SHOULD WE BE TEACHING Afghan history in our schools? It would certainly be of more practical use to the next generation than learning about the First and Second World Wars. For the last two centuries, Britain has repeatedly tried to impose its will on the people of Afghanistan with consistently catastrophic results, and seven years on from the start of our most recent military entanglement in the country, there seems to be no end in sight.
BUTCHER AND BOLT: 200 Years of Foreign Engagement in Afghanistan
BY DAVID LOYN
Hutchinson, 351pp, £18.99As more and more of our young people prepare to fight in Afghanistan as soldiers, or to determine its future as di
plomats and politicians, it makes sense to equip them with a bit of background knowledge; particularly when, as David Loyn illustrates in this excellent book, some of our worst failures there might have been averted, if only we'd bothered to learn the lessons of the past.
In 1838, the British military establishment moved towards its first large-scale intervention in Afghanistan – The First Afghan War – hoping to oust the Islamist amir, Dost Mohammed, and re-install former ruler, Shah Shuja, thereby creating a defensive buffer to the northwest of the British Raj. Mountstuart Elphinstone, the man who first opened diplomatic relations with Afghanistan when he met Shujah in 1808, and an expert on Afghan culture, advised caution.
"I have no doubt you will take Candahar and Caubul and set up Shuja; but for maintaining him in a poor, cold, strong and remote country, among a turbulent people like the Afghans, I own it seems to me to be hopeless."
Substitute the current Afghan president, Hamid Karzai, for Shuja, and the Taleban leader Mullah Omar for Dost Mohammed, and the same advice would have been just as pertinent in 2001. Then as now, the hawks didn't listen, and disaster ensued.
In 1839, after the British had installed their amir of choice with relatively little loss of life, a Lieutenant Colonel Dennie wrote: "The war may be considered at an end, the King being again on his throne." That war was to go on for another three years and claim Dennie's life along with thousands of others. The fighting saw the British first besieged in Kabul and then forced into a humiliating eastward retreat that quickly turned into a massacre. Of the 16,000 men who marched out of the city, only one made it back to the relative safety of Jalalabad alive.
As in 2001, some speedy initial victories left the British in control of the cities, but not the vast swathes of country that lay outside them. As in 2001, resentment to the occupation quickly grew, making it easy for Islamist fighters to recruit jihadis. Disaster could perhaps have been averted had the British paid more attention to the subtleties of Afghan power structures, but then as in the recent past, ignorance and poor intelligence cost lives.
Loyn's analysis of the Second Afghan War has similar resonances for today's military strategists. Another attempt to impose a ruler of Britain's choosing in 1880 led to a full-scale invasion with a 45,000-strong army. Once their man, Yakub Khan, was safely ensconced in Kabul, the British fell back to their strongholds in the east. But just like Karzai a century later, this puppet ruler found that his authority "was small beyond the walls of his capital, while the Mullahs and the anti- British party lost no opportunity of exciting the people towards the British alliance". Sure enough, the British emissary in Kabul was killed with his guards, and another British army under General Roberts had to fight back into the city to restore order.
No sooner had Roberts and his men arrived than there was an "eerie calm," but trouble was brewing. "Roberts and his staff may have waged a successful military campaign," writes Loyn, "but they did not understand how power worked… They saw the amir's family as savages… the mullah with the fragrant name as a joke and the rebel leader as just a hemp smoker; they went sailing while a rebellion swirled around them, missing the signals that a storm was about to break over their heads."
In the uprising that followed, Roberts and his men were forced to retreat from Kabul, pinned down in nearby Sherpur and besieged there through the winter. Following this bruising encounter – and the catastrophic battle of Maiwand, in which a British force trying to defend Kandahar was routed by an Afghan army with the loss of 1,000 men – the British government decided they'd had enough, and withdrew their troops. For the time being.
Of course, Imperial Britain isn't the only superpower to have tasted defeat in Afghanistan. The Red Army spent most of the 1980s trying to defeat the mujahadeen, but thanks to US funding, procured by Senator Charlie Wilson (very different in Loyn's account to the character Tom Hanks played in Charlie Wilson's War), they were eventually forced to give up and go home.
And now America, with support from Britain and elsewhere, is attempting to prop up another puppet ruler. As Loyn points out, though, the numbers just don't add up. The current Nato force consists of around 50,000 personnel (just half the size of the force deployed by the Soviets) and many are from countries which insist they be kept out of the front line.
Even more worrying than the lack of men on the ground is the naivety of some of the people deciding their fate, and the fate of the country they're supposed to be making more secure.
In 2007, the EU representative in Kabul, Francesc Vendrell , admitted how little research had gone into winning the peace after the Taleban were ousted . "The belief was that since democracy had come, it was not thought necessary for us to understand the tribal system."
Loyn also reminds us of former Defence Secretary John Reid's words in 2006, when Britain increased the size of its military force in Helmand Province: "We would be perfectly happy to leave in three years without firing one shot." Within 12 months of Reid's pronouncement, over one million rounds had been fired by British forces in the area.
Loyn, a foreign correspondent of more than 25 years' experience in Afghanistan, mostly with the BBC, tries to keep his feelings out of his writing, but you can sense him raging between the lines. In the 19th century, the common complaint about British soldiers was that they would "butcher" Afghan tribesmen then "bolt," hence the book's title. We're forever being told that military tactics are more sophisticated nowadays, but are they really?
Loyn interviews a Guards officer, Captain Leo Docherty, who served in Helmand in summer, 2006. He characterised the operation there as "a tragic replay of Soviet clumsiness" in which there was no coherent plan, just a series of "disjointed ill-considered directives from headquarters. Everything else, all the reconstruction stuff, is an illusion."
If and when Afghanistan makes it onto the Standard Grade and GCSE History syllabuses – perhaps in 2011, when the current occupation hits double figures – this book should become a core text.
The full article contains 1207 words and appears in The Scotsman newspaper.
