Within four years, the Taliban were spreading their influence right across Afghanistan. Western troop numbers grew from barely 5,000 at the end of 2002 to 130,000 a decade later. Yet the war continues to this day.
Where that early experience fits in to the present day is that we are now assured that the ‘war on terror’ is finally dying down. Donald Trump even declares that the West has won. In Western media there is little mention of the return of ISIS and their like in Syria and Iraq, hardly any coverage of Libya, Yemen, Somalia or Afghanistan, and little awareness of what is happening across the Sahel region of the Sahara.
Occasionally there is an event that attracts attention, a mass attack by several hundred paramilitaries in Niger this week being an example. Groups reportedly linked to al-Qaida and ISIS overran a military base killing 71 Nigerien soldiers as fighting across the country escalated in spite of the presence of thousands of French and regional forces supporting the Nigerien government in its counterinsurgency operations.
Behind the scenes, even now, experts may be telling the British, US, French and other Western governments that Admiral Boyce’s eighteen-year-old thoughts on the need to recognise the root causes of violence and to avoid inciting further radicalisation are just as relevant now as then. None of them seems able to take this on board, however, and it may be another two decades before we learn of their wilful disregard for a painful reality.
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