Fading ambition

‘Despite 30 years of war,’ remarked General Stanley McChrystal, the commander in 2009 of NATO forces in Afghanistan, ‘civilisation grows here like weeds.’ Unfortunately for the Afghans, their tribal, rural, autarchic civilisation that grows so readily has never been acceptable either to the western allies or to the Taleban.

However much NATO’s military goal has altered in the ten years it has been fighting there — from driving out al-Qa’eda and their Taleban hosts, to pacifying the country for elections, to holding the fort for their product, President Karzai, to countering the Taleban’s growing insurgency, to defeating the Taleban’s increasing terrorism, to withdrawal in 2014 — the civilian aim has always remained the same: to create a society resistant to Taleban rule.

In northern Afghanistan that has probably been achieved — primarily by reinforcing existing tribal structures — but repeated attempts at reform in the southern swathe, and especially the war-torn provinces of Helmand and Kandahar, have left the mosaic of village, clan and linguistic loyalties largely unchanged, and singularly vulnerable to Taleban incursion.

Whether some other outcome might have been possible is the central question of this compelling and clear-sighted account, from an American perspective, of the last three years of hostilities in the south. As he demonstrated in his justly applauded dissection of the shortcomings of the Iraq war, Imperial Life in the Emerald City, Rajiv Chandrasekaran, a distinguished journalist with the Washington Post, has impressive access to high-powered sources, but his outstanding ability is to place violence in its strategic context. His book catches the chaos and bloodshed of a firefight in Sangin, pulls back to the military planning beforehand, then to the earlier political calculations, and travels again down the bureaucratic channels and the lines of command to the battle itself and the consequences, invariably different to those originally calculated.