It’s five years this month since the chaotic retreat of US forces from Kabul. The Nato-backed invasion and occupation of Afghanistan, launched after the 11 September 2001 terrorist attacks on New York City and Washington DC, is now widely regarded as a failure.
It cost the lives of more than 2,400 US and 450 British troops, and tens of thousands of civilians (the exact number is unknown). Although al-Qaida terrorists were routed, their Taliban hosts reimposed repressive, misogynistic Islamist rule after regaining power in 2021. Afghanistan became a byword for ill-considered western interventionism and nation-building. It was the archetypal “forever war”, a phrase first coined during Vietnam.
If this cautionary tale had any lasting value, it was as a deterrent to politicians and generals tempted to rashly embark on open-ended conflicts without just cause, defined, achievable aims, and an exit strategy. Dismayingly, the forever war lesson had to be learned all over again in Iraq, which the US and UK invaded in 2003 and departed, having caused huge harm for scant benefit, in 2011. “Never again!” was the passionate cry at the time and since. And yet, it seems, the same disastrous pattern is now repeating after Donald Trump’s incomprehensibly foolish decision to attack Iran. A war he termed a “little excursion” is entering its sixth month and has been escalating rapidly. It, too, has a forever feel.
That this nightmare is happening again defies all reason. How can it be? Immediate causes of the war aside, answers may be found in persistent US exaggerations and misconceptions about the level and extent of external threats, mixed up with political dishonesty, national hubris, naivety and misplaced idealism.
Recalling the harrowing US experience in Afghanistan, Carter Malkasian, a National War College professor who served as a civilian adviser to US forces in Helmand and Kabul, suggests the basic premise for keeping troops in Afghanistan for 20 years – a belief the country would otherwise revert to being a safe haven for international terrorism – was fatally flawed.
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