LONDON: NATO’s political campaign in Afghanistan was a failure but Western troops were not defeated in battle by the Taliban, the UK’s defense secretary has said.
Speaking in front of a parliamentary defense committee examining the events in Afghanistan leading up to and since the NATO withdrawal, Ben Wallace told MPs that the alliance’s forces could have stayed in the country but lacked the “resolve” to do so.
He also said it would have been “reasonable” to expect Afghan government forces to hold out against Taliban advances for longer than they did.
Asked by MPs whether NATO forces had been defeated in the country, Wallace said: “I don’t think we were defeated ... Our resolve was found wanting is what I’d say, rather than defeated ... We always had a military advantage until we started reducing (troop numbers).”
He added that the rapid collapse of Afghan resistance against the Taliban was partly the result of NATO’s failure to effectively overhaul the country’s political system.
“NATO were there to enable a political campaign, and I think that’s what failed. The military were there to put in place the security environment in order to try and deliver that,” he said.
“When that’s withdrawn, that’s when you find out whether your political campaign has worked. What we discovered is it didn’t work … There are a lot of searching questions there for all of us.”
Despite the later failures, Wallace said the initial goal of the invasion — to dismantle Al-Qaeda and end Taliban rule of Afghanistan — was a success.
“We bought counterterrorism success for 20 years. Al-Qaeda didn’t mount … a terrorist attack on the United Kingdom or her allies from Afghanistan. For many soldiers, that’s very important,” he added.
“I think it’s highly likely that we’ll see a return of Al-Qaeda and an increasing threat coming from Afghanistan.”
The two-decade-long war cost the lives of over 240,000 Afghans, 2,300 US troops, more than 400 British soldiers and hundreds more from other NATO countries.
