DYING in VAIN

Not before time, the government’s conduct of the war in Afghanistan is beginning to be questioned. Those of us who questioned it from the get-go welcome the late converts. Lord Lamont made a particularly astute and well thought-through survey of the problem on Any Questions? at the weekend. What he had to say contained phrases that have not emanated from Tory mouths very often over the last eight years: “foreign invaders” (by which he meant us), “the mission is very ill-defined”, “we need an exit strategy”. Lamont believes that withdrawal can only be achieved through a deal being brokered. He believes – something which is self-evident to me but apparently unthinkable to many politicians and brass hats – that we are very hard pressed to talk with any credibility about a military victory.

Warfare has its own sort of momentum, its own remorseless logic. The moment it is engaged, what is at stake seems to be dominated by the face that politicians need to save. That is why so much is made of the troops themselves, of national pride in them, of the need to safeguard them and of the terrible overweening fear that their blood might appear to have been spilt without national benefit.

With so many deaths of British soldiers in so short a space just lately and such a head of steam building over perceived shortcomings in matériel, it may be that perceptions of the Afghan escapade have reached a tipping point. The Guardian today claims what it calls “firm” public support for the war, though in fact the poll commissioned for it and Newsnight reports approaching seven out of ten respondents as wanting the troops home either immediately or within six months; the government of course has no such plan. The pollsters interviewed 1,000 randomly chosen adults by telephone on Friday and Saturday; in other words, it was a small sample, not weighted by profile, not spoken to face-to-face and there is no record of how the questions were framed. Accordingly, it is best to treat such a poll with utmost caution (which is not of course how The Guardian treats it when looking for a lead story on a Monday).

Gordon Brown and David Miliband, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton all say that prosecuting the war prevents terrorism here in the west. This is a highly debatable proposition. Which of terrorists and what Norman Lamont calls “foreign invaders” is the chicken and which the egg? How many Afghans are recruited to the Taliban by ideological pressure and how many by resentment at occupation? As Lamont put it on Friday, “if you are foreigners, civilian casualties are held very, very heavily against you”.

Those who would continue the war on this basis may be acting on conviction but it is still a gamble. No one can prove that fighting the Taliban reduces rather than increases the incidence of terrorism. No doubt they have links with al-Qaida – links surely born more from tactical convenience than from strategic ambition – but it is unarguable that the Taliban’s mission is to prevail in their own country rather than to extend the war beyond their own borders. So the west’s war is explicitly about control of Afghanistan. To continue George W Bush’s “war on terror” would require a different theatre, across the badlands of north-western Pakistan rather than in Helmand province. The argument about terrorism sits better on that war (which is not currently being fought by any other than Pakistani forces against Islamic fundamentalists) than on the Afghan war.

What the west is doing in Afghanistan is prosecuting an old-fashioned colonial war of the kind the British fought with utter futility several times in the same country in the 19th century. Neither geopolitically nor economically is such a war remotely justified. It is another expression of western hubris just like Iraq and it is just as futile.

The wave of doubt over the war in Britain seems to have been wholly occasioned by the accelerated casualties among the military and the sense of frustration and despair that these deaths engender. Civilian casualties do not seem to signify. Why is this? The deaths of British soldiers make the news. These casualties are usually named, their likenesses shown and, as a strange ritual over the last year or two, their biers go a progress through the market town of Wootton Bassett, which is not far from where we live. The way they are presented to us is as “our boys” (now “our boys and girls”) and it has been so since World War I. Hence the banner slogan seen so extensively in the marches against the Iraq war: “not in my name”.

In the global age, many of us think of ourselves not as citizens of a particular arbitrary territory bordered and characterised as a separate sovereign state but as citizens of the world. All those caught up in war are our sisters and brothers, our children and parents, whatever their national origin. So as I see it the death of a sapper at the hands of a sniper or a tank driver hit by an IED does not diminish me any more than does that of a market stallholder caught by an explosion or a bedridden geriatric whose hovel is shelled.

We sometimes hear estimated numbers of such “collateral damage” casualties and, if cameras can get there, we see generalised images of carnage. Sometimes a photogenic child is recorded lying injured in some (often make-shift) hospital. But generally these casualties are anonymous – safely so, you might observe. The way we relate to them is oddly like the way we relate to the animal world. Any harm to our pets and domesticated beasts hits us hard; the constant visitation of death and injury to wild creatures in the world just beyond is something we ignore or at best notice in passing.

But of course those civilians are much more vulnerable than the military. They do not have weapons for protection or pre-emption nor armour against attack. They don’t have a choice to be other than where they are because they are poor – the comfortably off tend not to live in war zones. They have no recourse but to sit it out and hope that the next bomb falls on someone else. Unlike the soldiery, they are not there because they love it, as the bereaved soldiers’ families so often say. They don’t have a choice.

Politicians seem not to take these factors into consideration. In his first week in office – his first week – Obama ordered an air strike over the Pakistani border that not only violated that nation’s sovereignty but also killed civilians. He seemed to take it in his stride, like swatting a fly. I was very disappointed.

Perhaps long in the future – not in my lifetime, surely – someone will run for office in the States who takes the view that war is merely futile and destructive, that scarce resources need to be invested in construction rather than destruction, that jaw-jaw is better than war-war, that sufficient nuclear weaponry to destroy the planet once is more than enough and that all the rest is superfluous to requirements. And perhaps such a candidate will take the view that all such interventions in the affairs of other nations should be conducted through a body that represents a plurality of nations rather than the vested interests of a few rich economies, a body like the United Nations. And perhaps a future British government, having made such a continuous fuss about the bravery of our troops and the necessity to eschew any expression of an opinion that might be construed as critical of them or doubtful about the value of their deployment, will be the first since at least Victorian times to take proper care of those troops who come home injured in either body or mind and not do everything possible to avoid giving them adequate recompense for the injuries they sustained in “our” name.