Editorial

TOM CLARK

First, know thyself. Before adventuring on foreign fields, be sure about what you’re at least trying to do. “We” in the west were not spurred to go into Afghanistan out of concern for the Afghans in 2001, and nor, 20 years later, are we withdrawing because of the Afghans either. Domestic American concerns—revenge in 2001, war-weariness in 2021—have driven everything, as they are wont to do in a democracy. That’s now crystal clear. Clear, too, is the fate of an unlucky people making the switch between occupation and joyless, brutalising theocracy.

But the discussion of our longest modern war has too often been clouded in haze. Western capitals have ascribed to themselves all manner of motives, from human rights and the advancement of women to nation building and even narcotics control. A little knowledge of how, through history, the selfprotective instincts of occupying armies end up over-riding any nobler ambitions might have been useful. As CPW Gammell writes (p12), when in the 19th century the British were in charge of Herat, medieval Afghanistan’s city of poets, they laid waste to its beautiful colleges, mausoleums and hospitals as part of a flattening designed to deter a Russian advance.