Blind into battle

Early every morning through the spring of 2002, US troops at Bagram airfield on the Shomali plains north of Kabul assembled on a makeshift parade ground. After the daily briefing, an officer announced the number of days since 9/11, read a short obituary of a victim of the attack and reminded the troops of their mission: to capture or kill those responsible for the worst terrorist strike ever in the US.

Only a year previously, Bagram had been captured by the Taliban, who then exercised nominal control over 80 per cent of Afghanistan. Reduced to bombed-out buildings and a potholed, unusable airstrip, it was of limited strategic importance. Within weeks of the US-led invasion the runway was in constant use. Helicopters rotored throughout the night. Huge cargo planes arrived by day, some carrying thousands of meals cooked in US bases in Germany.

Hundreds of olive green tents surrounded the refurbished control tower, home to the US special forces and light infantry units who flew from Bagram to raid distant villages in the hope of picking up the trail of al-Qaeda fugitives. They had limited success, not least because most of their targets had long fled into Pakistan or Iran.

These men, as Steve Coll pithily puts it at the beginning of this impressive, authoritative and hugely detailed account of American misadventures in Afghanistan from 2001 to 2016, were going ‘blind into battle’. They had night sights — but little idea of who their enemy was, let alone where they might be.

Nor did their commanders or their political masters. The latter were distracted by other issues, usually domestic, and by the unfolding, unnecessary fiasco in Iraq. The troops’ mission evolved, mutating into nation-building on the cheap, then into fighting the Taliban as well as al-Qaeda, then to fighting narcotics production too before finally reverting to more or less where they had started.