Recent news reports have missed a major item on Afghanistan. Last week, the Independent reported on an internal study from the British government’s Ministry of Defence (MoD). The study, obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, examines the “extraordinary number of similar factors that surround both the Soviet and Nato campaigns in Afghanistan.”
The study finds that despite their differences:
Both interventions have been portrayed as foreign invasions attempting to support a corrupt and unpopular central government against a local insurgent movement which has popular support, strong religious motivation and safe havens abroad. In addition, the country will again be left with a severely damaged and very weak economic base, heavily dependent upon external aid.
It goes on:
The highest‐level parallel is that both campaigns were conceived with the aim of imposing an ideology foreign to the Afghan people: the Soviets hoped to establish a Communist state while Nato wished to build a democracy,” it says. “Equally striking is that both abandoned their central aim once they realised that the war was unwinnable in military terms and that support of the population was essential. [Emphasis added.]
In a questionable comment that one would expect a U.S. official to utter, the British government website states “We are in Afghanistan to protect our own national security by helping the Afghans take control of theirs.” The internal study, of course, comes to a contrary conclusion: “The military parallels are equally striking; the 40th Army [of the Soviet Union] was unable decisively to defeat the mujahedin while facing no existential threat itself, a situation that precisely echoes the predicament of Isaf [the Nato‐led security mission].”
To learn more about the international community’s inability to rescue Afghanistan—and why the international community made that grandiloquent pledge in the first place—register for the Cato Institute policy forum on Friday, April 5th , “The war in Afghanistan: What Went Wrong?” I will host Washington Post reporter Rajiv Chandrasekaran, the RAND Corporation’s Ambassador James Dobbins, and West Point Professor and COIN critic Colonel Gian Gentile to discuss America’s longest war.