LONDON: Britain’s top general has said it was “too soon” to determine if the West had been defeated in Afghanistan, claiming that the mission’s failings were political, not military.
Gen. Nick Carter also suggested that Afghanistan may turn out to be a better place than people had expected under “Taliban 2.0.”
Appearing on Tuesday before the UK Commons Defense Committee, Carter said the Taliban were different from their brutal predecessors and that the country could become more inclusive as a result.
He told MPs: “Taliban 2.0 is different. There are a lot of people in Taliban 2.0 who would like to govern in a more modern way.”
If the moderates gained control, he noted that there was “no reason to suppose that Afghanistan over the next five years might not turn into a country that is more inclusive than it might have otherwise been.”
On the same day that Carter made his comments, images surfaced from Afghanistan of Taliban fighters parading trucks with hanged men in Lashkar Gah — where British operations had been led from — and reports also claimed that female human rights workers had been murdered.
NATO’s two-decade occupation of Afghanistan came to an end earlier this year, and the country’s Western-backed government rapidly fell to the Taliban.
A number of British members of parliament recently claimed that the reality of the situation was that the US, the UK, and their allies in NATO had lost in Afghanistan, and that the Taliban had won.
But Carter said: “I think it is too early to say that defeat has occurred. Victory here needs to be measured in the results and not some great military extravaganza.”
He added: “And I suspect when we look back on the last 20 years, and we then look forward in 20 years’ time, Afghanistan may be a very different country. So, I think it’s too early to say that it’s a defeat.”
Similar to other officials, Carter said that the crux of the failure was a political issue, not a military one.
“What unraveled the whole effort was the political context in which all of this was conducted. I am very proud of what our armed forces achieved on the battlefield. They were never defeated by a very cunning, ruthless, and innovative opponent,” he added.
The general also spoke of ongoing efforts to evacuate from Afghanistan hundreds of British citizens and Afghans who had assisted NATO forces.
“The answer is that there is still, I’d guess, about 300-odd who we’d like to see leave Afghanistan, but the challenge is how you achieve that,” he said.
Washington’s Afghanistan envoy warned recently that evacuation efforts — which the Taliban were largely cooperating with — could stall as winter approached due to treacherous conditions at Taliban-run Kabul airport, from where evacuation flights currently departed.