With the second Leaders’ Debate focusing on International and Defence Policy, the UK’s policy on thewar in Afghanistan, on the casualties involved for British troops, and on their mission’s basic feasibility, has swung into sharp focus. Here Professor Christopher Coker of LSE’s International Relations Department considers the prospects.
I am sure that the Afghan mission can survive the attacks of its critics; it is much more difficult imagining it surviving the defence of its apologists. It would be nice if they could get the story straight, but they can’t. At one point I counted up to 8 different missions that ISAF is supposed to be pursuing in Afghanistan:
– counter-terrorism,
– counter-insurgency,
– state building,
– nation building ,
– opium eradication;
– peace building,
– peace support and now
– ‘stability-enabling’,
-NATO speak for making a difference – though exactly what the difference will look like when we eventually leave is far from clear.
In part, terms such as ‘stability enabling’ are the political vocabulary of the last decade, so familiar to us at home from Blairisms such as ‘core values’ and ‘performance indicators’ that have now been th
oroughly discredited. But they are also part of the military jargon which soldiers find themselves using when on campaign. At the ISAF HQ they talk of
– ‘agents for change’;
– ‘capability milestones’;
– ‘demand-reduction’;
– ‘injectors of risk’;
– ‘kinetic situations’;
– ‘light footprints’;
– ‘capacity building’,
– ‘upskilling ‘
and many more.
In part, this reflects an embarrassment about war ( a ‘kinetic situation’ is a fight) which all western countries even the US now share. However, in part it reflects the utter confusion at HQ itself about what the mission is meant to accomplish. Since 2005 NATO has no agreed strategic objective; this is war which is tactically driven. With every failure in the field targets are recalibrated – usually downwards. We have even stopped telling ourselves that President Karzai is one of the good guys; we are now trying to sideline him and talk directly to the tribal leaders, as we once talked to the warlords who remained in place when Taliban was driven from power nine years ago. ‘Leveraging local capacity’ is the latest buzzword, and one that is just as hollow as the rest.
As for ‘victory’ that aim was abandoned by the military long before David Milliband became the first major political figure to declare that it was no longer a valid objective. “Are we winning ” Gen Dannat was asked by a journalist last year. “It is not a term I use” he replied. “I prefer the word ‘success’. Are we being successful? Yes, however success is defined”. Precisely. This is a non-winnable war which should never have been undertaken.
Once al-Qaeda was out of the country it didn’t matter whether it would return (which no-one expected it would). If it had returned, it could have been taken out by drones, cruise missiles and special forces. The original ouster of Taliban was only intended to make a point; ‘Don’t give refuge to terrorist movements’. As PJ O’Rourke wrote of Iraq “Sure it is message but it is mess with a message: ‘Don’t mess with us!’ End of story except we got trapped into thinking we could terra-form a semi-medieval society, and use force to do it. So what will be the eventual outcome?
We will spin our way to withdrawal, probably within the next 2 years. In 1922 Ernest Hemingway wrote a piece for the Toronto Star in which he noted that the British having this time actually defeated the Afghans in the often forgotten Third Afghan war, had celebrated the fact by allowing the Afghan government for the very first time to establish diplomatic relations with Russia, the old enemy. The Afghans, he added, used to hate the British; now they despised them. It wont be long before we leave the country, relocating perhaps to Somalia or Yemen for the next adventure. But we won’t be any more secure. For there is only one thing more dangerous than being hated, and that is being despised.
The malaise in Afghanistan, rightly identified by Professor Coker, reflects a profound loss of confidence in both the capacity and right of the West to mount what before 9-11 were called ‘liberal interventions’. Whilst Afghanistan may have been the ‘right war’, it cannot help but be tainted by the wrong one – Iraq. Afghanistan has suffered from the diversion of resources to Iraq, the transatlantic split over Iraq and a loss of legitimacy more generally conferred by Iraq’s questionable legality. And ‘liberal intervention’ has become something of an unmentionable, as shown by David Miliband’s relectance to address the concept in a recent foreign affairs debate on the Daily Politics (available at http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b00s61j8/The_Daily_Politics_2010_Election_Debates_The_Foreign_Affairs_Debate/).
But we should not forget that the West has been successful in a number of liberal interventions in the post-Cold War era. Tony Blair may be one of the few remaining devotees of the concept, but he is loved for it in Sierra Leone (http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/apr/18/sierra-leone-international-aid-blair). Few would argue that the Balkans would be more stable now had NATO not intervened in Bosnia and Kosovo. So we should not assume that interventions cannot work, nor that they can never be morally right, indeed, cases of non-intervention such as Rwanda may be thought to cast more of a shadow over Western values than cases of intervention.
Whether Afghanistan can be made a success is doubtful – the conflict has gone on too long, with too little beneficial impact felt by ordinary Afghans, and may now be feeding rather than starving radicalism within the UK-Pakistan nexus. The crucial thing now then, is to get a settlement – any settlement – that will provide for representative Afghan governance. That, as Professor Brown points out, will certainly include Islamist parties, but we should not assume that because an outcome is imperfect that it is not worthwhile. Moreover, we should at this time be examining the examples of failure to reenage with our concepts of intervention rather than avoiding or rejecting them, since when they are needed again, (and they will be) it is the failures not the successes that are the most useful lessons.
Christopher Coker is rightly scathing about the inability of our leaders to decide upon the strategic rationale for the Afghan Campaign, but I think he underestimates the task they have faced. He seems to suggest that the coalition should have pulled put as soon as Al Qaeda were expelled and the Taliban dethroned, but things are not quite that simple – this is a case where Colin Powell’s famous ‘Pottery Barn’ principle applies – if you break it, you own it. Once the decision was taken to assist the Northern Alliance in overthrowing the Taliban it was more or less inevitable that ‘mission creep’ would take place and that NATO would have to take on some kind of responsibility for the political arrangements that emerged. We created the context in which the Karzai Government came to power – and, it should be said, the context in which Football stadiums are used for football and not public executions, music can be heard in the streets,and women can resume something like the place they held in Afghan society before the Taliban – and we have a degree of responsibility to defend the constitutional settlement that our actions established. It is pretty clear that many Afghans are disillusioned with the present regime, but also, I think, clear that they don’t want the Taliban back, and we need to respond to this if we can.
But can we? Perhaps this is a lost cause, but I do feel that in McCrystal and Petraeus we do now have people in charge who know what they are doing, and it is striking that the front-line soldiers – who are in a better position to judge than we are – still seem to feel they are making a positive contribution. In other words, all is not lost, at least not yet. I suspect the final settlement will involve some elements of the Taliban entering into government, but the terms under which this takes place are very important, and will be shaped on the battlefield, which is, in itself, a good reason for hanging on in there. What is interesting about all this in the context of the election is that although the war is not popular in Britain (or indeed anywhere else in NATO), none of the three main parties is running on a ‘bring the boys home’ ticket, possibly because they realise that this is an important campaign, too important to sacrifice to populist politics.
Well. Very dispiriting. Any suggestion that any of the major parties have anything to offer in terms of this ongoing war?