Three years ago, in Helmand, I watched Nick Clegg, now deputy prime minister of the UK, present a battle plan to the British military. Unfortunately, it seems to be following it. The plan was a crayon and felt tip scrawl by one of his sons, who had made his father promise to give it to the army. Handed over to amuse, it suggested that the baddies hidden beneath mountains could be fought by a few soldiers piling out of a helicopter. We smiled at the juvenile simplicity.
Now, in Helmand, the military are doing just this. They call their murderous night raids against insurgents a bold strategy for success, when really the intensification of violence is evidence of failure. They are, as former British foreign minister David Miliband will warn in a speech today, trapped in a war with no plan other than to kill as many baddies as they can before fleeing.
At the end of my trip to Afghanistan with Clegg and Nick Harvey, now the armed forces minister, I wrote an overly optimistic piece suggesting that the army might be about to turn things around. Smart soldiers using jargon deployed PowerPoint charts to prove it. It seemed wrong not to take their confidence seriously and allow them time to make their plans work. I did. More importantly, ministers did.
They have had the time and the plans didn’t work. Almost everybody in politics privately thinks that military involvement in Afghanistan has been a disaster. The pity is few dare say so.
Afghanistan is already yesterday’s war, though it is still to be tomorrow’s defeat. Mentally the public in the UK have adjusted for the end, though there are still 9,500 British troops in action. Many soldiers and marines are on their fourth tour of duty — two years of a young adult life. Some face redundancy on return.
Britain has been in Afghanistan for 10 years and in Helmand for five — world wars were fought and won in less time. It’s becoming one of those conflicts which seem to have no beginning and no end and probably no point, slipping from our enthusiasm and into history. Libya is eating up our energies instead.
There was little interest last month when the foreign affairs committee published what (by its standards) was a strong criticism of the military surge. Perhaps some attention will be paid to Miliband’s speech. Of all politicians involved in pursuing the war, he has been the bravest in speaking out. His intervention, as with his previous ones, is being made in the US. That’s where decisions are being taken. Britain, having set 2015 as a date for withdrawal for no reason other than the proximity of an election, is ticking off the days on the walls of Camp Bastion, Britian’s main military camp in Afghanistan, like a prisoner scratching out a sentence.
When General David Petraeus, commander of US Forces in Afghanistan, leaves the country later this year, he will of course claim to have broken the back of the insurgency, but what he has really done is scatter it across the country in response to ultra-violence. His predecessor, General Stanley McChrystal, promised to pacify 40 districts by December last year and 40 more by the end of this year. It hasn’t happened.
Talk of stabilizing Kandahar has come to nothing — those mega-operations which were supposed to drive the Taliban out of their capital. In the north, Mazar-i-Sharif has rioted against the UN. In the south, Britain is indulging the fantasy that Lashkar Gah, Helmand’s capital, can move to Afghan control. Across the country, the coalition is more feared, violence is higher and Afghan President Hamid Karzai more unpopular than ever.
Read Rodric Braithwaite’s magnificent new book Afgantsy: The Russians in Afghanistan 1979-1989 to see where this will lead. His compassionate and brilliantly researched account of the Soviet experience in Afghanistan tells the story of an almost accidental invasion, which collapsed not because of any single defeat, but because the occupation became too expensive and incoherent to sustain.
Britain is following the same path, and though Braithwaite is too discreet to make the comparison, the Soviet occupation was arguably more successful. It ended in a negotiated settlement, which might have lasted if the West hadn’t funded its ruin.
The obvious thing to say — and when it’s obvious you have to ask if there is a problem with it — is that Britain must talk to the Taliban. Without that, they will leave a broken country. The present strategy, says one official who has been at the heart of it, “is all a big, big lie.” Miliband will urge talks the Taliban this week and of course he is right, but here’s the problem: What if no one answers? The Taliban have little incentive to reach a deal. A few hopeful signs — a half-recanting speech by the previously obstructive US Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton — does not yet amount to a process.
In the meantime, the West is turning Afghanistan into a hyper-militarized state, funding a vast army and a security service, which is becoming a government of its own. In the sham defense of democracy, authoritarianism will be left behind. It will no doubt last for a while after we go, as former Afghan president Mohammad Najibullah did after the Soviets. The Taliban will find they are not strong enough to rule Afghanistan, but nor is anyone else.
If the present war is a calamity, what follows it will be worse. This is no way to end a column and no way to end a war, but maybe it’s best to shrug our shoulders and go.
Saudi Arabian largesse is flooding Egypt’s cultural scene, but the reception is mixed. Some welcome new “cooperation” between two regional powerhouses, while others fear a hostile takeover by Riyadh. In Cairo, historically the cultural capital of the Arab world, Egyptian Minister of Culture Nevine al-Kilany recently hosted Saudi Arabian General Entertainment Authority chairman Turki al-Sheikh. The deep-pocketed al-Sheikh has emerged as a Medici-like patron for Egypt’s cultural elite, courted by Cairo’s top talent to produce a slew of forthcoming films. A new three-way agreement between al-Sheikh, Kilany and United Media Services — a multi-media conglomerate linked to state intelligence that owns much of
The US and other countries should take concrete steps to confront the threats from Beijing to avoid war, US Representative Mario Diaz-Balart said in an interview with Voice of America on March 13. The US should use “every diplomatic economic tool at our disposal to treat China as what it is... to avoid war,” Diaz-Balart said. Giving an example of what the US could do, he said that it has to be more aggressive in its military sales to Taiwan. Actions by cross-party US lawmakers in the past few years such as meeting with Taiwanese officials in Washington and Taipei, and
The Republic of China (ROC) on Taiwan has no official diplomatic allies in the EU. With the exception of the Vatican, it has no official allies in Europe at all. This does not prevent the ROC — Taiwan — from having close relations with EU member states and other European countries. The exact nature of the relationship does bear revisiting, if only to clarify what is a very complicated and sensitive idea, the details of which leave considerable room for misunderstanding, misrepresentation and disagreement. Only this week, President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) received members of the European Parliament’s Delegation for Relations
Denmark’s “one China” policy more and more resembles Beijing’s “one China” principle. At least, this is how things appear. In recent interactions with the Danish state, such as applying for residency permits, a Taiwanese’s nationality would be listed as “China.” That designation occurs for a Taiwanese student coming to Denmark or a Danish citizen arriving in Denmark with, for example, their Taiwanese partner. Details of this were published on Sunday in an article in the Danish daily Berlingske written by Alexander Sjoberg and Tobias Reinwald. The pretext for this new practice is that Denmark does not recognize Taiwan as a state under