When Tony Blair promised in 2001 that Britain would stand by the people of Afghanistan, whom we had helped to liberate from the Taliban, most of us supported him. This newspaper did. The more he said how difficult it might be and that British forces might have to be committed to the mission for some years, the more we were convinced that we owed it to the Afghans to do more than simply install a puppet government, declare the job done and then leave them to the depredations of warlords and Islamist guerrillas.
Not that Hamid Karzai was a stooge of outsiders, of course. He was elected by an emphatic vote in the country's first free and fair elections. He has disappointed some of his own people since then, and he has occasionally offended Western governments and Western liberals with some of the nationalist and conservative poses that he has adopted for his own political ends. But the military intervention in Afghanistan in the 21st century was no imperialist adventure, as it had been for Britain in the 19th century and for Russia in the 20th. Nor was it comparable to the military intervention in Iraq that has done so much to colour British public attitudes to any of Mr Blair's claims to a moral purpose in foreign policy. Unlike Iraqis, Afghans tend to be pro-American; generally, the international force in Afghanistan has the support of the population.
Read Full Article »