Land of the Blind
There is a joke in the army that after a conflict we used to have “lessons learned” sessions to ensure we would avoid similar mistakes in the next conflict, but we had to rename “lessons learned” to “lessons identified” as we frequently identified lessons but failed to learn them. Although the wars I experienced are no longer current affairs but now recent history, there is much we can still learn from them, or at least identify.
Today the Taliban are back in power in Afghanistan after 20 years of occupation that resulted in more than 47,000 dead civilians and more than 3,500 dead coalition soldiers. For many, “Do not intervene” is the obvious lesson. But war is an inevitable part of human nature and with the rise of autocratic leaders and ebb of democracies in our fragmenting world, there may not be a choice.
In Afghanistan there was no clear, realistic, measurable strategic objective. This is a basic requirement if you want to unite a disparate set of allies behind a single purpose. At different times, the mission was to capture those behind 9/11, remove the Taleban, halt opium production, establish a democratic government and install western human rights. This was naïve in a country riven by decades of factional war and a centuries-old system of tribal politics.
Failures to coordinate these myriad objectives meant that they clashed. In 2007, while I was visiting the coalition’s Helmand HQ, a counter-narcotic task force from Kabul landed in a nearby district. The area’s commander had visited there the previous day to reassure the farmers that he was not interested in their opium crop if they did not support the Taleban. The task force, without the commander’s knowledge that they were in his area, without explanation set fire to the same fields, destroying the crops and with them the commander’s credibility and latest strategy.
This was compounded by organisational failures. Strategy was often decided by what capabilities and resources were available rather than the other way around. The military’s “can-do” attitude meant the leadership soldiered on under-resourced. No cost-benefit analysis was done on what blood and treasure would be spent to achieve our aims. The opaqueness of our objectives, meanwhile, made it impossible to accurately measure our success. The lie that we were winning could flourish. Without a coherent sense of our achievements, there was no obvious point at which we could justify an exit.
In any future war, we will need to obtain a better understanding of our enemies. In Afghanistan, our cluelessness about the environment was worsened by the constraints of an over-simplified, binary way of thinking. The US had split the world along Manichean lines: with us or against us. But this simple dichotomy did not match the reality of Afghanistan, nor will it match today’s complex multi-matrixed world of emerging state and non-state powers. The presence of foreign fighters was a key coalition metric. To some Afghans, people from the next valley were ‘foreign’. Rather than be on anyone’s side, most Afghans were motivated by complex, often historical, allegiances and grudges. Blinded by what we thought was a simple battle between good and evil, we were oblivious to this.
Few understood the history, tribal politics or the Pashtunwali, the honour-based code of the Pashtun peoples. Even fewer spoke the language. Misunderstandings blighted every interaction. We negotiated with the wrong people and misunderstood the intent of friend and enemy alike.
The Americans eventually recruited anthropologists to help them understand the Afghan people. We should be increasing the numbers of our diplomats and intelligence officers overseas rather than reducing them, but our soldiers too should be learning Chinese, Russian and the language, history, and politics of other emerging global powers. Our embassies should be full of the next generation of commanders immersing themselves in the culture and making contacts who will provide opportunities for de-escalation.
Moving from boots to bots won’t change this. The public are more uncomfortable with the deaths of our troops than they once were. Ukraine has demonstrated the value of replacing troops with autonomous drones and boats, but soldiers will always be needed. Artificial intelligence underperforms in complex environments that require high degrees of understanding of human context. An army of bots is no substitute for greater research and preparation.
Land of the Blind is a fictionalised memoir, rather than an autobiography of my time in Helmand. Autobiographies tend to address the specific, novels can address the universal. Albert Camus claimed that fiction is the lie through which we tell the truth. In striving for the truth about my time in Afghanistan, there’s a hope that universal lessons can be identified and perhaps even learned by the next generation of soldiers.
Andy Owen is the author of Land of the Blind, published by Fireship Press.
