Plenty of contemporary accounts record the surprise and horror with which the Taliban and many Afghans greeted the news of the attacks on New York and Washington on 11 September 2001. Fewer witnesses report the turmoil which US and Western demands that the Taliban hand over Osama bin Laden and his lieutenants created among those then ruling most of Afghanistan. The same Afghan patriot who described to me life in the Afghan Defence Ministry under the Taliban also told me of the shuras (assemblies of elders) in Kandahar which debated the American demand. He was convinced that the tide in those discussions was moving in favour of expelling bin Laden, on grounds both of expediency (and survival of the Taliban government) and of justice (in that bin Laden had abused the precepts of melmastia or hospitality). But turning that tide into a majority would have taken more time than Western governments thirsting for violent revenge were prepared to give. After the humiliation of 9/11, America needed to kick some butt.
What happened after Western special forces, and intelligence agencies, helped the Northern Alliance (the anti-Taliban united Islamic front of ethnic groups mainly from the north) overthrow the Taliban regime, and drive the Taliban first from the north, and then from Kabul and Kandahar, is not for this book. But the key point is that the Taliban were not defeated then, or ever, but simply driven from power, and pushed out and down, south and east. The floodwaters had been pushed back, but they had not been drained. Worse still, at the hastily convened peace conference at the Hotel Petersberg on the Rhine outside Bonn in early December 2001 the vanquished were not represented: the resulting peace, and the political process that followed it, was a victors’ peace, imposed without even the reluctant consent of those who had ruled most of Afghanistan for the preceding five years.
It was against that historical background that we in the British Embassy launched our two initiatives. The first stemmed from my early conviction (which grew the longer I spent in Afghanistan) that garrisoning the insurgency-infected areas of the Pashtun belt with troops from outside would deliver at best only temporary and local security. In many respects, it was immaterial whether those troops came from Peoria or Plymouth or the Panjshir Valley: American GIs, British squaddies and Tajik Afghan National Army soldiers (who did not speak Pashtu) were all aliens in the eyes of the Pashtun populations they were supposed to protect. Nor would we or any conceivable Afghan government ever have the force density to cover all areas in the south and east of Afghanistan then in the grip of the insurgents.
I remembered what a senior British officer had told me over lunch before I left for Afghanistan that spring. He said that, when coalition troops went into an Arab village to kill or capture members of Al Qaeda in Iraq, the inhabitants of the village would get out of the way, closing their doors and shutters and generally keeping a low profile: they had no wish to get involved in a fight. In Afghanistan, on the other hand, the risks were much higher. When a Chinook put down outside a Pashtun compound on a kill or capture operation, every male in the neighbourhood over the age of about ten would, rather than hiding, seize his Kalashnikov and come out to attack the intruders. In the British officer’s view, Afghanistan was a much more dangerous operating environment than Iraq. In Afghanistan, or at least the Pashtun tribal areas, killing foreigners was a kind of national sport – a bit like village cricket in Sussex.
I also knew that in the nineteenth century Britain had discovered through long and bitter experience on the North West Frontier of the Indian Empire that the only way to pacify or stabilise the Pathan (or Pashtun) tribal areas beyond the Indus was to empower the tribes to secure and govern those areas for themselves. But we had taken more than half a century to learn this lesson. At first, in the 1830s and 1840s, and again in the 1870s and 1880s, the Victorian forerunners of today’s neo-cons had advocated a forward policy, in which the British Indian Army and its auxiliary forces had themselves garrisoned the tribal areas. This policy, of trying to secure these areas ourselves, had resulted in the two disastrous Anglo-Afghan Wars of the nineteenth century. There had followed what was known as the modified forward policy, in which the garrisons from British India had been restricted to key towns and main supply routes. That hadn’t worked either.
It had taken Lord Curzon, as viceroy of India from 1899 to 1905, to develop the policy which had kept the peace, more or less, on the North West Frontier for the first half of the twentieth century. Known as the closed-door policy, this had involved bringing British forces back east across the Indus and then using a network of political agents to get the tribes, or, more particularly, the tribal maliks (rulers) and elders, to take prime responsibility for security and governance. The political agents had been mostly officers from the Indian Army, who had transferred to the Indian Civil or Political Services and had spent an average of sixteen years on the Frontier between home leaves. One of them, Major (John) Gordon Lorimer, had produced what is still the best ever Pashtu grammar, published in 1902 by the Oxford University Press. A copy sits proudly on the shelves of the British Ambassador’s office in Kabul. Lorimer’s distinguished great-grandson, Major General John Lorimer, late of the Parachute Regiment, was the Commander of 12th Mechanised Brigade in Helmand for the six-month summer rotation in 2007 – and, almost as important, a lapsed classicist like me. John later became an outstanding MOD spokesman.
If, in those days, the tribes behaved, more or less, they were rewarded with bags of gold, or the equivalent. But, if they misbehaved, they were punished. At first, this was accomplished by columns of infantry and cavalry, such as the Malakand Field Force, so memorably described by Lieutenant W. L. S Churchill of the 4th Hussars in his book of the same name. Later, after the First World War, it was the Royal Air Force which was used to mete out the punishment, in what was described, in an Air Ministry pamphlet of the time, as Imperial Air Policing. (The American drone strikes in Pakistan are, of course, the modern equivalent of Imperial Air Policing.) The RAF, founded only in 1918, was in action more or less continuously on the North West Frontier between 1919 (when the Third Anglo-Afghan War ended) and the Partition of the Indian subcontinent in 1947.
With all that in mind, I recommended to London that we should encourage the Americans to look seriously at establishing a pilot scheme for what we called Community Defence Volunteers. The idea was simple: every male in the rural areas of the Pashtun belt had a Kalashnikov, or access to one. We should ensure that those guns were turned outwards against intruders, in the form of the Taliban, rather than inward, on whomever – if anyone – represented the Afghan Government locally, or on a rival tribe or drug mafia. The principle would be one of armed neighbourhood watch, or armed first response. The hope would be that such individuals, perhaps paid a small retainer, perhaps wearing a green armband or some other Islamically correct form of identification, would provide the first line of deterrence to intruders trying to intimidate the villagers. They would be provided with communications to enable them to call for help as soon as trouble appeared, but they would be expected to hold the line until that help arrived.
An essential condition was that any such local volunteers should be under the supervision of a tribally balanced assembly of local elders, as part of a wider political settlement, to be refereed by the UN and the international community more generally. Such volunteers would be there to keep the peace, once there was a peace to keep. Afghan forces of any kind, in or out of uniform, could not be expected to fight a full-blown counter-insurgency campaign.
I was keen to stress that we were not advocating the raising of militias, with uniforms and trucks and a formal structure. Instead, we were proposing something which went with the grain of tribal society in the areas where we trying, with very limited conventional forces, to protect the population. As one wag in the Embassy observed, it was not so much Dad’s Army as Dadullah’s Army: indeed the name harked back to the Home Guard, who had originally been known