Afghan Lessons: Culture, Diplomacy, and Counterinsurgency

Epilogue

161 Epilogue I’ve just finished rereading everything and I’m happy. I wrote with passion and honesty. I wrote for myself, but also in the hope that some small lessons might be drawn from this unique personal experience. I would have liked to dedicate more space to the Afghans and their country and culture, but it was inevitable, in the end, that I would also write about the international mission. Post-9/11 Afghanistan has been occupied by a formidable foreign legion, and it would have been hypocritical to ignore that fact. When I first returned to Europe, I’d become upset by news from Kabul, but that doesn’t happen now. I suppose writing this book must have been good for me; it has helped make this experience complete, to feel I lived it to the full. The book was also a good excuse to be in touch with some of my fellow missionaries, who are now back to a “normal life,” just as I am. It is when I chat with them that I realize that eventually I was able to step back from Kabul at just the right distance. We hear less and less about Afghanistan now, with newspapers and newscasts interested only in Syria, Mali, and new potential crises such as Iran or North Korea. Even the fact that less than two years ago NATO was involved in another conflict, the one in Libya, has already been forgotten . The TV images of the Tripoli raids in 2011 have bothered me. At first I got angry because I thought we had learned nothing from Afghanistan , but then I told myself that in extreme cases, military actions that are part of a whole, and begin with some awareness of their consequences, may even have some noble purpose. Of course, there is the problem of what comes afterward, of how to rebuild what was destroyed. In the final analysis, as far as I’m concerned, this means not leaving everything 40-2423-0 epilogue.indd 161 6/3/13 1:57 PM 162 Epilogue in the hands of an international community that may be more skilled at mobilizing military than civilian resources. The most sensational news since my time in Kabul was the killing of Osama bin Laden in 2011, but even that didn’t get Afghanistan back into the headlines for long. It was a topic of discussion for a couple of weeks, mainly because this death would speed up the withdrawal of international forces. But then we were done, and Afghanistan returned to the back burner, as if this conflict were too far away for us. In any event, the future of Afghanistan will be more and more in the hands of the Afghans. It will depend on how the “transition” plays out—in other words, how the Afghans gradually assume responsibility, how the West will prepare its military disengagement, and what type of arrangements the United States and other international players will make to leave more and more political space to the leadership in Kabul. The start of serious negotiations with Taliban leaders continues to be the crucial unknown in the Afghan equation, not least of all because the bottom-up reintegration of insurgents doesn’t appear to be giving the results we’d hoped for. Every now and then we hear that some sort of secret negotiations are in progress with the Taliban. But as I write, it is difficult to foresee how things will go, because, by definition, any negotiation with and among the Afghans will be governed by the slow-moving hands of their clock. I’m keeping my fingers crossed on this, because I still have faith in a political solution based on the logic of the “facts on the ground.” If I ever get the chance to go back to Afghanistan, I’ll do all the things I couldn’t do this time. I’ll go and see the walls of Balkh, ride in the Badakhshan valleys, explore the mountains of Nuristan as I reread Eric Newby . . . more than anything, I want to walk around Kabul, stroll its streets early in the morning, when the air is still clear, and stop to buy fruit from the market stalls. Meanwhile, I’ll stick close to home. There’s plenty to do in Europe, too. For the last three years I have been working for the European Union, in Brussels, dealing with the Serbia-Kosovo mediated dialogue. It was a fascinating experience...