It does not matter to the British people how the Afghans choose to conduct an election. It does not matter how one of the poorest countries in the world chooses to govern itself under the UN charter of self-determination. Few elections outside Western democracies bear much scrutiny. We still hold our noses and deal with Iran, Kenya, Zimbabwe and Russia.
The excuse that we are preventing another Sept. 11 is ludicrously thin. That event, whose plotting and training were in Europe and the US, will cause the US to spend what Congress puts at a staggering US$1.3 trillion in wars and related security by 2019. And still no one has arrested Osama bin Laden. It must be the most extravagant punitive expedition to the Asian mainland since Agamemnon set off for Troy.
The impact on international affairs has been devastating. British foreign secretaries — not least the current holder of that office, David Miliband — strut the press conferences of the world declaring “what we want to see” in regimes that are no business of Britain.
In a BBC interview on Tuesday, the former Liberal Democrats leader Paddy Ashdown spoke of what “we” should do in Afghanistan as if it were in his old parliamentary constituency in the west of England. Every inch the liberal imperialist, he seemed to think we owned it.
We need look no further for an answer to the question posed by the US pundit Richard Haass. Surveying the wreckage of the Clinton/Bush/Blair years last summer, he asked why the West had squandered the legacy of its victory over communism. It had shifted Russia from humiliating defeat to chauvinist belligerence. It had antagonized half the Muslim world. It had left Europe squabbling and protectionist. China had risen to astonishing commercial power. The US had beggared itself with military spending. In sum, the architects of victory had shot themselves in the foot.
The West is not under any threat that justifies this wreckage. Instead, weak politicians, bored by domestic ills, have seized on any passing threat to boost their standing at home by fighting small wars abroad and making them big. That Obama should dash his store of popularity against the mud walls of Kabul is astonishing; no less so that Brown, not a stupid man, should insult his voters by declaring that “the safety of the [UK’s] streets” requires soldiers to die in their hundreds in Helmand.
Western leaders seem unable to resist the seduction of military power. They think that because they could defeat communism and fly to the moon, they can get any poverty-stricken, tin-pot country to do what the West decides is best for it. They grasp at nation-building, that make-work scheme of internationalism against which any people, however pathetic, are bound to fight.
All is hubris. The arrogance of empire has mutated into the arrogance of liberalism.
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