The lessons from history over Afghanistan are obvious – but will we heed them?

Three books by very knowledgeable authors are useful in understanding how we got where we are, writes Kim Sengupta

Hundreds of people gather near a US Air Force C-17 transport plane at a perimeter at the international airport in Kabul during the recent evacuation (AP)

The year has seen the western withdrawal from Afghanistan with a huge boost to international jihad as one of its consequences, while post-Brexit “Global Britain” is seeking to re-establish military and political footprints in, among other places, the Middle East and south Asia.

A number of books have come during this eventful time. Among them are three on Afghanistan and the Middle East by authors with deep knowledge and great expertise in their subjects, and are very useful in understanding how we got where we are.

The theatres of conflict are likely to move to eastern Europe next year, with the massing of Russian forces on the Ukrainian border and east Asia where an aggressive China is threatening to invade Taiwan. Both these confrontations, and what may unfold, have been influenced by messages taken away by allies and adversaries from Joe Biden’s Afghan retreat.

One of the books on Afghanistan, The Ledger: Accounting for Failure in Afghanistan, is by David Kilcullen, a former soldier from Australia, and Greg Mills, a South African academic. The Long War: The Inside Story of America and Afghanistan Since 9/11, is by David Loyn, a former BBC journalist who has reported for years from Afghanistan, among many other countries around the world. And the third book, Soldier in the Sand: A Personal History of the Modern Middle East (now out in paperback), is by Lieutenant General Sir Simon Mayall, who served extensively in the Middle East and was the senior adviser on the region in the Ministry of Defence.

Kilcullen, who was deployed in Iraq, Afghanistan and East Timor, had been counter-insurgency adviser to Condoleezza Rice when she was US secretary of state, and the American general David Petraeus, in Iraq. Kilcullen first came to prominence over a decade ago with another book, The Accidental Guerilla. His thesis was that America had approached both the Iraq and Afghan conflicts with a mindset shaped by the Second World War, and had failed to take on board the changing nature of conflict and the advent of hybrid warfare.

Counterinsurgency doctrine, in Kilcullen’s view, should be people-centric, guarding the urban centres of operation rather than chasing after the enemy in remote locations. He also feels that the west lacks an understanding of the nuances of Islamist militancy, failing to understand differing motivations and goals among fighters, with a failure to carry out negotiations at opportune times one of the results.

Writing in their new book, Kilcullen and Mills, who was an adviser to Ashraf Ghani, the president who fled as the Taliban took Kabul, hold that right to the end, too few lessons were learned too late. The government which emerged in Kabul after the overthrow of the Taliban in 2001 simply was not broad enough in representation. The tribes and clans were not brought into the fold, and the Taliban, who were then receptive to dialogue, spurned and viewed as perpetual enemy.

Senior people in George W Bush’s administration were responsible for this state of affairs. In 2004, Donald Rumsfeld, the then US defence secretary, told me and another journalist in the northern Afghan city of Mazar-i-Sharif that “the Taliban are finished, they have no part to play in the future of Afghanistan”. Rumsfeld was one of the key figures in the Bush administration who had instigated the invasion of Iraq the year before, transferring vital resources to that disastrous war from Afghanistan, creating a security vacuum which the Taliban and the Haqqani network, fed and watered in Pakistan by their sponsors in the military and the intelligence service, came back over the border to exploit.

Focus on defending urban centres was already in practice under the British general Sir David Richards, when he was head of the International Security Assistance Force (Isaf). I saw it still in operation by the Afghan government forces last summer while covering the conflict which ended with the Taliban takeover in Afghanistan. One of the key reasons the strategy failed was because the Afghan troops were not kept supplied after the American pull-out.

Rumsfeld comes under scrutiny in The Long War in which Loyn points out the defence secretary’s lack of long-term vision and an insistence on a “light footprint” which meant there were inadequate numbers of troops for the tasks needed. There were never enough boots on the ground to put in the areas from where the Talibs had fled, while failing to capture or kill Osama bin Laden at Tora Bora, and allowing him to escape to Pakistan, was a great propaganda triumph for the jihadists. After all, it was the 9/11 attacks and the Taliban’s refusal to hand over the al-Qaeda chief to the US which was the main reason for the Afghan expedition.

Loyn’s book charts how the Taliban were replaced by warlords, often corrupt, often involved in the opium trade, often oppressive towards the local population, who became partners of the west. Rumsfeld, when he met us in Mazar, had been to see Abdul Rashid Dostum, a warlord with a notorious reputation.

These strongmen may have fought the Talibs, but they also used the western military to settle tribal or personal scores. I recall, in 2002, how US air strikes wiped out large groups of people, some of them at social gatherings such as weddings, after the Americans had been told they were insurgents.

It is also the partnering with local militias which contributed to some of the military failures, such as the escape of Bin Laden. The Americans and the British never quite understood the Afghan dynamics, and the ties, sometimes, with supposed enemies, under which these armed groups operated.

Loyn’s work is divided into five different segments: the invasion in 2001; the warfighting which began in 2006; the “surges” under Petraeus and Stanley McChrystal; the state of the conflict after Isaf finished combat operations; and the final defeat this year. The book succeeds mainly due to Loyn’s deep knowledge of Afghanistan. He had access to many of the senior military officers and civilian leaders, western and Afghan, and this helps in filling in the inner details of what took place, the failures and successes – common purpose and confrontations.

Some of the labelling of commanders may have been arbitrary and possibly unfair. Loyn says, for instance, that the US general Dan McNeill resented being called “Bomber McNeill”. The sobriquet, I seem to recall, was thought up one afternoon at the Isaf headquarters in Kabul after a truce with the Taliban organised by the outgoing commander, General Richards, was effectively sabotaged by a US officer calling in air strikes on the Talibs. This was just as General McNeill was about to take over and is seen as an example of the American view that deals like the one at Musa Qala were naive and bound to fail.

As Britain seeks to expand influence afar, the policy makers in Whitehall will do well to listen to Simon Mayall, who was one of the main figures behind David Cameron starting the process of returning to east of Suez with the setting up of a naval base in Bahrain.

Mayall was the ideal man for the role – someone with not just professional, but also deep personal knowledge of the Middle East, having spent most of his childhood there before much of his distinguished career of 40 years in the region. A brief resume of Mayall’s father’s service gives a glimpse of changing circumstances in the military. In 1948 he had joined the newly formed RAF Regiment, which was 66,000 strong, with the role of providing protection for the chain of UK’s airbases around the world. The entire strength of the British army will be 72,500 in four years’ time.

Mayall joined the army rather than the RAF and went on take part in all the significant chapters of British involvement in the Middle East in subsequent decades. He fought in the two Iraq wars and was also seconded to the Omani armed forces for three years. The general’s Middle East adviser role at the Ministry of Defence came during the Libyan intervention and the Arab Spring. As well as degrees from Balliol, Oxford, he studied at St Anthony’s, Oxford, where he wrote a book on Turkish security policy.

Mayall brings a soldier’s eye to the conflicts, but he also sees the political dimensions which lead to them taking place. He also distinguishes correctly, between the Afghan operation which followed the 9/11 attack organised by Bin Laden from Taliban-run Afghanistan, and the Iraq invasion which, he acknowledges, had “as much to do with US internal political dynamics as it did with the stated casus belli regarding WMD and Saddam Hussein’s links to al-Qaeda”.

Those of us reporting from Iraq in the run-up to the invasion were only too aware of it. We accompanied the UN inspection teams as they searched for the mythical WMDs, but returning to the UK and visiting the US in between stints in Iraq, it became obvious that George W Bush, with Tony Blair a faithful follower, was determined for war.

Mayall can also see the result of American overconfidence and the misconception of what may take place during the occupation. “The image of President Bush on board the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln on 1 May declaring ‘major combat operations over’ with a banner proclaiming ‘Mission Accomplished’ behind him would come to haunt him and others as Iraq descended into chaos...” he writes. It was a chaos he and his fellow commanders were left to deal with.

But Mayall’s book is more than just a military account. It is a mix of history, politics and analysis enriched by personal experience which seeks to explain the complex mosaic of a highly volatile region. He remains fascinated by this remarkable corner of the globe, having “seen it at its glorious, happy and hospitable best, and its murderous and sectarian worst”.

Mayall’s belief in the geopolitical importance of the Middle East made him encourage and back the British government’s decision to open a naval base in Bahrain. The strategic importance of that could be seen in tensions in the Gulf which had led to a series of serious incidents including the seizure of a British tanker by Iran.

There will be plenty of such drama played out there in the future.

‘The Ledger: Accounting for Failure in Afghanistan’ by David Kilcullen and Greg Mills is published by Hurst

‘The Long War: The Inside Story of America and Afghanistan Since 9/11’ by David Loyn is published by St Martin's Press

‘Soldier in the Sand: A Personal History of the Modern Middle East’ by Lieutenant General Sir Simon Mayall, is published by Pen & Sword