There are no two without three, nor is any peace lasting

The second decade of September 2001 had just begun when 19 jihadist terrorists, duly trained, well paid and moderately instructed in the United States itself as commercial pilots, dodged the then scarce security controls at US airports and, once in flight, took control of four airliners and deliberately crashed them into targets, causing great damage in lives (2,995 dead and some 25,000 wounded) and infrastructures; but, above all, in morale and pride. 995 dead and some 25,000 injured) and infrastructure; but, above all, in the morale and personal and patriotic pride of Americans for having been shot down in such a way for the second time in their short history, on their own home; and, on this occasion, by a few miserable terrorists without any of their alarms going off or any reaction in time.

The rest of the story, chaos and heroic reactions, we all know and we all know what happened; as well as that, because of the upheaval it brought to the minds of helpless citizens, it was very easy for a timorous American president, George W. Bush, who had not yet been in office for a year, to take the lead. Bush, who had not yet been in office for a year, was able to get approval, without obstacles or fissures, to take up arms against his people and industry to lead them, once again, into a war like his father (Gulf War); although this time the scenario was Afghanistan, where national intelligence sighted, without specifying exactly where he was, Osama bin Laden, the leader of a jihadist terrorist organisation, Al-Qaeda. The notorious organisation, which has been and continues to be the subject of many headaches and thousands of attacks as well as being the mother cell of the self-proclaimed Islamic State.

Bush invoked Article 5 of the NATO Treaty and NATO responded to his call, creating two military missions to impose peace in the country and to capture the terrorist leader and act against terrorism in the territory, when the Taliban in Afghanistan did not agree to hand over Osama. The first of these, known as the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF), was led by NATO, and the second, Operation Enduring Freedom (OEF), was led by the US, the UK and Afghan forces under government control and ended in 2014. Both the US and the UK were involved in both missions, and although there have been attempts to unify them, they were never really and completely unified. 

The Western world launched itself into an all-out war with almost no restrictions in a geographically and climatically hostile territory, plagued by warlords, located in a strategic place because of its important and/or dangerous neighbours such as Pakistan, India, Iran and even China, among others, and where important armies such as the British had previously failed (three times, the first time between 1839 and 1842, the second time between 1839 and 1842, the third time between 1839 and 1842); between 1839 and 1842 the first, the second between 1878-1880 and the third in 1919) and that of the USSR between 1978-1992 (also called the Afghan-Soviet war or Russian-Afghan war) although it was really a civil war between the Armed Forces of the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan, supported between December 1979 and February 1989 by the Soviet Army, against the insurgent mujahideen or Islamic Afghan guerrilla groups supported by numerous foreign countries, especially the USA, which provided them with huge amounts of arms and money.

After more than nine years of heavy fighting and real war, the Soviets, exhausted by the military and logistical wear and tear and the impossibility of managing in such inhospitable terrain, officially withdrew from the conflict in 1989 following the Geneva Agreements between Pakistan and the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan. 

However, the Afghan civil war continued and fighting between insurgents and loyalist troops dragged on until April 1992 when the dissolution of the Soviet Union led to the end of all official or covert support and the fundamentalists, the ultimate victors of the conflict, were able to establish an Islamic state.

During the recent conflict, the roles played by one and the other have completely changed, as have the friends and supporters of each other and vice versa. I do not think I am discovering anything new if I state that this long and costly war of attrition in personnel and materiel, in addition to costing many Western lives (mostly American, 2,500), has been a complete failure of strategy, tactics, techniques, procedures and, fundamentally, intelligence and information.

Despite recent and not so recent experiences in foreign conflicts in which the United States has been involved, such as Vietnam, Iraq and the fight against the Islamic State, it seems that the Americans in particular and NATO in general have not read the many important lessons learned from the mistakes made in those conflicts, because they have fallen back into the same mistakes and, in some cases, even worse because they have influenced coalitions and allies to get dragged into the same cesspit and have invested a lot of personal, material and financial effort that could have been spent on better missions and objectives.

Military intelligence, despite playing with abundant and better economic, land and air assets and the much-vaunted artificial intelligence, has been a disaster. All their predictions have been exceeded and none have come true, except that the disastrous end result has been more or less as expected, but they have been slightly more than six months ahead of schedule.

Once again we have fallen into the costly and useless error of understanding that the solution to abandoning a conflict is to train and equip the local aborigines with all kinds of modern military equipment so that they can take over the mission and provide the necessary security to the population with full guarantees, having been instructed by the best instructors that each country can provide; But, again, without really controlling the number of people attending the practical training, the training of their officers and the rest of the command cadre, the handling of intelligence resources and, above all, how to forge the individual and collective morale of the troops, their will to win and their belief in the mission and the joint action.

Any training without control over its efficiency and productivity, as has been the case again with this and many of those that continue to take place in Iraq and in certain African countries, is futile and counterproductive. We have been sold the false narrative that approximately 300,000 Afghans have been trained and equipped by Western countries, when the reality is less than a third of that number; most signed up for such classes in order to receive pay and a weapon, but did not attend or only did so from evening to evening. Troops were not well paid (they are now owed several months' pay), their senior officers were distributed according to social or family caste and not according to their qualifications and ability. It is estimated that the US will have spent more than a real billion US dollars on the campaign and its various grades and training courses. On the ground, reputable sources estimate that, all told, a total of no less than $88 billion will have been spent on education and training.      

Politicians tend to rush headlong into any war, especially if they see a tasty morsel in front of them, without much consideration of the analysis of the decision factors provided by the military, who are the ones truly prepared to analyse the soundness and effectiveness of the decisions taken, the degree of probability of success and the final situation on the ground and in the country in question as a whole, after the end of the armed conflict, properly speaking.

Here again, at the time and without regard to the above, the desire for national and global prominence precipitated an action in a terrain where it is not easy to survive, move and fight, and almost everyone is a potential enemy. Only when the massive arrival of coffins and the need to spend large sums of taxpayers' money on the conflict do not produce results do they tend to pull back, even more quickly, and look for a way out of the quagmire even at the cost of consequences far worse than continuing in the above.

Thus in 2014, American analysts convinced their rulers that insisting on completely changing the ideology, thinking and behaviour of a country, land and population that continued to live in a medieval atmosphere and ideology and with deep-rooted Salafist beliefs that endanger the freedom of a large part of its population, especially women, in order to try to turn it into a democratic oasis, was not only utopian but impossible to achieve.

For this reason, a series of unofficial and then official contacts were initiated with the Taliban, with certain high-ranking supporters in between, in exchange for a less hostile stance on their part than in the past, and to explore the possibility of an agreed, non-cruel, progressive and non-retaliatory transfer of responsibilities in exchange for promises that we will know one day.

Moves that undoubtedly created a great sense of distrust in their own military forces. They felt betrayed and abandoned. When an army, even if it is well equipped and moderately educated, feels itself in such a situation, its minimal morale cracks or disappears and then, at the slightest external pressure, it collapses like a house of cards when the cards that hold it up at the bottom are taken away.

This explains why guerrilla forces, not unified in command and intelligence, without proper logistical means of transport, poorly armed and with little means of communication, were able to cover such long distances on motorbikes and take Kabul without firing a single shot.

Afghanistan, in addition to being one of the world's main producers of opium, is a country rich in lithium, a raw material in great demand today for communications and computers and over which China exercises significant current and future control, in addition to certain products that will pass through its territory and the new Chinese Silk Road; its role in the area will therefore be very important and it may be the new great power that finally controls the country or may also come up against the aforementioned warlords.

It is very unlikely that Putin's Russia, apart from rubbing its hands together and toasting with champagne the defeat, failure and international embarrassment of the US, will sit back and do nothing; we will soon see what role it has played in the conflict and in being able to influence the Americans as they did the other way around in the last century and what role it plays with the Taliban.

Afghanistan is now a failed state, its president got his ass to safety before the Taliban arrived in the capital; chaos and fear grip the minds and behaviour of its citizens; twenty years of "collaborationism" with the West in exchange for money and favours, the many quarrels produced, real information and lies spread among citizens, neighbours and even relatives, mean that today we see the scenes of terror at Kabul airport, full of men - with a serious absence of women - trying to get as best they can onto one of the many planes of all kinds that come there to pick up military personnel and civilians who were stationed at or worked in the embassies and intelligence services or interpreters. The skies overhead, with military helicopters flying back and forth, are very reminiscent of the evacuation of the US Embassy in Saigon.

In any case, those who will have the worst chances in their pockets from now on are women, who will see the few rights they have acquired in these years of successive changes curtailed. They will again be denied access to education, driving, freedom to leave the house and will be repressed, abused, sold and treated like cattle or stoned to death if they are accused of any kind of adultery.  

The future of all potential collaborators and their families is frankly uncertain, and it is quite possible that most of them will disappear from the face of the earth voluntarily or forcibly, because the reprisals will undoubtedly be many. The prisons, which until yesterday were full of very dangerous Afghans, are now empty and the dangers are increasing exponentially. The most serious problem today is that some countries, including Spain, have reacted too late, the confidence in Afghan capabilities was either too much or false and has been the ultimate intelligence error, which explains why air assets to pick up national personnel have been sent in today when the situation is in total chaos.

The US opposition, despite the fact that the plan to leave Afghanistan this year was drawn up by the previous administration, considers these events to be the most serious and shameful for a country powerless to react, which led the world to war and is now abandoning Afghans and allies to their fate; Meanwhile, President Biden is still on holiday without going to the Oval Office to work for the rescue of his citizens and informants in Afghanistan; incidentally, as is happening here in Spain with President Sánchez, and we will see the future of the arrival in Kabul and the final loading of the two A-400Ms sent today from Zaragoza.

In other words, the lessons learned on the two previous major occasions, Saigon and Mosul, have apparently come to nothing, they were not written down or nobody read them, and this is the third occasion on which the same situation and outcome is happening again; artificial intelligence has presented its first major failure worldwide and there is no Lasting Peace, however much we pompously call large military missions that way.