We should never have been in Afghanistan

Two important studies have been published this autumn on the apparent failure of our almost 20-year war in Afghanistan. In the Times Literary Supplement my friend Rory Stewart has been reviewing The Afghanistan Papers by Craig Whitlock; and last week I went along to the launch at the Frontline Club in Paddington of the BBC correspondent David Loyn’s The Long War, my copy of which has just arrived. Both look like brilliant accounts of what went wrong, both will surely prove useful guides to a lamentable episode in modern statecraft, but both — and Rory too in his own TLS assessment and recommendations — appear to me to be missing the point.

These three writers have become so close, so engaged, for so long, to a knot of truly Gordian complexity, that they have missed the Gordian solution. Give up.

Depressing, scathing, indignant though in their different ways Loyn, Stewart and Whitlock seem to be, they share (with so much post-pullout analysis of the conflict) a curious if unstated positivity: that we should have risen differently to this challenge; and if we had, it could be met.

I have had time so far to skim the Loyn book, whose broad thrust I heard him outline at the Frontline Club last week. Mr Loyn has been in Afghanistan every year since the start of the conflict and he’s one of the best-informed correspondents we have. He digs deep, he has interviewed many Afghan and western military leaders, and his analysis is detailed, calm and careful. But listening to him brought back my own youth, spent during the last gasp of British colonial history.

Loyn says we and the Americans should have immersed ourselves much more deeply in Afghan society and governance, and at every level, including the more local level.