The 20-year Afghanistan war: what was it good for?

Twenty years of fighting in Afghanistan. A monumental waste of blood and treasure on the part of the US and its allies, including this country.

The announced withdrawal of all US forces by September will be the trigger for Islamist extremists to once again take their gloves off.

Already the Taliban and its affiliates are seizing territory with apparent impunity (“Taliban advances after US closes its main Afghan base”, 6/7). A dispirited Afghan National Army and a corrupt government will be unable to contain them and Afghanistan will sink into the abyss. And once again become a training ground for Islamic terrorism.

Michael J. Gamble, Belmont, Vic

Forty-two years ago the US launched its war on Afghanistan when on July 3, 1979, Jimmy Carter signed a “presidential finding” authorising the CIA to spend just over $US500,000 on non-lethal aid to support the Afghan mujaheddin against growing Soviet influence in the region. However, that non-lethal aid was quite the opposite as is usually the case with the CIA.

The “growing Soviet influence” was the progressive PDPA government that ruled Afghanistan but did not do as Washington asked it to do. It was the US “aid” to rebels that forced the USSR to intervene. Everything that followed goes back to Carter’s signature.

Now, 42 years after Carter’s signature, a defeated US flees from Afghanistan. Malek Mir, a mechanic in Bagram who saw the Soviet army and then the Americans come and go, said he was left with a deep sense of sadness at the foreign presence.

“What was the point of all the destruction, killing and misery they brought us? I wish they had never come.”

Norman Broomhall, Port Macquarie, NSW

If there’s such a thing as a collective self-image, then our behaviour over the past 18 months has left us with a somewhat frayed and careworn perception of ourselves. If we walk away from Afghanistan without making provision to offer shelter to those who helped us during our 20-year involvement with that troubled country, then my pride in and affection for this country will be seriously diminished (“Afghan angels left for dead”, 6/7).

John McHarg, Maylands, WA

If our Afghan allies are left to the mercies of DFAT and the ponderous protocols of the Immigration Department, they have no hope. It would take a ministerial intervention, such as that of Bob Hawke after Tiananmen Square in 1989, and an airlift like that headed by Matron Vivian Bullwinkel in 1975 for the Vietnam orphans to save those who served our mission in Afghanistan.

John Morrissey, Hawthorn, Vic

Thank you, Vincent Zankin, for highlighting the US build-up of its weaponry systems, including nuclear warheads (Letters, 5/7). In 1966, Harold Holt went all the way with LBJ into Vietnam and Australians are still suffering from that. In April Greg Sheridan wrote, “The 20-year war in Afghanistan has been a civilisational failure for the West” (“A forever and fateful failure”, 17/4). The US is an aggressive country with a penchant for weapons. China’s nuclear build-up is a convenient excuse for the US to refresh its arsenal. It plans to spend $100bn on 600 new nuclear missiles able to travel some 10,000km carrying a warhead more than 20 times more powerful than the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima. Once a leader in nuclear disarmament, Australia is now so anti-China and pro-US that it can’t see the JADC2s from the WMDs.

Ray Peck, Hawthorn, Vic

Paul Dibb has hit the nail on the head (“US must be clear: hit an ally and we hit back”, 6/7). “Strategic ambiguity” may have served the US well in the past in relation to Taiwan, but the situation today is very different. China thinks it can now militarily threaten any nation that is smaller and weaker. It is a feature of the Chinese mindset that it will work to infiltrate its enemies with opacity, deception and grey-zone warfare as its weapons, but use raw power to threaten them into submission when it knows it has the upper hand. The US and its allies should present a rock-solid stance that if China makes a military move to threaten any part of that alliance then there will indeed be “great disorder under heaven”. Not to do so risks losing the Indo-Pacific to China.

Jim Wilson, Beaumont, SA