We should not walk away from Afghanistan even if it needs another 25 years of outside support, says Simon Diggins

Simon Tisdall’s denunciation of the US-led western involvement in Afghanistan as “17 or so years of ultimately pointless, criminal mayhem” (The US ruined Afghanistan. It can’t simply walk away now, Opinion, 8 February) is about as far wide of the mark as it is possible to be, unless you are Donald Trump. Even more curious, Tisdall then enjoins the US, presumably the “criminals” in this enterprise, not to scuttle away.

I served in Iraq and Afghanistan and am not naive enough to believe that one was the “good war”, while the other one wasn’t. But Tisdall seems to forget why we intervened in Afghanistan in the first place: to remove a monstrous regime, the Taliban, that had allowed the perpetrators of 9/11 to set up camp in their country and also terrorised its own people. Destroying the Taliban regime was the right thing to do.

Putting a country back together again, which had been in turmoil since the 1970s (two coups, 1973 and 1978, and the Soviet invasion of 1979), was always going to take time, and many mistakes were made. However, there has been progress on women’s rights, in education and in democratic government. These advances must be protected. This will need outside engagement and support and will take time, perhaps even another 25 years; we should not shrink from that. Sustaining that effort will be hard, but will not be helped by denigration of the efforts of those who have gone before.

Simon Diggins

Rickmansworth, Hertfordshire

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