They will find it a long war. Foreign military presence was originally acceptable to Afghans in a way that it never was in Iraq. This is partly because Iraq was occupied outside Kurdistan, but most of Afghanistan was not. While only 25 per cent of all Afghans say they support attacks on US or NATO/ISAF forces, this figure jumps to 44 per cent where people report shelling or air strikes in their areas according to an ABC News/BBC/ARD poll. Contrary to Washington’s plans, just 18 per cent of Afghans say they want foreign forces in Afghanistan increased and 44 per cent want them decreased. The Taliban, once vilified as Pakistani puppets, are having some success in re-branding themselves as Afghan nationalists.
One of the many depressing aspects of the American and British campaign in Afghanistan is that so few of the lessons of Iraq have been learned. One is that foreign military occupation is unpopular and tends to get more so. Iraq and Afghanistan are both countries with deep ethnic and sectarian divisions and foreign occupiers end up, willy-nilly, on one side or the other in civil strife.
So little has been learned in Iraq because propaganda is being taken as a guide to what happened there and what should be done in Afghanistan. This week there was some mindless debate in the wake of bombs in Baghdad, which killed over 100 people this week, about whether or not the American military withdrawal from the cities might have come too early. In reality, there have been few US patrols in Baghdad since the end of last year, and, even when the Americans were in military control of the city, they could not stop the explosion of vehicles packed with explosives driven by suicide bombers.
The main American success in Iraq was that, having backed the Shia and the Kurds against the Sunni, the US military did a side deal with the Sunni insurgents to turn on al-Qa’ida. The Sunni needed an agreement with the Americans because they were getting the worse of a civil war with the Shia. The recent bombings were probably Sunni parties, using al-Qa’ida as their messenger, brutally demonstrating to the Iraqi government that they will not be marginalized. The idea, popular in some Washington think tanks, that a few obvious tactical innovations won the war in Iraq, and can do so again in Afghanistan, is wholly misleading and will lure the US and Britain further into the morass.
Patrick Cockburn is the Ihe author of “Muqtada: Muqtada Al-Sadr, the Shia Revival, and the Struggle for Iraq.”
