As usual, all the warnings were there. Three Anglo-Afghan wars. Russia’s Vietnam. The Graveyard of Empires. Poppy capital of the world. The most bombed, crushed, corrupted, mined nation on the globe.

So off we set in our righteous war of revenge for the Twin Towers and the dead of 9/11 to bomb Afghanistan all over again and – a new twist, this – to bring “democracy” to the land though which Alexander the Great passed en route to India. Osama bin Laden was our latest Hitler, although his protective screen of Salafist obscurantist Taliban legions could hardly be compared to the Wehrmacht.

Bin Laden was a Saudi – so were 15 of the 19 hijackers who committed the international crime against humanity of 11 September 2001 – and Saudis supported the Taliban. But, as usual, Saudi Arabia was not part of the media story. This was to be a retelling of Victorian children’s books; of brave if bearded Afghan fighters struggling to take back their country, of high-altitude American bombers that killed the Taliban and wiped out a score or more of innocent villages, of US Special Forces riding bareback with Afghan horsemen to play “Bouskache” with a dead goat between battles. Carry On Up the Khyber.

The story, of course, was flawed from the start.

With what arrogance we began the whole wretched adventure 15 years ago. This time, we would not forget the brave Afghans (as we did after they drove the Russkies out of their country) and there would be freedom, aid, security and democracy. But as the years went by, the newly installed and “democratically elected” Afghan government became as wretched and corrupt as its communist predecessors.

The NGOs arrived with millions to spend – all competing with each other and with the US military which offered even more millions in humanitarian aid in return for intelligence information. There were the usual massacres, an atrocity or two – Afghans loyal to General Abdul-Rashid Dostum suffocated Afghan Taliban prisoners in container trucks, US jets and armed Americans liquidating prison mutineers at only occasional cost to themselves – but Kabul was swiftly “liberated” by journalists and a clutch of tribesmen from the Panjhir Valley.

A few women were persuaded to take off the evil burqa, in which their ancestors in parts of the country had covered themselves for hundreds of years, and George W Bush and our beloved Tony Blair quickly diverted themselves to the more lucrative rewards of a not dissimilar war in Iraq.

Allegedly, we “took our eye off the ball” by abandoning Afghanistan for Mesopotamia, but contemporary documents clearly prove that Iraq was Bush’s target all along. Afghanistan was never intended to be anything but a side-show.

By the time President Hamid Karzai had been installed in Kabul with the approval of a heavily tribal loyal “jurga” – the kind of assembly which, if British, might have prevented Brexit – everyone was being bought; the security services, banks, big business, the presidency itself.

By the time Karzai – whose green gowns were, at least, immaculate – was elected for a second time, even the UN declared the election a fraud. The US President duly congratulated Karzai on his election win. This was when American advisers began to tell us that we could not expect “Jeffersonian democracy” – whatever that was – in Afghanistan.

This would, after all, be a more rough-and-ready kind of political freedom, in which people voted along tribal lines. Karzai himself only began to fade from American approval, though, when he condemned US air strikes on innocent Afghans – speaking in Pushtu, which few US officials understood. When he appeared to pass a law allowing minority Shiite men to rape their wives, the White House published a photo of an apparently humbled Karzai under the stern and disapproving gaze of a matronly Hillary Clinton. US voters, please note. The US media then seized on Karzai’s unsavoury brother who was governor of Kandahar, the drugs capital of western Afghanistan.

It was the same old problem. To save American lives, the US bought up the Afghan militias to fight for them. These were the same outrageous gunmen and rapists who had destroyed Kabul in a four-year civil war in the early 1990s, but now they had to fight a resurgent, purist Taliban – who had done quite a lot of raping and marrying of child brides – to maintain US power.

Most repulsive of this bunch of misogynists was Gulbudin Hekmatyar, a former CIA asset militia leader – despised and feared by pretty much all Afghans – who ended up as an ally of the Taliban and is currently fighting his former American masters. In other words, he’s now back in the “Hitler” camp.

Far more sinister were the trails of militia leaders who wound their way across this devastated land in convoys of brand new 4x4s, sustained by Western cash and a reflourishing drugs market, supposedly still fighting the Taliban – with whom some of them were commercially connected – while in fact staking out little kingdoms in a land which had grown used to such fiefdoms over thousands of years.

Which is why Afghanistan will not become Islamistan or even Talibanistan. It will, when the West finally packs up and leaves, become Mafiastan. Perhaps it already is.

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