The Ledger review – how America failed Afghanistan

The Ledger by Greg Mills and David Kilcullen (Hurst Books), £14.99.

“The people of Afghanistan do not deserve this,” tweeted Khaled Hosseini, author of The Kite Runner after the fall of Kabul to the Taliban in August.

Quite how and why they didn’t deserve the shambolic debacle to international intervention in Hosseini’s country is explained sharply, elegantly and brutally in The Ledger – Accounting for Failure in Afghanistan by Greg Mills and David Kilcullen. If you read no other book or account of the shameful American-led disaster, read this. It is not only one of the best books about the intervention in Afghanistan, but also on the whole business of stabilisation and security, the growing threat of sudden and devastating regional and communal wars.

Both authors are veterans of the international operation in Afghanistan, and Kilcullen, a former officer of the Australian army, has advised British and American commanders at the highest level. Mills was in the presidential palace as President Ashraf Ghani took flight, leaving behind his closest and most loyal staff. 

It needn’t have happened like this. 

The exit operation and evacuation of staff and dependents from Kabul was worse and more disorganised than the equivalent bailout from Saigon in 1975. Mills and Kilcullen contend, and with plenty of evidence, that the scuttle from Kabul is set to have more far-reaching consequences in global security, not least for the standing of the US and NATO, than the Vietnam debacle. 

The seeds of the disaster were sewn with the deal made in Doha in February 2020 between the Trump administration and a delegation of the Taliban, though quite how representative this was of the gang now in power in Kabul is questionable. 

The deal was that the international forces would be out altogether by September 2021, the twentieth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks. The Taliban would negotiate an interim government with the regime of Ashraf Ghani. There would be a truce and peaceful transition. If only.

The Americans did not consult the government in Kabul, nor any of the allies. It was cut and run – or rather run and cut. When the last of their forces left Bagram airbase, they released 5,000 Taliban militant prisoners, flew off with their last fighter jets and put out the lights on a timer twenty minutes later.

They did not even tell the Afghan general responsible for the multi-billion dollar base. 

Biden was as keen to get out as Trump, so he didn’t review, revise or perhaps even seriously assess the consequences of what he inherited from the dodgy Doha agreement. In 2003, the then Senator Biden, luminary of the Senate’s Foreign Affairs Committee stated, “the alternative to nation-building is chaos, that turns out bloodthirsty warlords, drug traffickers and terrorists.”

On 16 August this year, in his first comments on the Kabul debacle, he said, “Our mission in Afghanistan was never supposed to have been nation-building.” With supreme insouciance, Kamala Harris remarked, “the mission achieved what it set out to.” 

No American president, apart from George W Bush initially believed, or possibly even really understood, the complexities of Afghanistan and what their force was trying to do there. Mills and Kilcullen rightly point out that for many officials and commentators across the western world Afghanistan is a bundle of clichés. It was never really a nation, but a collection of rival tribes and factions, it is fueled by a drug economy and it is irredeemably corrupt. The two authors say all such assumptions are wrong, as the real gains in social, educational, health reforms over the past twenty years show.

Now Afghanistan is facing mass starvation, the upheaval and flight of refugees to Pakistan and Iran especially – threatening the stability of both. Pakistan’s military and ISI intelligence agency had planned the sophisticated phasing of the Taliban’s summer offensive – Mills and Kilcullen spell this out clearly. Yet now as hundreds of thousands of refugees and fugitives from famine head south, the security and stability of Pakistan is in question. 

Quite why and how things fell apart so dramatically this summer has been explained in an article by the former commander of forces in Helmand, and briefly tasked to defend Kabul as it was falling, the British educated General Sami Sadat. In an article in the New York Times on 25 August this year, he says; “I am exhausted. I am frustrated. I am angry.” 

The Afghan forces were betrayed, let down by three factors. First, the Doha deal was a sell-out, as both regime Trump and Biden knew. Second, from the beginning of this year the 17,000 foreign contractors and maintainers that kept the Afghan planes and helicopters flying, and communications systems and drones running were pulled out. This meant almost none of the Afghan forces’ 200 far-flung bases could be reinforced and resupplied. “The Taliban fought with snipers and improvised explosive devices, while we lost aerial and laser-guided weapons capacity.” This view was endorsed by the former US commander David Petraeus to the House of Commons last month. Once the Afghans lost resupply facilities and air support, especially by drone and helicopter, they were finished.

Biden said that Americans were fighting in a war – losing no casualties in the eighteen months prior to this August – “that Afghan forces are not willing to fight themselves”. Afghan military and police have lost 60,000 dead in the past ten years or so, and this summer were taking casualties, killed and wounded, at 5,000 a month.

The third cause for collapse according to General Sadat is the rampant corruption across the Afghan military and government as a whole. He should have added that the Americans bought into it freely at times – with a view perhaps that Kabul may be a kleptocracy, but at least it’s our kleptocracy. The Karzai and Ghani presidencies were egregiously corrupt – ironically in 2008, Ghani co-authored a book with Clare Lockhart called Fixing Failed States. In the end, his own failed state fixed him.

The Ledger should be read alongside the brilliant critique of the crazy-paving path of British and Dutch planning and execution of operations in southern Afghanistan, the opium areas of Helmand and Uruzgan – Inescapable Entrapments by Mirjam Grandia Mantas, a colonel in the Dutch Army who served two tours in Afghanistan. The two books are the stand-out critiques of the whole international imbroglio in Afghanistan. 

Colonel Grandia’s main contention is that the Dutch and UK military were asked to do jobs they weren’t configured or trained to do. Their mission was messed up by meddling and hubristic politicians, think Tony Blair and John Reid, and their close coterie of advisers who knew almost nothing of Afghanistan. She, too, focuses on corruption and weak governance at the centre – a fatal flaw in all such stabilisation operations. You cannot get anywhere if you try to work with such crapulous and corrupt setups like the Thieu regime or the Karzai-Ghani presidencies of Vietnam. This was pointed out as far back as 1988 in a brilliant book, Dangerous Paradigms, by D Michael Shafer – a mentor and collaborator with Mirjam Grandia. 

Now Afghanistan is facing famine after yet another epic drought this summer. This is results from the change in climate – especially from the system of glaciers from the huge mountain chain from the Hindu Kush to the Himalayas and the Karakoram. The Taliban offensive is one of the clearest examples to date of conflict conditioned and accelerated by climate change. Crops from pomegranate to wheat failed and desperate villagers turned to the only point of authority, and perhaps protection, they could find – the Taliban.

The debacle in Afghanistan has put a huge question mark over the capabilities and effectiveness of NATO, still the most important western alliance. The coalition forces in Afghanistan never worked as a coalition. It was an all-American show, with the allies offered bit parts if they were lucky. 

Not only are millions of innocent Afghans now facing privation and starvation, but the violent internationalist terrorists and subversives are back, principally the Islamic State Khorasan. They are even threatening the Taliban, as well as more general global jihad.   

The Ledger is timely because international alliances and their function need a reset. Whatever Biden and Harris may babble about “nation-building” being for the birds, international alliances like NATO and UNO will have to do stabilisation, security and recovery missions – and over and again – in the future. 

In learning how things have gone so badly wrong in places like Afghanistan, and how we can operate more practically in the future, there can be no better introduction than Mills and Kilcullen’s wise words in The Ledger.