Herat is an ancient city on the Silk Road, originally built around an oasis in a fertile valley. In present-day Afghanistan it is the gateway to Iran, with a population of half a million. At the height of Nato combat operations in the country, a decade ago, I visited Herat to get a glimpse of what this war-torn country could become: it was peaceful and prosperous, with tree-lined avenues, historic sites and a bustling industrial estate around its airport. I discussed an optimistic future with students at the university, including young Afghan women never allowed to study before.
The hopes of those students for a more peaceful, tolerant and modern future for their country made a deep impression on me. They were showing it could be done — this crossroads of civilisation did not have to be a terrorist haven; it need not collapse back into civil war or oppression; it could lift itself to a new level if only we had the will and resources to keep helping it. If only.
But it turns out we do not have the will, even though the resources required had become modest. In the last few weeks almost the entire province of Herat has fallen under the control of the Taliban. Fighting has reached the streets of the city itself. On Sunday, the Afghan government belatedly flew in reinforcements to try to defend it, but the border crossings are now providing tax revenue for the insurgents. The businesses are largely closed. The next generation of students will be seeing their ambitions snuffed out. The dreams of a better future are dying.
If Herat represented the vision of what Afghanistan could be, the fact that it is now under siege — only four months after President Biden made the terrible error of announcing that the few thousand remaining US troops would leave the country by September — illustrates the looming disaster of what it will become instead: either permanently at war or oppressed by a brutal ideology. It is the same story in many other places, including in Lashkar Gar, the southern city where so many British political and military leaders went to proclaim our determination and solidarity with brave people who aligned themselves with creating a peaceful and democratic country. As they see the Taliban come down the street, those people are entitled to feel betrayed.
I wrote in April in these pages that Joe Biden had made, on this issue, his first big mistake — that the small US and other Nato forces present there made all the difference to the fighting confidence of the Afghan army and provided the only leverage for the Taliban to take seriously the interminable peace talks in Doha. Since then, the speed and scale of the Taliban advance, to now controlling around half the country, appears to have taken the White House by surprise. It should not have done so: if you utterly demoralise your own side in a war, it should not be in the least bit surprising that they retreat, abandon weapons, argue among themselves or surrender, all of which have rapidly begun to happen.
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But since this mistake has been made, and made so firmly that it cannot be reversed — “America’s longest war is over”, in Biden’s emphatic words — is there any point in going on about it? Can’t we just put it down as one unfortunate error by a president who, in world affairs, is getting most things right? Don’t we just have to close our minds to the fate of those young people in Herat and realise we can’t do everything we might want to do? And isn’t this a popular move anyway, to get out of drawn-out wars, that also allows the US to get on with focusing on a geopolitical contest with China?
Unfortunately, the short attention span of the western mind does not mean we will be allowed to forget about what we have done. The ease of the Taliban advance carries four important lessons and implications for Washington, London and allied capitals.
The first is that we will have even greater obligations to the people we have abandoned as they seek refuge from death and persecution. The British government has already recognised this by accelerating the bringing to safety of former interpreters and other staff who worked with our armed forces. Last week, however, five former chiefs of the defence staff and dozens of other former officers wrote that “the policy is not being conducted with the necessary spirit of generosity required to protect our former colleagues from an indiscriminate and resurgent Taliban”, saying urgent action is needed to save more people “who saved countless British lives”. It is not Britain’s fault that this crisis is developing so quickly, since it is quite clear that ministers have been horrified by the US decision. But we are left with moral responsibilities that now must be honoured.
Second, it is not too late to avert a complete collapse in Afghanistan if Biden permits continued air strikes and special forces operations, albeit from much less convenient bases in other countries. This would almost certainly be too much for the president to swallow: the war would not be over after all. Yet as the refugees grow in number, women’s rights are suppressed and ultimately the risk of terrorist bases in Afghanistan re-emerges, the White House may well find that the popularity of this withdrawal evaporates.
Third and crucially, it is vital not to make the same mistake elsewhere. Oddly enough, Biden has adopted a very different approach in Iraq, agreeing to keep limited US forces there. That is inconsistent but right. But President Macron recently announced the drawing down of French forces fighting Islamist insurgencies across Africa, leaving the West without any coherent strategy for containing the mounting threats. In Mali, Niger, Nigeria and Mozambique, for example, extremist groups are gaining ground. They will be encouraged by the news from Afghanistan, and one day they will erupt as a new, violent threat.
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The fourth lesson is longer term. The strategic contest with China is primarily about ideas, not territory. It is therefore global, not confined to one location like the South China Sea. When we go to great lengths, spending tens of billions of dollars and losing thousands of lives among Nato forces, to allow those students I met in Herat to share our ideas of freedom, it is a terrible error subsequently to abandon them to their fate. It leaves the western idea lacking strength, constancy and credibility: a strange position to adopt when simultaneously increasing support for Taiwan.
In the coming weeks, we will all be tempted to avert our gaze. But we have to force ourselves to watch, and learn, as an unforced error brings about a catastrophic defeat.