Afghan retreat: where’s the strategic thinking?

The Taliban seized Kunduz last weekend, by the far the most important capture in their campaign so far, and the fifth provincial centre to fall to them in as many days.

Almost in anticipation, the US government on Saturday told all its citizens to leave Afghanistan as security deteriorated. The British government also advised its citizens in Afghanistan to get out.

A US policy of cut and run has been exposed as an ignominious sell out – exposing an alarming lack of principle, practicality, morality and strategic thinking at the heart of the Biden administration’s foreign policy. As much as Washington’s opponents and foes, the allies need to take notice of this huge lacuna at the heart of the Western Alliance, starting with Nato. They must develop initiatives on their own.

For the UK the matter is urgent. The assumption of the government’s recent foreign policy and strategy policy papers – starting with John Bew’s Integrated Review – is that the UK would always work to the American alliance – “shoulder to shoulder”, in Tony Blair’s ill-judged phrase. Bew, a historian and biographer of Clement Attlee, is the Prime Minister’s foreign affairs advisor in Number 10.

The US, of course, in firepower, money and reach, will always be the principal ally in organisations like Nato. But it isn’t the only ally and its leadership cannot go unquestioned if it’s in the hands of an erratic Donald Trump or a comatose Joe Biden – who, policy-wise, is giving a very good impression of Rip Van Winkel on tranquilizers.

The slew of immediate challenges and risks commands immediate attention – starting with Afghanistan and the deepening confrontation with Iran. On the latter, Biden seems to bank on the revived nuclear talks in Vienna delivering a deal, and not much more.

Elsewhere there is the potential and actual collapse of the two Arab democracies from the Arab Spring, Lebanon and Tunisia. Barack Obama saluted the Arab Spring as the harbinger of a new era of democracy to the Middle East. His erstwhile Vice-President Joe Biden seems to think that now that scenario has failed – it’s ok to shrug the shoulders, slope arms and retreat.

American foreign policy priorities are now focused on the Pacific and China. There are, of course, also the massive challenges on both the domestic and international stage – as for most of the rest of us – of pandemics, now manifest as Covid-19 in its many forms, and climate change.

America, we are told, must choose – and no longer has a role of global policeman, if it ever did. The point about a working strategy is that it has to take on all the threats and problems listed above. It has to set priorities, and take into consideration a cascade of risk requirements. It has to assess and face up to consequences from mistaken postures and actions, and ill-judged inaction such as that we are witnessing now.

Donald Trump and Dick Cheney liked to rail against the iniquity of the US having to foot the bill for underperforming allies in organisations like Nato. But the argument cuts two ways – such as in the case of Britain’s armed services which have been overly keen at times to live in the US pocket. 

These past weeks we have had a rerun of the old mantras such as “America doesn’t do nation building” – that from Biden HQ in Washington itself. “The Afghans must now run Afghanistan” is another – which matches the old US Marine quip that “peace-keeping is for pussies.” After 20 years of grueling experience in Iraq and Afghanistan, the US policy wonks and politicians are weak on stabilisation and security missions short of outright war. There is still too much of the “overwhelming force” doctrine of Colin Powell, and the “Shock and Awe” approach of Donald Rumsfeld.

Strategy is not about timelines and end dates, as Biden has been warned by a string of distinguished and experienced generals, including David Petraeus, Jim Mattis, HR McMaster, and our own David Richards, Richard Barrons and Nick Carter, the current Defence Chief. Strategy means generating dynamic policy and plans which have to adapt and change according to circumstances. Leaving Afghanistan in the lurch is no strategy at all – as the generals rightly stress. Rule by Taliban mayhem will inexorably affect America’s interests and wellbeing for generations to come.

Facing the strategic vacuum left by the withdrawal of the US and its allies in just a few weeks’ time is China, which is featuring increasingly in Afghanistan.

Both Beijing and Moscow have held talks with the Taliban diplomatic leadership who appeared at the recent talks in Doha. It is difficult to conceive of any credible or realistic agreement that either President Vladimir Putin or President Xi Jinping could cut with the Taliban leadership in any form.

Despite the surge of Taliban forces across rural Afghanistan this year, it is unlikely that they can take all the main centres, stabilise the country, and declare peace – however bloody and repressive it may be – for months or even years to come.

This makes the conduct of the Biden regime all the more inexplicable. The peace deal signed in Doha last year has been breached by the gross and brutal behaviour the Taliban has levied on the battlefield this year. The pledge to seek a peace deal with the existing Kabul government now seems duplicitous, yet Biden appears to believe in it still.

The decision to quit has been accompanied by a string of familiar hackneyed phrases and clichés about “ending forever wars”, “not being in the business of nation building” and “time for the Afghans to look after themselves” – all well beyond their sell by date, and pretty vapid in the first place. The ditching of Afghanistan and the pull-out from Iraq before the year is out will have dire consequences. This is where the generals are right, and should be listened to.

There were mistakes aplenty in the way the allies operated in Iraq and Afghanistan – they were often less than agile in adjusting to changing circumstances and reversals. Now the prospect is of a violent, in many ways psychopathic, Islamist regime playing host to a whole list of allies and militants who will use New Taliban Afghanistan as a base for operations worldwide, which certainly means Europe, and very likely the American home territory too.

The Taliban offensive this summer is more comprehensive than before, and the presence of foreign allies and assistance is becoming clear. There are up to 1,000 al-Qaeda militants in the country, and support from groups like the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan and supporters of the Islamic State have been reported. Fighters from Punjab have reappeared and the influence of the Pakistan military cannot be ignored. The influential and semi-autonomous Pakistan Inter Service Intelligence agency has been involved in the training and recruiting of the Taliban since its fighting formations were reconstituted after the defeat in 2001. Since then, Pakistan military personnel have been captured and killed among Taliban groups – some still had their Pakistan military identity passes and tags on them.

For Pakistan, however, a New Taliban regime in Kabul is a risk as much as an advantage. It will be allied to a string of militant groups in and around Pakistan itself, and a threat to any Islamabad government’s stability. It would be the natural ally of Pakistan’s own Taliban – Tehreek e Taliban Pakistan. The Haqqani clan network is both Afghan and Pakistani in terms of recruiting and territorial influence. In turn they link to the Kashmiri militant movements – such as the historic Laskhar e Taiba, one of the main instigators of the commando terror attack on Mumbai in 2008.

The campaign in Afghanistan is now at a flexion point, a turn in the page. The Taliban will attempt to take a major capital by the end of autumn – about eight weeks from now. Whether they can take and hold a strategic centre like Herat, Mazer e Sharif, Kandahar or Jalalabad is still open to question – particularly if government forces can still get sufficient air support by drone, raiding helicopter or fast fighter close support. America is due to down tools with air support from 1 September. Much now depends on whether the Biden team is still prepared to follow the diplomatic fiction that the Taliban leadership, whoever they may be in reality, will stick by any of its agreements to deal fairly with the Kabul government.

America and its allies, Britain and the European powers included, should now carry out a reset of strategy based on facts on the ground in Afghanistan and the entire region. It is not just a matter of obligation to a government they have said they would never abandon, but a matter of necessity for their own collective and individual security.

For Britain there is a wider message from this mess. It must now develop its own national strategy. So much has been promised for decades now – but in reality it has fallen short. There has been a string of major strategic policy papers from Blair’s Strategic Defence Review of 1998, and there were two major strategy papers under David Cameron’s premiership in 2010 and 2015. All have been flawed in costing, execution and aspiration – all have been overtaken by events within 18 months.

We have seen a similar exercise this year with Bew’s Integrated Review, flanked by a Defence White Paper, and a Defence Industrial Strategy paper. The Bew paper is a brilliant tour d’horizon sketching where Britain sits in the world. But it is not the declaration of strategy now urgently needed. We must decide the priorities for security and prosperity for the country and its allies, taking in the real threats that need immediate attention. The prime alliance will be with the US and Europe. We cannot change the coordinates of human geography on Planet Reality. This means working with the Americans, but not necessarily always at or under Washington’s command.

The armed services need to be sorted out from the current tangle of outdated practice and processes, which has led to an annual defence procurement budget where at least £1.2bn of the allocation of £16bn is wasted, according to the leading defence policy wonk Francis Tusa of Defence Analysis. The Army has hit a train crash in its fighting vehicle programme, where funding for two programmes of around £5 billion for personnel carriers is about to be written off with no tangible result.

The Army needs to be given a new coherent structure – a flexible format to meet new demands and threats. Defence has to take in the new agenda requirements of cyber warfare and space – but it has to meet the here and now threats and crises on the ground. The twisted complexity of the Afghan crisis is precisely the kind of scenario in which it should have a role. In addition, the demands for supporting domestic resilience is part of the new home defence role – it means dealing with the social disruption brought by the pandemic and the effects of climate change such as weird weather, as well as fighting the kinetic threat from terrorist extremist groups and organised crime.

During the Libya crisis of 2011 David Cameron famously ticked off the Defence Chief General David Richards for giving his critique of the PM’s military planning. “You do the fighting, and I will do the talking,” Cameron snapped. However, he didn’t then explain who should do the thinking – which then, as now, tended to be pretty thin. Slogans like “Global Britain” are fair enough for an election campaign, but in terms of the practical thinking required they are airy persiflage.

The functionaries of government, diplomats, generals even, the think tanks and politicians, seem wedded to process, tradition and “normative practices”, in the jargon. This is the message of Colonel Mirjam Grandia Mantas’s Inescapable Entrapments about British and Dutch military planning for southern Afghanistan. At times it reads like a missing scene from Yes Minister, where process and ministerial egos rule, and thinking out of the box is heresy.

It is time to get real about practical policy and flexible planning – the essence of what event Carl von Clausewitz meant by “strategy”.

Faced with the cascade of problems of today, gesture politics and slogans are not enough.