RICHARD FEETHAM and Henry Mortimer Durand are prime examples of officials who have the uncanny knack of creating enduring problems out of short-term solutions.
Feetham chaired the 1925 Boundary Commission and used his casting vote to transform existing county boundaries into the Irish Border. Placing parts of south Armagh inside the new Irish state might have been controversial but would scarcely have undermined the British empire.
The Durand Line stands as a bloody monument to the deal its inventor struck in 1893 setting the border between Afghanistan and the British Raj. The deal offered King Abdur Rahman Khan protection from the British and Russian empires at the price of splitting Pashtun territory in two. It is a border 28 million Pakistani and 12 million Afghan Pashtun continue to ignore to this day.
The Afghan monarchy, until it was overthrown in 1973, sought cautiously to modernise its country while steering a carefully balanced international course. Much of the country’s urban elite studied in the USSR and in 1978 the PDPA, or Afghan communist party, seized power and embarked on a radical transformation of the country including compulsory schooling for girls.
Many rural mullahs strongly opposed this as the new state teachers threatened their beliefs, their social standing and much of their income from fees paid by local parents. State teachers were among the first victims of the rural insurrection against Kabul, particularly after the 1979 Soviet intervention in an internecine struggle between the party’s Khalq and Parcham factions.
What little once existed in terms of Afghan state services has been one of the primary victims of the last 30 years of warfare. More than two-thirds of 28 million Afghans are illiterate, a crippling legacy of a “failed state”.
The exact reasons for the Soviet misadventure in Afghanistan remain debatable. The then US vice-president Walter Mondale recalled that Washington was initially more concerned about mental instability in the Kremlin than Soviet expansion. After nearly a decade of war, 15,000 dead and 44,000 wounded, the Soviets withdrew.
The mid-1990s saw the Taliban movement, based on Koranic students who had grown up and studied in Pakistani refugee camps, emerge. Disciplined and dedicated, with Pakistani support, the Taliban took Kabul in 1996.
The al-Qaeda leadership so influenced Kabul’s view of the outside world that the Taliban refused to arrest or deport Osama Bin Laden following the September 11th attacks on the US.
Washington replied with air power and Afghan proxy forces, only deploying a small US contingent to track down Bin Laden and his lieutenants.
There are now nearly 60,000 US troops in the country, assisted by a further 36,000 in the Isaf international force. US commander Gen McChrystal has requested an additional 40,000 to allow him, over several years, to “stabilise” the country by expanding operations and the training of Afghan forces.
A former commander and current US ambassador to Kabul, Gen Karl Eikenberry, has argued against such reinforcements because of questions over the competence and life expectancy of President Karzai’s government. This echoes Mikhail Gorbachev’s concerns about Moscow’s then protégé – “Comrade Karmal is hoping to continue sitting in Kabul with our help.”
Taliban has become a handy catch-all label rather like Viet Cong was in Vietnam. Attacks in Afghanistan flow from a witches’ brew that includes local disputes, regional rivalries, national resistance, personal vendettas and simple banditry.
Earlier this month an Afghan policeman shot five British soldiers inside their post in Helmand. Initially described as a Taliban “mole”, it now appears that the British casualties were “collateral damage” in his revenge on the Afghan officer who was sexually molesting him.
The country’s recent presidential elections were deeply flawed. The Kabul government is unsurprisingly sapped by corruption in a country where 12 million people survive on less than €0.30 a day.
If there was a window of opportunity for the international community to help create a modern Afghan state five or six years ago, poverty, corruption and warfare mean it no longer exists. Afghans have come to see foreign troops as occupation rather than assistance forces.
The chances of the Kabul government cleaning up its act are small. Support for the war is steadily declining across all troop contributing nations – 71 per cent of respondents in an Independent on Sundaynewspaper poll yesterday want the UK to withdraw "within a year".
The 100,000 foreign troops in Afghanistan can no longer identify who they are fighting against or what exactly they are fighting for.
This lack of an achievable mission makes it largely irrelevant how many additional troops are deployed.
The line of least resistance and the one favoured by some Obama staffers would be for the president to send just enough additional soldiers for just long enough to allow for a plausible exit from Afghanistan.
That is the kind of digestible and attractive advice Richard Feetham and Henry Mortimer Durand proffered to the political leaders of their eras. For all its attractiveness, the approach is as flawed now as it was then.
The Obama White House could return to a question Senator John Kerry, a decorated Vietnam veteran of the United States navy asked the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in 1971: “How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?”
It would take much of President Obama’s undoubted courage and shrinking political capital to deliver an honest answer.