Military Technology 05/2021

The author, with local and security guard (partially obscured), at Qala-e-Bost fort, Lashkar Gah, 13 August 2011. (Photo: Crown copyright – PO (Phot) Hamish Burke) 88 · MT 5/2021 Rear Echelon The fall of Kabul may have made headlines around the globe, but for this particular reader, the news that hit hardest as the Taliban regained control of Afghanistan was the recapture of Lashkar Gah on 13 August. The capital of Helmand province, the city had been the focus of the UK‘s portion of the West‘s now-abandoned exercise in nation-building. Voices from across the political spectrum are already claiming that such efforts were always doomed to failure: but there was a time, not so long ago, where there was genuine optimism in the city. Ten years to the day before Lashkar Gah was retaken by the Taliban, I was on a ‘sightseeing’ trip in the city. Admittedly, this was no routine ‘package tour’. My few days in Afghanistan were part of a media embed with the British military; getting out and about in Lashkar Gah involved 40-minute briefings with armed security contractors and fast-driven con- voys of armour-plated vehicles; and for the duration of my time ‘outside the wire,’ I was wearing body armour. But over the course of two of these necessarily brief but vividly illuminating visits, the shape of a better future was relatively easy to grasp. The first was to the airport, where, in 2009, with a cash injection from USAid, the dirt strip had been tarmacked and a small terminal and control tower built. Nearby, a 33 hectare patch of desert was being assaulted by earth-moving vehicles, preparing the ground for a planned agri-business park. These projects were umbilically linked. The city lies in a particularly fertile part of Afghanistan. The main cash crop in recent times may have been opium poppies, but local farmers would grow legal produce if there was some way they could get ade- quately paid for doing so. The business park was intended to house not just distribution centres, but canning and packing facilities, too. Instead of exporting raw ingredients, Lashkar Gah could become a processing hub, enabling local producers to keep a far greater proportion of the profits their crops would ultimately generate. The paved runway allowed regional jets to access the city for the first time in a generation: weekly flights con- necting Helmand with Kabul were viewed as the first step towards inter- national routes, allowing farmers to export to India, Pakistan and beyond. The second trip out from the compound where the multinational Provincial Reconstruction Team was headquartered offered an even more distant goal - turn- ing Lashkar Gah into a tourist destination. It was an ambition nobody was seriously considering at the time, but the potential was undeniable. Qala-e-Bost fort, located on a hilltop overlooking the confluence of the Helmand and Arghandab rivers, to the south of the city, would easily make it onto any central Asian tourist‘s must-see list. Its history dates back 3,000 years, and the views from the vast walled compound are as breath-taking as the underground ruins that sit huddled under a jumble of rocks at one end of the site. If you had asked me at the time, I would have had no hesitation in predicting that there was a far better chance of the business park getting built than there was of tourists returning to Qala-e-Bost. Of course, I was entirely wrong. UK funding for the agri-business project was pulled in 2013; according to a House of Commons debate the following year, the ownership model proposed for the units was culturally incompatible with local custom and practice, so take-up was minimal and belief in the site‘s viability ebbed away. Qala-e-Bost was occupied by refugees fleeing the advancing Taliban by the beginning of August: yet in July, Tolo News – Afghanistan‘s first 24-hour news network – was quoting four visitors to the fort who were described as ‘tourists,’ in an article which also had the then local authorities promising to invest in restoration. Nation-building is hard work, its timescales more akin to geological processes than western political cycles. It requires vast amounts of money, a significant chunk of which will be wasted: and the time and effort of countless people, some of whom will lose their lives to the effort. Everyone knew this at the outset. The West‘s abandonment of the Afghan population has nothing to do with geopolitical pragmatism, and everything to do with short-term do- mestic popularity. Nation-building may be an impossible job; President Biden‘s recent pronouncements underline it is certainly a politically unde- sirable one. Yet the alternatives appear equally unpalatable. If the US, the UK and their allies are serious about building stability by exporting values, they have to find some way to separate foreign policy goal-setting from the political project of winning elections. And they will need to find leaders with visions that extend beyond the next opinion poll, and with enough resolve to continue to do what they believe is right even if – indeed, especially if – it is unpopular. At the time of writing, it is unclear whether the former aspiration is widely held; and it seems depressingly obvious that individuals with the latter quality are not in the room when Western nations make their foreign-policy decisions. Angus Batey What a Difference a Decade Makes With a professional writing background that covers issues as diverse as cricket, music and crime fiction, Angus Batey has strong credibility in aerospace and C4ISR issues as well. He will become a regular contributor to Mönch publications. f