in the south the problem is in kandahar and national guard so that's where we need to create the jobs that's where we need to create the activities and these people in central afghanistan well they're very peaceful so we don't need to do anything for them well i mean surprise surprise when the pressure starts 20 years later those people in central afghanistan don't feel much gratitude towards the government who didn't reward them for being peaceful didn't take advantage of the fact that were four million hazara in central afghanistan who really wanted to better themselves get into education building and you know i was in bamiyan in november barely changed from where it was 20 years ago i mean if you think about the transformation of most developing countries in 20 years is extraordinary right how little it's changed okay enough from me back to you just can i make a quick comment greg the the governor of barakshan possibly uh apocryphally is alleged to have told the german commander in 2006. so barakshan for those who don't know is a province in the far north to have said how many people do we have to kill around here to start getting some aid right uh in other words you know the passions shoot at you and you help them out we're peaceful we support the government you give us nothing how many people do we have to kill you know and look at barak-chan now um let's let's let's add today how many terrorists have we got to keep in our country to keep the international community interested i mean one of the reasons we left is that the international terrorist analysts have convinced themselves over the last few years that afghanistan doesn't pose a significant international terrorist threat compared to syria or whatever right so all the efforts that the afghan government made and the special forces and a lot of intelligence work on trying to contain and control the international terrorist threat from afghanistan is rewarded by us saying oh well we don't need to worry about it anymore so see you later guys we're out and now guess what obviously it's now considerably more likely we're going to get an international terrorist threat out of afghanistan than if we'd remained let me pick up on this issue of intelligence because i do think it's a fascinating one one of the uh and it's a it's a relationship between intelligence and political pig-headedness sorry rory i don't include you in that description but um you know it seems when it came to iraq that president bush was going to go into iraq whatever the intelligence said and it seems as if biden was in his intent on what was now intent on withdrawing from afghanistan no matter what the consequences were it was just this you know we've got to go in or we've got to go out and it don't give me don't you know don't confuse me with facts type of mindset do you think that there has been and if so why do you think there has been the sort of serial failure of intelligence in iraq think of helmand rory i know you were outspoken at the time um in the pace now of collapse and actually understanding how hollowed out the afghan army was and the rate of attrition and how this was unsupportable rory you pointed out in terms of you know trying to do zoom zoom maintenance on helicopters it's not a not exactly a a a a proper art form um or is it is this a failure of intelligence or is this a failure of politicians to listen and maybe uh to you first david so when we say intelligence it's important to understand that there is direction collection processing analysis you know dissemination to policymakers and then a policymaker has to act on uh that material and i think in terms of direction collection and processing we've been actually pretty reasonably good in afghanistan analysis has been an area of significant debate there have been times at which people in kabul or elsewhere have had very different views than analysts outside uh there are famously a number of civilian analysts who called this right i wasn't one of them uh but uh when when military analysts didn't uh so there's a big been a big debate on that and then of course when you disseminate it to policymakers they have to act on it let me give you one anecdote um to illustrate that in 2008 when i was working for the u.s state department it was a debate it's in the media it's not secret uh between cia and dia central and defense intelligence agencies on the one hand and the intelligence folks in kabul on the other people in kabul thought things were going dramatically better than the external analysts thought and one of my tasks was to go and review the intelligence and look at what people were doing and get a feel for who was right and who was wrong and i came away thinking that the people outside the country were much more accurate in their assessment but worth pointing out the reason for that was not that the guys in kabul were being uh manipulated or they were being overly rosy or trying to paint a false picture it was that they'd only been there for one year there are many cases they're on their first rotations um they were young analysts who were getting their first spurs in in the field they didn't have anything to compare it with by contrast some of the cia analysts have been doing afghanistan for 20 years and they could see this sort of change over time in a way that the tactical analysts couldn't the other thing that was worth noting is that at that point there are almost 2 000 intelligence analysts inside the wire at um uh the main isaf bases in kabul who never got out right they weren't able to get out there's no there were no we we think that intelligence analysts in country have better access they often actually have worse access than people who aren't in country because they're not able to travel um and in an age of social media and um you know the ability to talk to people on whatsapp and so on open source field reporting is is critical right now there's a network of people i'm one of them who have self-generated i know you are too greg who's self-generated and are now working to get people out in a way that the governments have failed to do on the basis of just the connectivity and the ability to do that um through uh open source material so the intelligence game has changed um and i think that you know analysis has been controversial the collection hasn't been a problem so much but it's really then do politicians act on the intelligence they're given and that's probably a question for rory to answer yeah let me come in from from two sides on this um i i think the first thing is that it's a it's a bit of a mystery this because of course it's true from the beginning of this engagement and it was true in iraq too that politicians and generals said things which were completely insane about afghanistan from the very beginning so i uh one of the reasons that sheriff ghani was often very angry with me is that i kept quoting his statement at the end of 2001 that every afghan was committed to a gender-sensitive multi-ethnic centralized state based on democracy human rights and rule of law right and i just spent 30 days walking through rural afghanistan i couldn't think how i would translate that into diary literally i mean i'm thinking okay how do i imagine bushiyakhan and sangi's dealing with the notion of a gender-sensitive multi-ethnic forget so the question at the root of this then is are these guys cynical or are they naive are they lying or do they just not know what they're talking about and the same is true for all the generals who from 2005 onwards i have them all on record saying this is the decisive year 2005 6 7 8 9 10 11 every year was the decisive year but of course the truth of the matter is that these guys politicians generals are not really in the business of describing reality what they're actually in the business of is trying to influence people they're selling a story generals are trying to pump up the morale of their soldiers politicians are trying to win support at home and almost nothing of what they say is actually about afghanistan about us it's about how to tell a story that keeps your soldiers fighting keeps the money flowing in keeps the voters on site so you have to bake in from the very beginning that structurally kind of fundamentally structurally a total lack of realism that kind of crazy naive optimism is baked into the whole way that we think about these things you couldn't write for example a a report if you look at the interim afghan national development strategy which was the core documents through which in different iterations tens of billions of dollars flowed over the next few years you read this document and it doesn't describe afghanistan at all i mean it could be describing botswana in fact i think quite a lot of it was sort of copied and pasted from a structure designed for botswana why does this happen it happens because if you said in a formal public document this is a very fragile poor country and with a lot of patience and a lot of luck we hope this country in 20 or 30 years time will be slightly more prosperous humane and stable than it is today and we hope it's going to look a little bit more like pakistan a little bit less like the congo right people go bananas you know we're not going to put troops into that we're not going to put money into that i'm not investing in that kind of project right our whole civilization is predicated on selling fairy stories and that's one of the reasons clearly that biden's got out i mean he's lurched from the crazy naive optimism of the 2000s to an equally naive pessimism right he's gone from believing we can turn it into switzerland to try to pretend we achieved nothing and that we were making no difference at all which is equally false right um let me just finish this thought and then i'll hand back to you but the analogy that's been striking me recently is it would be like a very idealistic and naive person saying i'm going to take a child into my home from a very damaged family with a very difficult background take them in as a seven eight year old and i'm going to dedicate myself to turning their life around and you put the years in and you begin to realize that it's difficult work it's two steps forward it's one step back some things are improving some things remain really tough and problematic and at the end of 10 years you just think well screw it i haven't managed to turn this kid into the perfect little child that i dreamt of so i'm throwing them out i'm standing the door and i don't have any more to do with them they're not my responsibility uh so to solve this problem and i think you know intelligence is somewhere there but fundamentally it's the mindset that is perfectionist either we achieve a perfect state or we have nothing to do with it there's no moderate sustainable long-term investment and that means that any intelligence you produce is immediately mashed up through optimism bias through weird mirror imaging through weird sorts of group thinking i mean these kind of psychological tendencies which basically mean that the senior people are going to only take on the information that's convenient to them and ignore anything that that challenges their basic worldview thank you very much both of you um you'll remember perhaps rory and david that one of my first responsibilities in the headquarters in 2006 was to turn the afghan national development strategy into a campaign plan and it was a job that defeated and drew draw it up as a schematic and it was a job that defeated all the paper i could virtually find in the headquarters it was so complicated i don't think that switzerland let alone botswana could have implemented it it had everything in it and no capacity to be able to achieve any of it and that's a great failing on the part of the international community i i was struck by your comment about um believing that it's a complete failure um one of the when i was in afghanistan last month one of the journalists i spoke to from tollo news a great great success story in terms of of of a news agency and that's a tremendous change in afghanistan itself just the spread of digital communications the spread of news and amongst many other changes which we can refer to girls education uh literacy and so on these are all very big social changes that the taliban's going to find very hard to put back in the box again i said to him has the last 20 years because of course the noose was tightening when i was there very rapidly i said has it been a failure and he said no it's incomplete and and i think it's a it's a very me personally a very good summary of course the question is how long does it take to complete something like that and the answer is well you know the u.s has been in germany for 75 years it's been in korea for 70 years these are long-term security questions which take a great deal of commitment but we can you can comment on that i i wanted to ask david do you think and this is for rory as well do you think the strategic failure was at the very beginning that nobody thought this thing through to the finish that nobody really said this is where we want to get to these these are the commitments we're going to make it so it became subject to short-termism on the one hand that rory has alluded to it became subject to personalities became influenced by institutional interests of donor agencies but also institutional interests of nato itself having to get involved to give itself a a justification um to what extent was this a failure of strategic thinking um right from the very outset david so uh three quick comments um on korea right so rory brought up korea the us first went to korea in 1945 20 years or 20 to say 21 years after that would have been 1966. in 1966 south korea was a military dictatorship that had a gdp per capita lower than that of the congo we've had 28 500 troops in korea more than that actually close on 50 years right it hasn't broken the bank we it's been sustainable does anybody think that if we were to pull all those troops out of korea in the way that we've just done from afghanistan you wouldn't have a similarly catastrophic um you know uh outcome so the inability to pull troops out doesn't mean it's a failure right and that would be my second comment which would be malaya right the way that counterinsurgency works is not that you defeat the enemy everything's fine you have a big metal parade and you go home what happens is you suppress the enemy to the point where the locals can handle them with minimal assistance or let's say sustainable assistance and then they handle them right now malaya the the emergency ended in 1960 but there was still an active insurgent component out on the ground in northern malaya when i was a young officer in but it wasn't a threat for that 30-year period to the malayan malaysian government malaysian government was handling it perfectly well but by the way the five powers that are part of the five-power defense arrangement still maintain an air base and troops and support and frankly they still do to this day right so the mere notion that you you've you've got to leave otherwise you haven't won is is pure aisle right and no military analysts um would would be caught dead making that statement if they know anything about irregular warfare um so those are the couple points but i want to just point to something that i think rory has probably got a view on as well and it's about the allies allies largely went into afghanistan i think in order to support the united states and they did it to show themselves as credible coalition partners and as credible members and reliable members of the alliance and they did it out of a goodwill sense to support the united states the problem with that model which we could sort of shorthand is alliance brownie points right as a war aim the problem with that model is at dawn on the second day of the war you've achieved your war aim right so what do you do now and the only way that you can undermine the alliance credibility that you've achieved is to leave too early and people have probably heard me use that this analogy before but you don't want to be the first person to stop clapping at the stalin speech right so all the allies were like well we have to stay now until the americans figure out how to get out of here and so we all committed we all committed to stay all the allies wanted to make it work but they just wanted to make it work so the americans could figure out how to leave the americans didn't want to figure out how to leave or they weren't able to for a variety of of reasons and i think that allies um didn't really exercise the leverage that they probably should have in shaping the plan precisely because they framed it in terms of alliance commitment there are some exceptions the french did a very good job in imposing leverage the turks have done a good job um i would argue the uk has done a pretty good job compared to many others uh but too many of the allies were just there to be there and if you're only there to be there well then you know um you've got an institutional interest in in not rocking the boat can i come in just quickly behind david on that can i can i can i absolutely really but i want to ask you a ps question to us which you can address in your comment which is do you think that the uk should have lobbied hard against the us decision and and and and how could uh prime minister johnson have pushed back against uh president biden well so i think two things i think they're related i mean what david says resonates so much uh although the uk was the second largest troop contributor it was incredibly frustrating trying to engage with the uk about counter-insurgency warfare strategy because fundamentally in the end this was a u.s strategy which they were bolting into and when for example the british ambassador sheriff cooper coles tried 2009 to question the strategy he was fired right and he was replaced by a man who just basically became a cheerleader for the americans uh there was no real appetite for full independent analysis trying to question whether this whole thing made sense because we were a junior partner 90 of this was american always that then leads on to where we are more recently so the presence on the ground by the beginning of this year was 2 500 troops and some planes so theoretically it should have been possible for the uk and other nato countries to take up some of that burden uh the uk boasts of spending more than two percent of its gdp on defense and being a major military power right 2500 is eminently manageable or should be with the kind of defense budget that we have the turks had already said they were going to stay if the uk is the second largest monetary contributor who'd come in clearly and early enough i think we could have persuaded others french germans certainly australians and others to come along with us and we could have had a conversation with the us we could have said to biden okay you want to get your voice home but we need certain types of enablers and support to make this transition work right could have kept some of their commander control structures good and safe we could have kept their contractors kept the planes running without relying on zoom kept bargram right couldn't get back on there um so the u.s defense secretary claims that he tried i didn't think they tried very hard and the reason they didn't try very hard is exactly for the reasons that david uh laid out but but the the consequence of this is this is an incredible humiliation that biden has inflicted not just the humiliation of betrayal of all the afghans that weapons but an immense humiliation of these nato allies because we're left carrying the responsibility in the canvas we're left humiliated in front of our public but he didn't really consult us he made no attempt to think through a transition he didn't concur to him that we might stay when he left and in fact that she as jake sullivan revealed the press conference yesterday uh he hadn't made any attempt to call any nato leader until this morning i said kabul falls five days president united states doesn't even bother to pick up the phone to anyone and that gives you a pretty good idea of the kind of relationship that's going on here rory let me pick up on that theme i know you have a time constraint but i do want to hear two two answers from you if you can um and we'll deal with them really a quick sequence the first is is what do you think the damage to you spoken about the damage within the alliance uh and certainly this indicates the the extent of the lack of leverage of other nato allies on the united for this st was always that it's better to be with the united states because you could have leverage over them well as it turned out in fact no you don't have any leverage over them uh uh or so it would appear what do you think is the the danger to all the damage to the west in terms of its moral authority given that it's essentially let down uh it's it's its obligation to the afghan people and what do you think are they going to be the geopolitical implications of this particular i think here of russia and china and others that will take advantage of the vacuum that's being created not necessarily a physical vacuum that's one thing but a a political and ideological vacuum well i think there are two dimensions this one is of course that tragically and traditionally uh countries have often let down their allies in shocking ways right we have to be honest about this this isn't the first time that people are being betrayed uh the british worked very closely for example with karen and kachin fighters to fight the japanese and then handed them over against their wishes to a burmese government that suppressed them briefly for 70 years and there were some pretty horrifying things at the end of the second world war where we betrayed whole countries to the soviet union to try to but uh it is the case that by doing this again and so publicly and this is probably the worst betrayal i can think of since the end of the second world war right i'm struggling to come up with something quite so unforced and callous right we tried to hang on in south vietnam at huge cost for a long time that was not an easy departure um and the consequence of this is that it allows autocratic regimes to distinguish themselves from us by presenting themselves as more long-term patient allies no that doesn't mean they always are but that's going to be what china and russia will try to suggest to the world iran will try to suggest because there is a good narrative there that democracies suffer from an attention deficit disorder that we can't really do foreign policy because every few years we have a new election we're going to be president the us through the cold war and even in the 1990s and 2000s managed to insulate itself a little bit against that because there was a very very highly developed us defense intelligence foreign policy establishment largely detached from domestic politics and had huge resources cia stations all over the world places all over the world that were able to keep relationships going over decades donald trump really began to break this and biden has really exposed the fragility of this whole system uh in a brutal way and that that's what really worries me and i think that it's going to be very difficult now uh britain going into another relationship with the united states now goes in in a much more fragile and paranoid way than they would have done 10 years ago i saw this first actually in relation to crimea i was in the national security council when obama went and donald trump came in and suddenly britain was left asking itself is this entire policy that we've signed up to and advocated for in ukraine and crimea one that we britain believe in or were we just going along with the united states in order to do the stunning clapping and what do we do if trump suddenly uh goes 180 degrees around on this do we do we go with him do we go we don't don't know right and this is going to become worse and worse and it's becoming worse and worse at a time when generally the reputation of our liberal democracies is much lower than it was 90s the growth of democracies has stopped and has begun to go backwards populism is rising around the world the british economy which was larger than china's as recently as 2005 the chinese economy is now seven times larger than us i mean we're entering a very different world and what biden has done is particularly destructive in that context could i chime in briefly greg do you mind absolutely and then i'm gonna come back to rory for a last question before he has to take his taxi yeah so just very quickly that i think i fully agree with all of that i would just add one more geopolitical effect this is going to extend the war on terror right it might be by a decade or more what we saw after the fall of the almost fall of the iraqi government and the declaration of the caliphate was a massive morale boost for jihadists worldwide and you know almost seven years of extended significant terrorism threat even if the taliban stick to their commitment and don't launch attacks from afghanistan the fall of afghanistan to the taliban defeating the world's you know most important superpower after 20 years is going to be a huge moral boost for everybody and we're going to see a renewal of jihadist activity worldwide just when we thought we were getting out of 20 years of the war on terrorism we probably just bought ourselves another decade by doing this that's a great segue uh dave to to a last question for rory which uh which of course you can comment on as well which is is really what's the prognosis now um uh and you know is there is there a likelihood of and is of course a danger in making any prognosis but is is there a likelihood of of of civil war returning to afghanistan uh as at the end of the the uh mujadine soviet phase at the end of the 1980s i saw pictures on social media today of ahmed massoud back in the panchayat valley northern alliance flags fluttering i spoke to akuma last month in in kabul and he was deeply frustrated about um the the lack of communication between himself and the government between his people and the government and and and the fact that there was very little uh coordination and consultation going on are we likely to see a return to those uh dark days of the 1990s and then very important and related to that is is what should the west now be concentrating on so i think afghanistan is going into a dark phase um the taliban controls most of the country and most afghans appear to have intuitively decided that although most of them do not want to live under taliban rule that um that was preferable to trying to put up a suicidal fight where they thought they would would be killed for nothing punching the panchayati is holding out but we need to think quite seriously before we start encouraging afghans to rise up against the taliban government because there's a real danger of what happened in southern iraq of course which is that people rise up and are massacred because i don't think there's any appetite from the u.s or others to provide significant support for afghans trying to do that um and and this is risky because those guys in the pancho will of course be reaching out desperately to allies looking for some degree of support to keep them going and some intelligence agencies and others will be tempted to fund fund them doing that but but we need to think quite seriously about what the consequences that are um i don't have an easy answer but it doesn't look good to me the second thing is your question about what the west should do um this has now gone beyond a military situation into a humanitarian development catastrophe and a political catastrophe so from a humanitarian development point of view there are now millions of afghans in really big trouble predominantly across the country clinics are shut many of them very dependent on female doctors and nurses who are reluctant to go to work the governmental systems are currently paralyzed because the taliban whatever their merits are not great government administrators and many civil servants are a bit reluctant to go back to work i mean remember afghanistan the end of 2001 it was not a very governed place right there were the taliban sat around in a few empty offices and there were a few rusty finding cabinets but most of central afghanistan there wasn't anything that you could really recognize as a state um so that's going to mean people will be hungry that's going to mean a lot of people not going to school that's going to mean a lot of people not getting health care i would counsel the west against imposing immediate sanctions on the taliban particularly general sanctions that stop development assistance humanitarian assistance they're going to hurt millions of ordinary afghans create even more of a hellish situation on the ground and the taliban will just shrug it off i mean they've had a pretty tough life for 20 years they don't give a monkeys without being sanctioned they've effectively been sanctioned for me that's right um so that's the first thing please do not rush to start saying all usaid programs and funding for save the children usf who ndp cease tomorrow right that would be awful and the second thing is we need to find some way of trying to reach out to the taliban very realistically very cynically appreciating that the likelihood is that these people are not people that we can do business with because after all they've just devoted 20 years their life to trying to destroy everything we've created right so there's very good reasons to be very doubtful about how far we can get but for what it's worth at the moment they feel secure they are have chosen to put out a pretty optimistic moderate message they're keeping security pretty well in kabul um so there is an outside chance they say a small chance but an outside chance that you can have some kind of conversation with them and try to stop things going worse prevent them becoming a terrorist safe haven try to set some basic conditions on how you get female health workers back stop them causing huge problems in the region and we have to have the confidence to try to do that because if we don't do that quite quickly this is going to become an extremely paranoid regime worried that people are going to topple them and then all kinds of further horror is going to unravel um i'm very very sorry i'm leaving you i i just want to say a huge thank you and what a privilege it's been to be with you and and um for people listening i mean red hat foundation fantastic dave it's fantastic and also worth hearing more from greg if he gives you a second before he leaves because he was in kabul just four weeks ago and we haven't heard enough from him but thank you so much again for having me bye-bye guys thank you thank you thank you very much rory only a pleasure as ever um and thank you very much for squeezing us into an extremely hectic schedule thank you thank you um dave do you what would you like to uh pick up on on some of those questions about the the prognosis and and what should the west be concentrating on then i want to to ask you to end with some thinking on what the uh collapse of the afghan government and going back to your rise of jihadism question what this means for countries facing similar circumstances particularly those in the sahel we think of mozambique in terms of the islamist insurgency in the north of mozambique what do you think the impact of this is going to be and what should african governments be taking out of the failure of kabul and the collapse of kabul for their own strategies yeah that's a great set of questions um so just i mean people probably know that only a few a few months ago i said in writing that it would be a stretch to imagine the taliban taking kabul anytime soon right so i don't know if there's a prognosticators anonymous but i think i'm going to try to wean myself off of prognostications because i obviously suck at that i'll just say the reason that i thought it was unlikely was that i could not believe that the international community would just abandon the afghans the way that we have you know not one airstrike not one word of support not any assistance um president biden coming out and saying on saturday hey it's all done and then ushaf ghani leaving and the afghan army collapsing as a result of that was all things that i just never believed on moral grounds that we would ever be capable of doing so i obviously don't understand the moral universe of a lot of a lot of folks that made these calls so i'm going to get out of the prognostication business for the moment i'll just say though that what's happening now suggests that we're already in a civil war as rory said uh protests in jalalabad and coast overnight taliban shooting into the crowds and killing people people protesting uh in in those cities uh up in the pancha valley not only the muslims but the first vice president amrula saleh who is now noted that the afghan constitution says that when the president flees the first vice president takes over as caretaker president and he's now rallying political allies and saying i am the legitimate president of afghanistan come to me and we're gonna fight um this uh this suppressive regime so we're already in a civil war um and i think that rory's point is exactly on the money uh we need to make a decision about whether it's going to be better or worse than uh you know to support our opponents to the taliban uh or to simply try to get the taliban to moderate their behavior since it's just you and me and no one's listening i'll say this without fear of being repeated uh i actually believe the russians have taken a rather good approach here and i i know you'd be astounded to hear me say that but the russians have said we're deciding whether to recognize the taliban and whether to um uh assist the government and their behavior over the next few weeks is going to decide um our course of action i think that's a very smart way to play it right to apply that leverage i see the chinese have effectively sort of de facto recognized the taliban already and are talking about tying them into some belt and road projects that link to iran and to pakistan so there's some economic leverage there and i think we need to think about this unfortunately less is a moral question and more as a question of leverage at this point and how do we generate the the maximum leverage to try to you know mitigate this self-inflicted uh disaster that we're we're dealing with um so going forward i i think that would be my recommendation right now of how we should think about this we should not immediately write off the taliban but we should understand that as rory said there's deeply disturbing elements here and we should um figure out how we can apply leverage to um to to prevent some of those horrific excesses that we saw last time around and the final comment for me would be this is not the afghanistan that the taliban um were kicked out of in 2001 or the afghanistan that they dominated in 1996 it's much more developed it's had trillions of dollars of investment um the society is different 65 percent of of afghans are young enough that they don't really remember the taliban government it's a much more urbanized and commercial and educated uh society the taliban also are different the taliban old leaders are still in figurehead positions but many of the key players are younger that doesn't make them better in a moral sense but they're certainly different and i think that even the taliban recognize that they can't run this thing like they did in the 1990s i mean they had a conference yesterday where they talked about holding an international investment uh symposium and trying to get international aid and assistance and direct foreign investment you know this is the taliban right so you know i think we have to give them the chance to change while being extremely skeptical um and holding our ability and reserve to react if they if they don't and that's all about you know achieving leverage thank you very much david i know that our time is up it's been a incredible discussion with two of the most uh well-informed and nuanced and uh strategic thinking of the commentators out there and and always a great pleasure to hear your views uh thank you very much to the daily maverick and the norman shtifting for supporting this webinar series i i think is a as a child of the cold war who watched the scenes of the evacuation of south vietnam who read about the newspaper rather than watched it but have since watched on youtube i just never imagined that those scenes would happen again in my lifetime uh to see the the the the pitiful uh actions of people clinging on to airplanes and falling from the sky as a consequence of that but there we are and i i think that's what this points out is a dramatic failure of politics as i said during the webinar a failure to hold politicians to account but i too would like to end on the positive note that david has mentioned is it will we will see how this shakes out over the next uh weeks and months and perhaps it's a subject subject that's worthy of a repeat discussion when we when we can assess slightly clearer once the dust is settled uh but thank you again david thank you very much the daily maverick and thank you everybody the several thousands of you who signed into this really interesting webinar good afternoon and goodbye

Channel: Daily Maverick

Views: 9,980

Rating: 4.7714286 out of 5

Keywords: afghanistan, kabul, taliban

Id: DRtxEJjQ0cc

Length: 61min 18sec (3678 seconds)

Published: Wed Aug 18 2021