The cost of intervention

This comes from a very strange place in my body. One of my earliest memories is Dad giving me an Asterix book as he waves me off from Dempsey Barracks in Sennelager to spend seven months in the Helmand Province. I still place that moment in something transitional in my life.

Along with the moment he came home, and several of us were called from our classroom to run giddily to our fathers. I was seven, and it left me with a horrendous interest in the armed forces, the idea of a nation, and strategy. But also, of humanity and our very nature.

The explanation I have been given for ‘Afghanistan’ since I can remember, is that all the problems lie in the discrepancy between nation and state. More specifically, Afghanistan it is a hodgepodge of nations, a strange buffer zone of territory that served a purpose a hundred and fifty years ago to mean that Russia and Britain didn’t share a border. It is a habitable and occupied wasteland. Up for grabs from whoever has the biggest guns at the time. Afghanistan is culturally tribal and multi-ethnic, a domination of Pashtuns intermingled with Shi’a Hazaras and Sunni Tajiks amongst nomadic Kyrgyz and Baluchis. Recent history has done nothing but mar this anthropological Jenga tower, Turkic ethnicities are considered the dregs of the Soviet invasion in the 80s, [1] the Sunni-Shi’a split still ripples under the surface, and repeated invasions have forced waves of refugees either elsewhere in the country or over the border itself.

This has meant that any form of top-down power structure has been effectively obsolete. I spoke to Angelica Akrami from the Cambridge University Afghan Society, and she explained that it just seems as though Afghanistan’s problems will never end. On top of the different ethnic groups, there are also two conflicting camps of thought, those who think more liberally and nationalists who want to preserve the essence of Afghanistan at any cost.

The frequent interventions and external meddling have left Afghans feeling diminished; of course, the Taliban are not representative of the population, but they have a key feature that the NATO based alternatives had: they are Afghan.

Afghan history has been characterised by malformed logic and as a result the state itself sits in a strange limbo between the Middle East and Asia. The population is, not necessarily divided by, but certainly disconnected by their own smaller ‘nations’. External intervention has done nothing but further impose ideologies that do not lie in the landscape. Or have made these ‘solutions’ seem so drastically different that the notion itself of ‘democracy’ could appear alien.

In 2021 senior Taliban commander Waheedullah Hashimi claimed that Afghanistan would be organised under Sharia law and that there will not be a democratic system ‘because it does not have any base in our country’. This is obviously not true, on many, many levels. Features of Pashtunwali, for example, whilst hardly a Western translation of democracy, does show a more fluid bottom-up approach to governance.

There has never been and is no centralised system of power or hierarchy for this tribe, however the fluid nature of the organisation follows clear patrilineal lines that wind through the individual clans and weaves the tribe together as a whole. It could be criticised for being too feudal, but how else did our democratic system start? The key problem with this system is that more groups than the Pashtuns live in Afghanistan, and this undulating power structure also crosses the border into Northern Pakistan. No, it isn’t representative of traditional perceptions of democracy, but that does not mean that it could not form a facet of a viable alternative.

In the simplest terms, Afghanistan is indefinable. Further military intervention is not going to help purely because it will further ignite fires of nationalism and mistrust of external powers, whilst contributing to further instability.

Evidence has shown that the Afghan War was useless. There are few members (either current or former) of the British Army that I have talked to who can or want to defend the decision to intervene. The conflict was an opportunity for the US and the UK armies to maintain a high operational profile in recent years. The waste of life and resources (from both sides) is particularly heart wrenching when everything fell to pieces so swiftly in August of 2021.

In the face of the complete collapse of women’s rights and the imposition of a brutal dictatorial theocracy it is clear why the question of reintervention is on the tip of tongues. Further military intervention is, however, futile. The problems of Afghanistan run too deep to be adequately sealed with such a quick fix.

A form of democracy should be facilitated in Afghanistan in the near future (hopefully as quickly as it is feasible), but this needs to be done tentatively, and the country should be permitted to translate this government in a way that the Afghan population would support. The Taliban are not representative of the state, obviously, but neither is a forced, NATO and US endorsed system of government. Not to mention the irony of imposing an unpopular democratic system over a state.

Afghanistan has never really united under a single form of government. It could be argued that the Taliban as they are now, are merely a very tight lid. It is not out of the question to argue that they too will be toppled reasonably soon. If democracy is the dream for this country, it needs to be permitted to develop on its own terms, this is not something that can be judged from European or Western standards, nor is it something that we can force or judge – after all, Europe is hardly devoid of depressingly recent histories of violent dictatorships.

I think the notion of humanity is key in these circumstances. It is human to want to help, but it is also human to reject that which has no immediate benefit. It is human to see safety in some deformed familiarity over what has been the direct cause of such torrential violence. Tragically, it should not be a question of what could be lost from not intervening; it should be a question of what it would cost Afghanistan to be plunged into further instability.

[1] Only partially accurate: yes, many Soviet troops were Uzbek for example, however many of the current population are descendants of those who fled the USSR to northern Afghanistan to evade persecution.

All images belong to the author, Lucy McCulloch, unless otherwise stated.