“My fear is that in the wake of Afghanistan, which was the biggest international intervention in 50 years, people now are very leery of getting involved in other places.” Author Christina Lamb

Award-winning British war correspondent Christina Lamb recently went back through 27 years of notebooks from her travels in Afghanistan and Pakistan. The result, Farewell Kabul: From Afghanistan to a More Dangerous World (Harper Collins), is an intimate, granular and unflinching critique of how and where NATO leaders went wrong.

Your book bluntly declares the war in Afghanistan a failure, militarily and politically — and that Pakistan all along was the real problem. What makes you think a war with Pakistan would have gone any better?

I’m not necessarily advocating we should have fought a war against Pakistan. What I believe is that Afghanistan, and certainly the Taliban, were not our enemies. It was clear from the very beginning that Pakistan at the very least was turning a blind eye to things and in fact they did much more than that.

One U.S. official later said that in the beginning they thought Pakistan was on their same side, then they realized Pakistan was turning a blind eye, and then later, they saw Pakistan was actually supporting other side. And then finally they realized, they were the other side.

I remember sharing a guesthouse with you in early 2002 in Kandahar, just as the first Canadian soldiers were about to land. What is your sense of the Canadian involvement in the war?

Canada obviously lost a great deal — more soldiers killed, in per capita comparison to other NATO partners. My sense is Canada was in the right place, focusing on Kandahar, which was the key place. But clearly there weren’t enough Canadian troops to really secure the situation there from 2006 onwards. They would be able to deal with one Taliban group and then suddenly another would pop up.

Canada ended its combat mission earlier than its NATO partners, handing over Kandahar to U.S. troops. Do you think by leaving early we spared ourselves the gloomy humiliation you describe in witnessing the British troop withdrawal last fall, when Afghanistan was left to an uncertain future?

Perhaps. The debate in the U.K. has focused on an awful lot of military bungling. But I think for all the countries involved, there was a failure of political narrative. Nobody could really explain what we were doing there because they didn’t really know. At first it was revenge for 9/11 and trying to find Osama bin Laden. But he escaped, and then we slid into this later war against the Taliban, who were not global jihadists at all — they just wanted to take over Afghanistan, which is not much to do with us, really.

What lessons do you draw from this that might apply to new conflicts, new wars, in Syria and elsewhere?

My fear is that in the wake of Afghanistan, which was the biggest international intervention in 50 years, people now are very leery of getting involved in other places. That apprehension played a major part in not doing anything about Syria, and leaving Libya the moment after the government regime had fallen. I don’t think our publics are so opposed, they just want political leadership to explain what we’re going to do and why.

The other worry is we can’t seem to end conflict anymore. Afghanistan is not finished, the Taliban are not defeated and we’re getting pulled back into Iraq. Libya has become a complete warzone with warring militias. We’re in a situation where we don’t know how to finish what we start.

You invoke the Whack-A-Mole analogy in the book — the idea of military action as a carnival game, where new targets pop up after strike. What’s wrong with that scenario?

You have to know why you are whacking the mole, explain the objective, and also be prepared to devote the resources, both militarily and politically, to achieve it. Yet at the same time our militaries are becoming smaller and less capable and the will isn’t really there.

That said, the biggest reason we didn’t defeat Taliban was political. We did a very British shortcut, which backfired, by re-empowering the warlords who were the very people the Afghans blamed for the Taliban’s arrival. Even today, Afghanistan’s vice-president is one of the most notorious warlords in the country. Many Afghans have very negative views of these people.

Everyone who has been has at least some positive memories of Afghanistan. What stands foremost in your experience?

Sitting and listening to Afghan poetry at one of the old houses in Kabul. People outside watch the TV and come away with the impression of Afghanistan this very brutal place where everything is about fighting and men with beards and guns. But in fact, Afghans have a real passion for beauty and poetry. They are tremendous storytellers. There was one night during my first time there at age 21, meeting fighters from Kandahar and Helmand and listening to astonishing stories about feuds. I’d never heard anything like it. It really brought home that you cannot understand Afghanistan without understanding the tribes.

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Did NATO understand the tribal dynamic?

No, and that was a problem with the troops. Helmand is a classic example where British troops went in thinking it was all black and white; we’re going in to fight the bad guys – the Taliban. Actually, Helmand was a mix of all sorts of tribes and rival drug gangs and Kandahar was the same thing. A lot of it wasn’t Taliban fighting even though we were calling it the Taliban. It was actually the Barakzai fighting the Alakozai or the Alakozai fighting the Noorzai.

How is that even possible, given the British history of prior involvement in Afghanistan?

When you look back at the documents of Britain’s early Afghan wars, they kept carefully detailed studies of who was who. But instead, we turned this war into a sort of competition over who could use the most ammunition. Right at the beginning our paratroopers used 400,000 rounds and then the next lot used 1.1 million. In the end, the British used 46 million bullets in a conflict in which we went in saying we would not fire a single shot.

Some criticism revolves around the shortness of military tours of duty. Most Canadian deployments lasted around seven months, how long did British soldiers serve, on average?

Just six months for the U.K. troops, which is crazy. In eight years in Helmand province, we went through 17 commanders. Afghanistan is a place where it matters who you know. It takes time to build relationships and there is a lot of tea drinking involved. So having completely new faces coming, it was almost like starting a new war with every rotation. They all said the same things — “We’ve come and we’re doing to do all these things for you” — and actually didn’t do any of it. So it wasn’t surprising that Afghans quickly become very skeptical.

Which scenario best fits your idea of where Afghanistan is headed? Toward greatness, toward disaster or toward something in-between, perhaps more or less as it was before the West came in and spilled its blood and treasure?

Option No. 3. I envision an Afghanistan continuing to notoriously resist central government control, with various conflicts around the country and the Taliban coming back in parts of south and east, where they never really went away.

That said, there are differences between the Soviet withdrawal and what we’re seeing today. Afghanistan was so cut off then, so isolated, with no telephones, no television and radio as the only contact with outside world.

Now everyone has mobile phones, Afghans are on Facebook, even in remote villages. That sounds trivial but it does mean they are seeing what outside world is seeing, that there isn’t constant war everywhere in the world. And that’s the life they want.

The interview has been edited and condensed for length and clarity.

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