Gosh! No wonder those poor policymakers have been kept in the dark! While the ‘intelligence failure’ ruse almost always stretches credibility, its fragility is particularly acute when placed alongside what Richard Dannatt, the British Army’s general chief of staff between 2006 and 2009, told The Guardian on the matter on 29 August: “This issue has been on politicians’ desks for two to three years and, certainly, it’s been there during the course of this year… Back in July, 45 senior officers wrote to the government… saying there are people we are concerned about and if we don’t do the right thing, their blood will be on our hands. It is unfathomable why it would appear that the government was asleep on watch.”
If the ‘issue’ has been on Raab’s desk for years but he hasn’t bothered to read about it, that could explain why he didn’t see the juggernaut coming. If he had spent the taxpayers’ money wisely and got himself some binoculars (in other words, eyes on the ground, books on Afghan history, or reliable counsel), Raab and other politicians pretending innocent surprise might have realised what was coming. The intel has been accumulating for years, some of it contributed by members of previous Conservative governments, from the heart of the establishment.
Another type of Tory?
On 6 November 2014, under the title ‘Afghanistan: ‘A Shocking Indictment’, the New York Review of Books published a lengthy review of Anand Gopal’s deeply researched and widely praised investigative account of America’s intervention: ‘No Good Men Among the Living: America, the Taliban, and the War through Afghan Eyes’. By 2014, according to the reviewer, a man with personal experience of Afghanistan, the failures of the intervention were “worse than even the most cynical believed”. By the time the review appeared, consensus saw two remaining options for the future of Afghanistan: the best case was ‘political accommodation with the Taliban’, the worst was ‘civil war’.
The reviewer proceeds to cite one mind-bogglingly shocking example after another of the kind of US incompetence and ignorance revealed by the actions of its army, as well as prosecuting the “uniformity, overconfidence, and rigidity of Western response” to the “startling differences within the countries in which we intervene”.