| Publication |
2009.
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| Summary/Abstract |
In early September 2008 Rodric Braithwaite travelled to Afghanistan to 'see some of the places (Herat, Pandsher, Salang), talk to some Afghans, and check on the stories my Russian contacts (who go back there all the time) tell me about the positive attitude the Afghans now have towards the Russians'. He kept notes as a record for his own use, and to send back to his family on a daily basis to reassure them that he hadn't been kidnapped. He kindly shared them with Survival, and we present a version abridged to fit the available space. Braithwaite did not meet the kind of people that official visitors to Afghanistan usually meet. He drew a number of conclusions from his conversations:
First, the common belief among Afghans that they were better off under the Russians, and that the last Communist President Najibullah was a better leader than Karzai, may not reflect historical reality; but it bodes ill for the coalition's overall aims. Secondly, the Russian effort in Afghanistan was frustrated above all by their inability to control the frontier with Pakistan: a task which may well turn out to be even harder for the coalition. Thirdly, although the Russians were not defeated militarily in Afghanistan, any more than the Americans were in Vietnam, both the Russians and the Americans failed entirely to achieve their political objectives. The British, by contrast, who ended their nineteenth-century Afghan wars with military victory, sensibly settled for their minimum objective: a monopoly of Afghan foreign policy, which lasted for 80 years. There are no such simple options available today. Finally, there is no certainty that the proposed surge in coalition forces will stabilise the country: the analogy with Iraq is just as false as the earlier analogy between the prospects for democracy in Iraq and what happened in Germany and Japan after 1945.
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