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The Afghan conundum goes back centuries before 9/11, argues Tam Dalyell

My father – I am 77 years old and he was 45 in the year I was born – lived and worked in a world long gone. Like six generations before him, who spent their working lives in the service of the East India Company or the government of India, he went east as a teenager.

Within weeks of graduating from Sandhurst in 1906, he was on a boat, commissioned into the Staffordshire Regiment – two years military service being a pre-requisite to becoming a junior government of India district officer. And nothing was more important to the pursuance of his career than to master – or at least become proficient in – basic Urdu and the dialects of the areas to which he would be designated after his statutory regimental service.

Like many other usually impecunious young sons of the Raj, he had it drummed into him that, in order to get promotion, he had to develop an understanding of and empathy with native customs. His mother’s father, Judge Gibbs, had been an acceptable vice-chancellor of the University of Bombay.

Posted in 1910 to Gilgit and in 1912 to the North-West Frontier, my father’s job was to deal with the local leaders, some of whom were undoubtedly minor warlords. He used to reminisce to me that it would not have occurred to him to start bringing up any business matter with Kashmiris or Pashtun in the first half hour of a meeting until he had exhaustively discussed the health of their children, followed by other members of the family, then the well being of their animals and finally responded to their polite enquiries about his own family.

The truth is that the British national interest – the existence of a buffer Afghan state between Russia and the jewel in Victoria’s crown, the Indian empire, was well served. The disastrous Afghan wars were all brought about by impatient military commanders, sent out from England and ignorant of the local people.

Tribune readers may well be saying to themselves: “For pity’s sake, you are describing the situation as it was a century ago.” Well, not quite. Older readers may remember Ron Brown, the Labour MP for Leith from 1979 to 1992, nicknamed “Afghan Ron” by waspish MPs. Yes, I know he was ridiculed for some goings-on concerning knickers in the House of Commons showers. But the fact was that Ron Brown visited Afghanistan on several occasions and talked with actual Afghans. I used to take him seriously in the House. He would tell us that the Pashtun had not changed in hundreds of years, and did not want outsiders, other than their “guests”, to whom they were immensely hospitable.

It was not only the likes of my dad who were acceptable to them. In the first part of George Wigg’s memoirs, detailing his time as an NCO in the Indian Army in the inter-war years, it becomes clear how many of the NCOs and other ranks of the military had a grasp of the local language and customs.

Now how many of the unfortunate young men of the Royal Anglian Regiment, the Grenadier Guards, the Royal Military Police, the Parachute Regiment, or any other unit carried through Wootton Bassett, had a smattering of the local language? Few, if any.

My dad and his colleagues would be aghast at the wishful thinking of Gordon Brown, General Richard Dannatt and anyone else who supposes that there can be a satisfactory long-term outcome to military action in south-west Asia. Social change is not going to come out of the barrel of a gun. On the contrary, guns and ill-directed American bombs are recruiting sergeants for the Taliban.

It is not as if Tony Blair and Gordon Brown were not warned. I was only one of a number of Labour MPs who spoke up as soon as the sending of troops was contemplated. “Why did he imagine”, I asked Blair at Prime Minister’s Questions and in private, that the US/UK would succeed, when 100,000 Russians, with contiguous borders, and easier supply lines, had failed?”

I added: “Did he not know of that Russian general, on exiting Kabul, who had sighed: “Give me one Afghan on a donkey, rather than four Russians on a tank.”

Blair’s answer was a sheepish – and complacent: “We are different from the Russians”.

In the 1980s, I was a member of a Labour Party delegation on a week’s visit to the United Nations. A meeting was arranged for me by Sir Anthony Parsons, Britain’s ambassador to the UN, with his Russian counterpart, Oleg Tryanovsky, and the Russian ambassador to Washington, Anatoly Dobrynin. That convinced me of the folly of military intervention. “You will fail, as we Soviets failed”, they said with absolute certainty.

Back to my dad. From 1932 until 1937, he represented the British Government in Bahrain. In this capacity, he had a lot to do with Yemenis, as I did, too, to a lesser extent over the years from 1962 to 2005 in the House of Commons. I am filled with foreboding. I fear for any military intervention on a famously gifted and clever people, whose ancestors were the silversmiths of Asia. Ill-prepared Brits and blustering GIs would create a situation in Yemen no less dire than that in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Tam Dalyell was Labour MP for West Lothian from 1962-1983 and Linlithgow from 1983-2005