David Aaronovitch: The troops leave Afghanistan. And then the horrors begin
[David Aaronovitch is a writer, broadcaster and commentator on international politics and the media.]
Almost exactly 30 years ago, in the summer of 1979, an IRA double ambush killed 18 British soldiers near the town of Warrenpoint in Northern Ireland. Among them was the commanding officer of the Queens Own Highlanders, Lieutenant-Colonel David Blair. It was the worst single incident during a campaign that lasted nearly two decades and cost more than 700 military lives.
Yet, despite the occasional opinion poll suggesting that the Irish should be left to sort things out for themselves, and a desultory Troops Out campaign waged by the Daily Mirror, there was never any great public movement for withdrawal.
Three years later, though still mired in Ulster, British Forces travelled thousands of miles to liberate some barely populated islands from Argentina, at a cost of 258 Service personnel. The call for the troops to be brought home, or for Mrs Thatcher somehow subsequently to account for the losses, hardly registered.
Why are things so different now, in Afghanistan, where the increase in military deaths seems to have prompted a widespread public unease? It could be linked, one supposes, to the myth that somehow Britain is alone in this battle or taking the lion’s miserable share of the dying. How many people know that, in relation to population size Canada has lost a third more soldiers than we have and Denmark has lost 50 per cent more? Perhaps they too have their debates about helicopters, and imagine wars in which none of their soldiers dies.
It was easier, it seems to me, for pro-warriors in the past. They’d talk up their wars, censorship would keep the worst of it from filtering back home at least for a while, and they could always deploy the language of patriotism against those who demurred. Defeatists, they called them, giving succour to the enemy. Soldiers know they risk their lives, and you the doubters put them doubly at risk.
I’m glad that this form of bullying cannot be done any more. I’m glad that every life we lose or whose loss we inflict has to be argued over and explained, from root to crown of the whole tree of conflict. The onus is on those of us who believe that we are right to be in Afghanistan constantly to re-explain why.
Maybe we’ve done too little of it. With some important exceptions (here I recommend my colleague, Matthew Parris) I am struck by the paucity of the case against our involvement, by the failure of many opponents to engage with even the most basic and obvious objections to their proposals for withdrawal.
Here is a paraphrase of a typical withdrawalist prospectus: failure is inevitable, intervention was historically pre-doomed, the idea of “Western-style democracy” in Afghanistan is a delusion, in any case there is mission creep, we are only there to please the Americans, sooner or later the Taleban will win, better to get out. And that’s it. As for what happens next, let’s not go there.
Because, of course, we’ve been there. The New Statesman magazine a week ago reminded its readers that it had opposed the invasion of Afghanistan back in the autumn of 2001, but failed to remind them of what it had advocated instead.
Perhaps a mythical surgical strike to take out bin Laden somehow but otherwise leaving Taleban-ruled Afghanistan alone? Perhaps nothing at all other than a change in Western policy is sufficient — as if by magic — to placate the forces now rising in the region?
For others the implication is that we could have gone in, done for al-Qaeda and come out again — almost precisely mirroring the policy of neglect that followed the Soviet defeat, when we countenanced the country’s descent into warlordism, followed by the Taleban, followed by al-Qaeda.
These were the same days when “we” — as represented by pre-9/11 George Bush — certainly did not believe in nation-building. If the lessons of history tell us of the dangers of intervention, they also tell us something just as important about hit-and-run — something visible in the lost statues of Bamiyan, the executed of the Kabul football stadium, the murder of Ahmad Shah Massoud, the reduction of women to the status of slaves — no, lower than slaves — the spread of jihadism and the fall of the twin towers.
So, going in, we couldn’t just run out. That’s mission creep for you: the mission changes. Of course it does; ask the shade of Abraham Lincoln. Once there, we could hardly have had no view of what came after, even if we most certainly have not insisted on the “perfect” democracy of the sneering caricature...
Read entire article at Times (UK)
Almost exactly 30 years ago, in the summer of 1979, an IRA double ambush killed 18 British soldiers near the town of Warrenpoint in Northern Ireland. Among them was the commanding officer of the Queens Own Highlanders, Lieutenant-Colonel David Blair. It was the worst single incident during a campaign that lasted nearly two decades and cost more than 700 military lives.
Yet, despite the occasional opinion poll suggesting that the Irish should be left to sort things out for themselves, and a desultory Troops Out campaign waged by the Daily Mirror, there was never any great public movement for withdrawal.
Three years later, though still mired in Ulster, British Forces travelled thousands of miles to liberate some barely populated islands from Argentina, at a cost of 258 Service personnel. The call for the troops to be brought home, or for Mrs Thatcher somehow subsequently to account for the losses, hardly registered.
Why are things so different now, in Afghanistan, where the increase in military deaths seems to have prompted a widespread public unease? It could be linked, one supposes, to the myth that somehow Britain is alone in this battle or taking the lion’s miserable share of the dying. How many people know that, in relation to population size Canada has lost a third more soldiers than we have and Denmark has lost 50 per cent more? Perhaps they too have their debates about helicopters, and imagine wars in which none of their soldiers dies.
It was easier, it seems to me, for pro-warriors in the past. They’d talk up their wars, censorship would keep the worst of it from filtering back home at least for a while, and they could always deploy the language of patriotism against those who demurred. Defeatists, they called them, giving succour to the enemy. Soldiers know they risk their lives, and you the doubters put them doubly at risk.
I’m glad that this form of bullying cannot be done any more. I’m glad that every life we lose or whose loss we inflict has to be argued over and explained, from root to crown of the whole tree of conflict. The onus is on those of us who believe that we are right to be in Afghanistan constantly to re-explain why.
Maybe we’ve done too little of it. With some important exceptions (here I recommend my colleague, Matthew Parris) I am struck by the paucity of the case against our involvement, by the failure of many opponents to engage with even the most basic and obvious objections to their proposals for withdrawal.
Here is a paraphrase of a typical withdrawalist prospectus: failure is inevitable, intervention was historically pre-doomed, the idea of “Western-style democracy” in Afghanistan is a delusion, in any case there is mission creep, we are only there to please the Americans, sooner or later the Taleban will win, better to get out. And that’s it. As for what happens next, let’s not go there.
Because, of course, we’ve been there. The New Statesman magazine a week ago reminded its readers that it had opposed the invasion of Afghanistan back in the autumn of 2001, but failed to remind them of what it had advocated instead.
Perhaps a mythical surgical strike to take out bin Laden somehow but otherwise leaving Taleban-ruled Afghanistan alone? Perhaps nothing at all other than a change in Western policy is sufficient — as if by magic — to placate the forces now rising in the region?
For others the implication is that we could have gone in, done for al-Qaeda and come out again — almost precisely mirroring the policy of neglect that followed the Soviet defeat, when we countenanced the country’s descent into warlordism, followed by the Taleban, followed by al-Qaeda.
These were the same days when “we” — as represented by pre-9/11 George Bush — certainly did not believe in nation-building. If the lessons of history tell us of the dangers of intervention, they also tell us something just as important about hit-and-run — something visible in the lost statues of Bamiyan, the executed of the Kabul football stadium, the murder of Ahmad Shah Massoud, the reduction of women to the status of slaves — no, lower than slaves — the spread of jihadism and the fall of the twin towers.
So, going in, we couldn’t just run out. That’s mission creep for you: the mission changes. Of course it does; ask the shade of Abraham Lincoln. Once there, we could hardly have had no view of what came after, even if we most certainly have not insisted on the “perfect” democracy of the sneering caricature...