I don’t think I am entirely alone in being uncertain what to do about the war in Afghanistan. I bet there are many thousands, including MPs and perhaps even a few ministers and shadow ministers, who can’t make up their minds whether we should soldier on or cut our losses and pull out. Who knows – perhaps even President Barack Obama is one of us. He is certainly taking his time about deciding on his future strategy.
I admit that my natural inclinations are with the second option. I am broadly against Britain barging into other people’s countries in pursuit of our own interests – or, even worse, in pursuit of American interests. At the time of the Iraq invasion, there were people in the Labour Party who opposed that conflict, but said the war in Afghanistan was a different matter and should be supported. I didn’t agree.
Nor do I buy Gordon Brown’s argument that we can’t pull out because it would lead to a direct increase in terrorism on our own streets. If anything, the opposite is true. It is our presence in Afghanistan and Iraq, along with our complicity in the Israeli occupation of Palestine, which provide the main motivation for terrorist attacks in the United Kingdom.
However, the belief that the original invasion was a bad idea is neither here nor there. It happened, we are there and now we have to decide what to do about it. And, frankly, I don’t know.
This dilemma was made all the more poignant for me last weekend, on Remembrance Sunday. I listened as usual to the BBC’s broadcast of the ceremony at the Cenotaph, and as usual found it offensively militaristic for an occasion which ought to be a day of mourning for the largely civilian armies of the First and Second World Wars. All those bellowing drill sergeants and booming field guns clashed with the essential sorrow of the event.
But what really got to me was Radio 4’s earlier broadcast of a Remembrance Day service at the British Army headquarters in Helmand province. Two British soldiers had died in Helmand that morning and you could sense the raw emotion of the congregation of young squaddies – most of them barely out of their childhood – as they sang their hymns and murmured the Lord’s Prayer. As the army padre presenting the programme remarked, everyone present knew they might be the next to die.
The question, however, is what conclusions we should draw from this. And, with typical ambivalence, I found two contradictory ideas emerging from my emotion. The first was that we should get those youngsters out of there as fast as possible, so that there wouldn’t be a next to die – in other words, we should withdraw. The second was: how could we tell them that their comrades had died pointlessly?
It is a painful conundrum, but it is made even more difficult by a further, terrifying complication. This is the existence of nuclear weapons just across the border in Pakistan, where the same Taliban, beefed up by Osama bin Laden and his maniacs, are conducting a near civil war with the Pakistani military. If they were ever to get their hands on the ultimate bomb, no one doubts that they would use it. As they keep telling us, they love death while we love life.
And that poses another, even bigger question: would our withdrawal from Afghanistan strengthen the Taliban in Pakistan and thus make it more likely that they would win their war with the Pakistani army and get their hands on nuclear weapons? If the answer is yes, then the case for staying on in Helmand is greatly strengthened.
So what can we do? I can only offer what some will see as a rather far-fetched proposal: that we (and here “we” must include the Americans in the lead role) start negotiating with Pakistan – and also perhaps India – to neutralise the nuclear stockpile in the sub-continent. It may be possible, especially if we offer massive financial inducements to both Pakistan and India. But it is a long shot. Meanwhile, I continue in my state of emotional paralysis. I’m just glad I don’t have to decide whether the killing will go on. l
Ha. You thought I had written a column this week without mentioning bankers. Wrong. But just for a change, I want to say something complimentary about Gordon Brown in his dealings with banks. I refer to his remarkable conversion to the idea of a worldwide tax on international financial transactions.
God knows what changed his mind – until about five minutes ago, his Government had been consistently rubbishing the concept of what is often called a “Tobin tax”. And goodness knows why he suddenly bounced the idea into the G20 meeting in St Andrew’s without some preliminary softening up – an omission which resulted in hostile reactions from the Americans and the International Monetary Fund
But he did it, so let us be grateful. Perhaps the Prime Minister had been talking to France’s wonderful finance minister, Christine Lagarde, who has recently been making the gentlest mock of Brown’s love affair with the banks and contrasting it with France’s much more regulatory (and successful) approach. She will be backing Brown on this one. Perhaps she converted him. She could convert me to anything.
