Afghanistan’s fall is 9/11’s latest unlearned lesson

There have been many dark moments in the two decades since 9/11, some of them in Kabul last month. I remain especially haunted by a snapshot from 2007 Iraq. British political adviser Emma Sky was riding a Blackhawk with US commander Gen Raymond Odierno. She mentioned to her boss over the intercom a glimpsed graffiti on a building wall in Baghdad: “THE HERO, THE MARTYR SADDAM HUSSEIN.”
Odierno responded tersely that the hanged dictator was a mass murderer. Sky, who liked to live dangerously, said: “We still don’t know who killed more Iraqis, you or Saddam, sir.” There was a deadly silence in the helicopter, and even the diplomat wondered if she had gone too far. “General O,” as she called him, then shouted, “Open the doors, pilots. Throw her out!”
There are many layers to this story, recorded in Sky’s memoir of her Iraq service. Odierno deserves credit for taking the harsh jibe on the chin. Sky commands respect, for never having told the military what they wanted to hear.
The ugly part, of course, is that she touched on a truth about the US response to 9/11. Incomparably more Afghans and Iraqis have died during the intervening
20 years than Americans perished in the attacks on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon, and few had anything whatsoever to do with extremism.
As a historian, I acknowledge that this is not a unique phenomenon. In 1944-45, British and US aircraft killed many more French and Dutch civilians in air attacks against Hitler’s V-weapon sites on the continent than Nazi flying-bombs and rockets killed British people. That does not, however, make disproportionate force any more acceptable now than it was then.
Amidst all the breast-beating on both sides of the Atlantic that has accompanied the withdrawal from Kabul, I have rewound my mental clock back to 9/11. The only question that seems to matter is: What should we, America and its allies, have done differently, following the most devastating terrorist atrocity in history?
Let us all agree — Americans and Europeans, Democrats and Republicans, military and civilians — that an option to do nothing did not exist. My friend Lord Heseltine, a veteran British statesman, once stopped me short when I criticised some Western folly in Syria. He said: “There are moments when a government absolutely must be seen to take action.”
9/11 represented such a moment. The case for direct assaults on al-Qaeda’s camps in Afghanistan, and the pursuit of Osama bin Laden, remains unanswerable. A final reckoning with the terrorist leader was delayed until 2011 in Pakistan, but the CIA and US Navy SEAL operation was a model of its kind, wholly justified in the eyes of most of the world.
The November 2001 overthrow of the Afghan Taliban regime, by Northern Alliance tribesmen supported by US air strikes and special forces, also represented a proportionate action, which again commanded international support. British war reporter Toby Harnden has just published a book written with CIA cooperation, “First Casualty,” portraying the early months of the Afghan campaign. It vividly describes the rollicking adventures Langley’s men enjoyed amid the blood, dust and tribesmen, which ended — apparently — with the bad guys in flight.
It was then, of course, that things started to go awry. Amidst the orgy of hubris shared by politicians, soldiers and spooks, a delusion gained hold that Afghanistan could be remade on a Western template. Worse, George W Bush and the neo-con zealots sharpened swords for the invasion of Iraq.
Why did they do it? Why did they lie, lie and lie again about the complicity of dictator Saddam Hussein in 9/11, when no shred of intelligence endorsed such a claim? Why did Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair wreck their reputations by promoting
spurious claims that Iraq had weapons of mass
destruction?
When Madeleine Albright was US secretary of state back in 1998, she proclaimed with a cross-party arrogance that would be reflected in much done by Washington after 9/11: “If we have to use force, it is because we are America; we are the indispensable nation. We stand tall, and see further than other countries into the future, and we see the danger there to all of us.”
Henry Kissinger justified his own support for the Iraq invasion by saying: “because Afghanistan wasn’t enough.” America’s enemies had aspired to its humiliation, “and we need to humiliate them.” Stephen Wertheim of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace has written recently: “rather than pose a threat, Iraq offered a stage. On its territory, the United States would exhibit overwhelming power.”
So it proved, of course. The first important lesson of both Afghanistan and Iraq is that the campaigns exposed institutional failures in Western intelligence that are still unrepaired. The US National Security Agency and its British counterpart GCHQ possess extraordinary electronic resources. But neither the CIA nor the British SIS has ever fathomed the tribal and family networks which are critical to political behaviour throughout the Muslim world.

—Bloomberg

Max Hastings is a Bloomberg columnist. He was previously a correspondent for the BBC and newspapers, editor in chief of the Daily Telegraph, and editor of the London Evening Standard. He is the author of 28 books, the most recent of which are “Vietnam: An Epic Tragedy” and “Chastise: The Dambusters Story 1943”