Afghanistan was a waste of life and money. Our politics won’t recover until we recognise that

It’s happened many times before. The union flag is pulled down surrounded by anxious British soldiers. They hope the ‘natives’ they’ve handed power to will hold on to a British-friendly kind of order, but are desperate most of all to get home safely. The plaques recording the lives and deaths of fallen comrades are unscrewed and packed up, and a patch of desert goes back to dust. The British military say they have confidence in the Afghan army to hold Helmand against the Taliban, and I have no reason to doubt they will. Either way though, the Afghan war has been a costly and tragic white elephant.

The numbers have been horrific. 450 Britons have died, and more than 500 Afghan civilians killed. British involvement in Helmand cost just under £40 billion, £2000 for every household in the UK and £25,000 for every Afghan citizen in the region. Afghanistan cost roughly the same as that equally outlandish public sector extravagence, HS2. More usefully, to pay for 5,000 police or nurses throughout their careers.

What was worth this great expense? This was no Falklands War, with its simple, incalculable aim of restoring British sovereignty over British soil. Nor did it aim to annihilate a regime which threatened to kill us. The nearest parallels were the small wars of decolonisation Britain fought in the 1940s and ’50s. Malaya, Mau Mau in Kenya, all about reasserting British (read coalition, or western) authority in territory Britain knew it wouldn’t rule for long. Like Afghanistan, they were not wars in which absolute victory was possible. They ended up as a numbers game, with the aim of marginally improving the chances of a friendly regime surviving.

The difference, though, was that those wars of de-colonisation were prosecuted with the (deluded) aim of preserving a British sphere of influence in lands soon to be self-ruled. Afghanistan connected to no sense of British, or even American sense of global strategy. The initial justification was about defeating terrorism. But that faded as soon as the Taliban kicked Al-Qaeda out, and terror seemed to be being plotted from Pakistan, Yemen, East Africa, the Sahara desert, maybe some London suburbs and now Syria. Not a single Al-Qaeda operative was killed by NATO in Afghanistan. We stayed because we’d started fighting and because making Afghanistan a better place was ‘the right thing to so’. But above all, we’d created an expensive machine, of military contractors and aid workers, that needed something to do.

The Afghan war happened because politicians were taken in by the belief they had the power to shape distant lives and forces which are out of their control. They believed the military’s claim that violence was capable of kick-starting Afghanistan’s economy, created a democractic polity and getting girls back to school. From Blair onwards, Afghanistan was an opportunity for politicians beleaguered at home to show their activity and virtue. The delusion only worked because it was such a far away place, and we don’t see the real consequences.

In fact war, and vast amounts of mis-spent money has held Afghan politics back badly. It’s the constant meddling of external powers, not the characteristics of Afghan society which have caused such lack of development and such poverty. Violence, from the Russians to us, brutalised Afghanistan; it was violence possible because its perpetrators didn’t have to stay to live amongst the consequences.

To give one, horrific example, from Anand Gopal’s book No Good Men Amongst the Living and the early days of the war. In 2002, US Central Command in Florida identified two Al-Qaeda compounds. They sent in special forces who executed two leaders, seized prisoners and massacred guards. In fact the US had mistaken two district governors for Taliban leaders and destroyed the core of any local anti-Taliban leadership. The US eventually apologised, but the special forces operatives got medals for their catastrophe. In this kind of scenario, its hardly surprising warlords, scamsters and crime bosses (Afghanistan’s frightening Vice President Abdul Rashid Dostum is all three) have taken the place of good leaders.

As the cliché goes, it is politics not violence which changes societies. And politics means people who live in a place negotiating their differences, and figuring out how to build their society for the future, using argument in place of fighting. All that takes local knowledge, the kind of confidence between people that takes years and, above all, commitment to stay. Neither of those are things the British soldier can hope to possess.

With soldiers gone, Kabul is stuffed full of western agencies with large amounts of money and their own rigid models about how to spend it. Britain’s over-inflated aid budget is divided between highly paid consultancies (but that’s another story). The hubris of politicians has created a costly machine, whose impact on the lives of the people it is supposed to help is negligible. It’s the same problem as here – institutions (in the state and the market) which create their own self-justifying languages, which define their own purpose, and have little connection to what really happens outside.

We all know, in our hearts, Afghanistan, like Iraq, was a waste of lives and money, a sad, tragic waste, which could have been avoided. The fact it’s so hard to admit – and we still need to pretend what’s happening is good – shows how badly wrapped up our politics has become in its myths. There’s a lot to unpick, unravel, explain, criticise. Until we do, parties like UKIP which say any kind of international engagement is a waste of money will make hay.