Losing Afghanistan: The Fall of Kabul and the End of Western Intervention

by Brian Brivati (Editor), Stephen Gethins (Contributor)

“Those who wonder how the international community failed so dramatically in Afghanistan need look no further … Losing Afghanistan explores the arguments for and against intervention and highlights the difficulty of establishing unity of purpose and effort in such demanding circumstances. Above all, it poses a question: how can we in the West claim we know so much, yet demonstrate in Afghanistan that we understand so little?” – General (retd) Sir Jack Deverell OBE, former Commander-in-Chief of Allied Forces Northern Europe

“A wonderful book of insightful essays on Afghanistan from an outsider lens.” – Ezatullah Adib, head of research at Integrity Watch Afghanistan and national country representative at the World Association for Public Opinion Research

“The strategic question posed by these brilliant essays is: how can the doctrine of liberal intervention be reframed to ensure the West intervenes overseas to manage future humanitarian calamities for reasons beyond just national security?” – Brigadier (retd) Justin Hedges OBE

***

When Taliban forces took Kabul on 15 August 2021, it marked the end of the Western intervention that had begun nearly twenty years earlier with the US-led invasion.

The fall of Afghanistan triggered a seismic shock in the West, where US President Joe Biden announced an end to America’s involvement in conflicts overseas. In Afghanistan itself it produced terror for the future for those who had worked with and grown up under the coalition-supported administration.

Now, with the country spiralling into economic collapse and famine, Losing Afghanistan is a plea for us to keep our gaze on the plight of the people of Afghanistan and to understand how action and inaction in the West shaped the fate of the nation.

Why was Afghanistan lost? Can it be regained? And what happens next?

Edited by international development expert Brian Brivati, this collection of twenty-one essays by analysts, politicians, soldiers, commentators and practitioners – interspersed with powerful eyewitness testimony from Afghan voices – explains what happened in Afghanistan and why, and what the future holds both for its people and for liberal intervention.

Genres: Politics

365 pages, Hardcover

First published February 22, 2022

About the author

Dr Brian Brivati has published extensive work on contemporary British politics with an emphasis on the political history of the British Labour party. His biography of Hugh Gaitskell (Richard Cohen Books, 1996) received 10 book of the year selections. His research and teaching has recently extended to comparative work on genocide and human rights. He speakers regularly for the Holocaust Education Trust. His articles have appeared in the Guardian, the Times, the Financial Times, the Independent on Sunday, the Observer, the New Statesman, Progress, the Fabian Review and Parliamentary Brief. He is a regular broadcaster on political history. He has also written a biography of Lord Goodman (Richard Cohen Books, 1999) and edited The Uncollected Foot: Essays, Old and New, 1953-2003 (Politico's, 2003), Ernest Bevin, single volume edition, by Alan Bullock (Politico's, 2002), Guiding Light: the collected speeches of John Smith (Politico's, 2001), The Labour Party: a Centenary History (Macmillan, 2000), Aneurin Bevan, 1897-1960, single volume edition, by Michael Foot (Victor Gollancz, 1997), and New Labour in Power: precedents and prospects (Routledge, 1997).

Reviews

[Paul Bryant · Rating 2 out of 5]

THE GOOD, THE BAD AND THE KIND OF OBVIOUS

OR

I’D DO ANYTHING FOR DEMOCRACY (BUT I WON’T DO THAT)

Here we have 21 essays by various expert persons musing on what the hell happened last August – how come nobody saw THAT coming? And was it all for nothing?

I have to report that a lot of these essay writers should be rounded up and sent to Afghanistan where they would succeed where the military failed by blathering the Taliban to death. On every other page we encounter such ringing phrases as “multiple governance models”, “a clear centre of strategic gravity”, “a new paradigm of engagement” and suchlike. The last essay is called “The Post-Afghan Reset And The Case For Rebuilding EU-UK Security Co-Operation”. Then again, there are five Afghan “witness statements”, the last one of which is called “A Mother Turns to Sex Work”. No obfuscation there.

All due respect, I don’t think you are going to come away from this book with much you didn’t already know. For example - in spite of its global dominance, the collective brains of the West persistently fail to understand non-Western countries – ex-USSR countries, Iraq, Afghanistan….

In 2001 there was an assumption that Afghans were sick of the Taliban and would therefore welcome its opposite. The first part was probably true, the second was hopelessly naïve.

There’s a very obvious point to be made right away : British and NATO officials never spoke Afghan languages or knew any Afghan history or anything about clan and tribal structures. Also, there was a fast turnover of diplomatic staff because nobody wanted to stay there longer than 18 months.

We did not work with the grain of Afghanistan because we did not know what the grain was and did not make the time or space to find out.

One big problem was the drugs trade. I am informed that 95% of Western heroin was supplied by Afghanistan. What an opportunity for Western forces to eradicate a great social evil. But “many key powerbrokers themselves profited from the trade” and blocked any attempt to destroy the poppies. Well, pardon me, not so surprising. Another big BIG maybe the BIGGEST problem was corruption. This bad word is sprinkled around on every other page, but most annoyingly, all the writers assume we know exactly what they mean. I mean, yes, we have a rough idea, but I would have liked some light shone on this murkiest aspect to the whole Afghan catastrophe. Do the Western authorities shrug and turn a blind eye when all the aid is stolen over and over?

A CASE OF REAL BAD TIMING

Lord Purvis of Tweed, the Liberal Democrat Party’s bigshot in the House of Lords, writes in his essay :

The world is – contrary to what the daily news may make us think – more stable, democratic, free and tolerant than in any time in recent history.

As I read that Mr Putin’s tanks were about to start rolling into eastern Ukraine.

SERIOUSLY??????? WTF??????

One time I was told something that shocked me – on page 243 :

Bagram Airbase…had been abandoned by the US in early July, leaving behind some $85 billion worth of military equipment.

$85 billion? Do you think that's a misprint?

UPDATE on this : Venus (below) pointed me to articles on fee and politifact which seriously dispute this crazy figure. Undoubtedly there was a whole lotta hardware left behind but not quite that much. Google "No proof Biden left Taliban $80B" for details.

A CONTROVERSIAL OPINION

The best, most forthright essay for me was by Professor Paul Dixon. He sticks it to the military elite, and I think about time too

…Senior British military officers, like their US counterparts, have resented and evaded democratic control. Their growing power represents a threat to democracy but…. criticism of the military elite, whether from the left or the right, is considered largely beyond the bounds of legitimate debate… Scrutiny and criticism are portrayed not only as an insult to those who have served and sacrificed but also as potentially treacherous for undermining the propaganda required to defeat the enemy.

Strong words indeed.

There are many other aspects to the whole thing which I would love to discuss but I have tried your patience enough I think.

2.5 stars.

[James · Rating 2 out of 5]

As this is an essay collection, and a very varying one at that (travelling from high to low quality easily) I'd like to just list some of the ones I thought were good and the one I considered the worst. This essay collection felt like it either needed a stronger editorial hand shaping its overall narrative or more of a back-and-forth between contributors countering each others' viewpoints. As it stands, it seems more like a huddle of people all shouting contradictory things over each other in a cacophony of opinion.

The Good Essays

* A Failure of Leadership by Mahmud Khalili
* Hostile Takeover of Afghanistan - Regional Approach and India's Concerns by Arun Sahgal and Shreyas Deshmukh
* The Intelligence Failure and the Cultural Failure of the West to Think in Generations by Philip Ingram
* The View from Iraq by Haider al-Abadi
* The Post-Afghan Reset and the Case for Rebuilding EU-UK Security Cooperation by Stephen Gethins

The Middling Essays

* 'No End of a Lesson': The End of Liberal Internationalism and the New Isolationism by Brian Brivati
*Islam-Inspired Ways of Avoiding The Resource Curse in Afghanistan by Omar Al-Ubaydli

The Awful Essay
* General Dannatt, the Forever Wars and the Military Elite's Threat to Democracy by Paul Dixon

This is a conspiracy theory masquerading as discourse analysis.

The Other Essays

The rest of the essays were either forgettable or merely adequate.

[Dropbear123 · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.25/5 rounding down for goodreads.

It's a series of essays by different authors that can be broadly divided into 3 topics - why the West failed in Afghanistan?, What happens to Afghanistan and its people now? and what will the impact of the failure in Afghanistan mean in the long term for the West's geopolitics and military interventions. Variety of authors and viewpoints. The book was released at the beginning of 2022 and I don't know enough about Afghanistan to see what has held up well in the book and what hasn't.

I bought this new but at half price as an impulse purchase and it was ok overall. As someone who isn't that interested in Afghanistan and is more of a casual reader trying something new I'd find it hard to specifically reccomend it.

[William Rockwood · Rating 3 out of 5]

The title is misleading, it should called 'Afghanistan Lost' because most of the essays are more of 'where do we go from here' than 'how did we get here.' That being said, there is plenty of good in this book, in particular the essays by Mahmud Khalili, Haider al-Abadi (the former PM of Iraq), and Philip Ingram, but like all books of essays, some are great, some are good, and some are bad or feel out of place.