Western Mistakes in Afghanistan

I've never been to Afghanistan. So no anecdotes about bearded men or rugged terrain from me. Nevertheless I intend to lecture you one and all on how very different a place it is. For your own good. This earbashing is something you deserve I'm afraid because you, we, the West are the principal problem in Afghanistan, not backwardness, tribalism, remoteness or even the Taliban. No us. Which is not to say that we should withdraw. That would be in fact an unthinkable blunder and it is just not on. So what do I mean?

I mean that it is as plain as a pikestaff to anyone with an intuitive sense of the unbridled capacity of Western governments to indulge in arrogance, complacency and self-delusion, naturally all the time with the best of intentions, that the narrowness of our approach and our lack of imagination have trapped us into a cul-de-sac.

Us narrow? When the Taleban live in the dark ages? Us short on ideas when so many civil servants are so hard at work on so many acronyms? What's imagination got to do with it?

Imagination is critical to understanding and my contention is that we have simply failed to grasp how different a place Afghanistan is. It is so far removed from Fulham or Brooklyn or traffic jams on the north circular that we have not managed to adapt our expectations of what is possible radically enough. Trying to install Western-style democracy is like trying to put a market garden on the moon. Technically it is just about conceivable but as a practical matter it is an exorbitantly expensive nonsense.

Back in 2001 it seemed like a grand idea to reject Mullah Omar's offer of calling together the Loya Jirga, a home-grown Afghani political body, to consider handing over Osama bin Laden in return for recognition of the Taleban regime by the West. Actually that was an arrogant mistake. Any sane Western government would now, eight years into a war that we are losing, bite the hand off a body firstly capable of delivering a stable Afghanistan and secondly willing to play ball. So we began by handicapping ourselves radically. Now that our own Western structures have proved a meaningless shambles and our Afghan partner has all but evaporated as a result the notion of the Loya Jirga is being floated again. We have wasted eight years. Such is the price of arrogance.

During those eight years Afghanistan was for much of the time the 'number two problem' after Iraq. Iraq was so bad that there wasn't much good policy-making energy left over for what seemed a containable situation in Afghanistan. So, under the radar, policy flatulated and took on a life of its own. We ended up funding reconstruction and destruction often at the same time and in the same place. We ended up roaming through poppy-fields and blowing up drug barons. We ended up building girls' schools and backing Karzai's deals with all and sundry. We had Western soldiers who would not fight because their governments didn't fancy the idea and Afghani soldiers who would not fight because they were just completely unreliable. Where they weren't corrupt they were drug addicts. In the meantime Paksitan got so unstable that everyone decided that it didn't matter if policy in Afghanistan was a mess because Pakistan was the real problem. It would have been impolite to have Western troops in Pakistan but at least