CABLES FROM KABUL
The Inside Story of the West’s Afghanistan Campaign. By Sherard Cowper-Coles. Harper Press.312pp.
INFERNAL TRIANGLE
Conflict in Iraq, Afghanistan and The Levant – Eyewitness reports from the September 11 decade. By Paul McGeough. Allen and Unwin. 338pp.
Reviewed: 5 August 2011
This book offers unparalleled insight into the policy morass of current Western engagement with Afghanistan, where vast expenditure of lives, billions of dollars, and years of rhetoric have failed to reveal any credible strategy for a long-term sustainable outcome.
From an authoritative insider’s viewpoint, it also exposes the ultimate charade of a nominal “coalition” in which the dominant player, the United States, for all its commitment of resources, seems least able to implement a strategy informed by the experience of others, or even by its own recent history.
Sir Sherard Cowper-Coles had a stellar career in the British diplomatic service, rising through postings in Cairo, Israel, Washington, Paris and Saudi Arabia before being dispatched as Ambassador to Kabul in 2007. In 2009-2010 he was Foreign Secretary David Milliband’s Special Representative on Afghanistan, and resigned from the Foreign Office soon after the change of UK government, in late 2010. We can be grateful that the resignation made this book possible.
The author’s great-grandfather, a captain in the Royal Navy, is credited with inventing the swivelling naval gun-turret. Cowper-Coles, freed from diplomatic restraints, lobs shells in all directions, hoisting friend or foe. As he chronicles his years in Kabul and the machinations of international politics, he exercises a peculiarly British capacity to combine praise (and even claimed devotion) with devastating personal critique.
The book is dedicated to the late American diplomatic star Richard Holbrooke, “who gave his life for peace”. But the portrait of Holbrooke, during his 2010 role convening a process of Special Representative meetings to coordinate a strategy for Afghanistan, is of a vain and crass egomaniac incapable of accepting, or acknowledging, the contributions of others. Many a minister, military officer, or civil servant (some anonymously) get similarly brisk treatment – especially those who trot out the platitude “much has been achieved, but challenges remain”.
With the confidence to be self-deprecating, Cowper-Coles admits shame for occasions on which he too, in the line of duty, allowed lies and obfuscations to go unchallenged, or on some occasions challenged, too brusquely, the naïve good intentions of less jaded Westerners on mission in Kabul.
Most of his critical ordnance lands on Americans, and on those British who seemed to be pushing personal agendas that often involved not saying boo to the American goose. Cowper-Coles himself manifests as a bright, urbane English toff – public school, classics at Oxford, pony clubs, country houses, brother in the Guards, the august Brooks’ gentlemen’s club in London. One might not be surprised that Americans, or Australians, could find him bumptious, especially when what he had to say was both politically inconvenient and correct.
He met in Kabul with Senator Joe Biden, then Chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee but not yet US Vice-President. Having treated Biden to a lecture on the flaws in US Afghanistan policy, Sir Sherard was needled by an apparently patronizing Biden trotting out Winston Churchill’s reference to democracy being “the worst form of government – except all the others”. He volleyed back “..Churchill also said that you could rely on America to do the right thing – once it had exhausted all the alternatives”.
This may have been a career-defining moment, though the author remains proud of it.
A writer who begins a book quoting Thucydides Peloponnesian Wars and ends it with a Latin tag (untranslated) is likely to exhibit a political “responsiveness” that is hampered by a knowledge of history, like a Greek chorus howling in his ear. Cowper-Coles sees the Western coalition floundering around Afghanistan, ignoring all the lessons of Empires, ancient and modern, and especially the local lessons of the British Empire. He grows increasingly frustrated by the success of militarists, British and American, in convincing politicians that the key to Afghanistan’s political future is a foreign-imposed and foreign-funded military “victory”. Russian diplomats gloat that the West is repeating the Soviet experience in Afghanistan, having learned nothing from it.
By early 2011, when he has left the Foreign Office, he has regained some hope that the Obama administration “gets it”, and understands that negotiation with the Taliban is the only and inevitable way forward. But the negotiating position grows weaker each month that negotiations are delayed. He quotes the wisdom of Sun Tzu (550 BC) that “tactics without strategy are merely the noise before defeat”.
Other requirements for an Afghan solution are that serious action be taken to cut off Taliban support from Pakistan, and that the self-serving military demand for more “victories” be firmly rejected by political leaders. No wonder that he appears to have been eased out of the Foreign Office.
Australia is never mentioned as carrying the slightest weight in coalition strategy talks, nor as participating in serious coalition strategy meetings. Former diplomat and Secretary of Defence Rick Smith is noted as an honourable participant in Holbrooke’s 2010 Special Representatives process, but that process is written off as an ineffective “circus”.
Australian military in Afghanistan are briefly cited, not for good works in their patch of Oruzgan, but for breaking the hearts of female staff and gate-crashing the Ambassador’s Charity Ball at the British Embassy in Kabul. So much for the vaunted importance of Australia “staying the course”.
Paul McGeough’s Infernal Triangle is a complementary perspective, collating dispatches from his coverage of the Afghanistan and Middle East conflicts over the decade since Al Qaeda attacked New York’s World Trade Centre. His first-class journalism sits outside the stream of diplomatic noblesse that filters (and decorates) Sir Sherard’s insider account. McGeough draws instead on street-level observation and interviews with active and passive stakeholders on all sides of the action.
McGeough was reporting for an Australian (Fairfax press) audience, but the Australian perspective rarely colours his sense of global interconnection. The dispatches are presented in three sections respectively on Afghanistan, Iraq and “The Levant”, then chronologically within each section. I’m not sure the sectioning was a good idea, because one of the rewards of reading dated reportage is to observe the reporter’s changing viewpoint as his experience grows and events unfold. To some extent, the sections break this chronology.
Infernal Triangle begins with McGeough’s sympathetic account of the 9/11 attack itself, which he witnessed on the streets of Manhattan, and with hopes for social justice in a future democratic Afghanistan. It ends with the bitter conclusion that, despite the failure of Al Qaeda to win the “Arab Street”, the West has squandered vast resources, and killed thousands of its own and others, in hopeless politically-driven military campaigns to “impose democracy at gunpoint”.
The West can never eliminate the motives for terrorism, nor expect lasting trust from Islamic nations, so long as the West sanctions Israel’s unconscionable colonization of more and more Arab lands. McGeough’s chapter “Controlling the Narrative in Israel and Palestine” is particularly mordant on this aspect.
Australia’s presence in Oruzgan offers a microcosm of the general failure, in a chapter McGeough calls “Doing the Bidding of Organised Crime”. Cowper-Coles favours pragmatic negotiation with the local powers that be, however distasteful. McGeough’s observations in Oruzgan lead him to believe that the Karzai regime, and perhaps the whole American-style centralized government structure imposed by the US and its allies, has no hope of taking root with the dispossessed and marginalized who make up most of Afghanistan’s population. These wary, tribal people assume government officials to act criminally, and they respond only to tangible bribes (from the West) or the most credible threats that come from the Taliban, local drug lords, or both simultaneously.
The USA alone expends over US$125billion on Afghanistan, which amounts to about one hundred times Afghanistan’s domestic revenue. Everyone knows this is unsustainable and that there is no credible strategy for a withdrawal that might avoid almost immediate collapse of the regime. Politicians who tell you otherwise are merely playing for time with their own electorates, while poor Afghans scramble in the dirt for dollars that fall from the sky.
Richard Thwaites has been a foreign correspondent and a bureaucrat engaged with international affairs.