War in our time

What to make of the final (?) pull-out of British troops from Afghanistan? Listening to General Sir Nick Carter, chief of the defence staff this morning you would think there were three equally weighted options, only one of which could lead to the country being taken over by the Taliban again. For once I agree with Iain Duncan Smith when he said in parliament that it all sounded like the end of the American pull-out from Vietnam. If there was a sea nearby, we might have seen helicopters being pushed over the sides of ships into the sea. I have always been ambivalent about the Afghanistan war. I supported it in 2001, since it had UN approval, and however one might regard such approval it was pretty overwhelming. My view was also bolstered by the desire to see the end of a tyrannical, brutish misogynistic Taliban regime. What they did was appalling. But it isn’t enough, is it, to use one’s own military power merely to impose ‘our standards’ on another country, no matter how illegitimate their  regime? At various points we might all have been invaded by other countries with their own mission of superior civilisation. So there has to be a rule, and a reliance on it no matter how shaky or fragile, about international relations. Since the UN did not approve the invasion of Iraq, I couldn’t vote for that. As has often been pointed out quite correctly, it was an illegal war, with all the consequences we are now familiar with. But it doesn’t feel much different in Afghanistan.
 
As things stand, a deeply corrupt Afghan government is unlikely to survive, and I think the country will be plunged into civil war and warlordism—and many of those warlords will be no better than the Taliban. I can only hope that there are enough women’s militias fired up and ready to fight their male oppressors that they can prevent the entire country stepping back 20 years. If that were the case, then perhaps our intervention wouldn’t have been entirely in vain.