Afghanistan & British Electoral Politics
Monday 15 March 2010 at 01:41 We have not looked at Afghanistan as an issue since the High Summer of last year or commented in depth on British foreign policy since the Autumn. Why is this?
Partly because there has been nothing new to say and partly because comment on British policy in West Asia has degenerated into a political sideshow, a subject for knockabout between two political parties seeking to win an election later this Spring.
Miliband's Compton Lecture
David Miliband's Compton Lecture on March 10th might be regarded as the last serious pre-election attempt by the Government to establish precisely what it is doing in this faraway country before a disenchanted public adds it to the melange of issues that will decide its fate.
Within the first few words, he managed to encapsulate what New Labour stands for and to reaffirm the ideology of engagement - enlightenment values in a transatlantic context.
We have recently thrown some doubt on the viability of the latest iteration of the Enlightenment project as an idealism that can be destructive in its attempts to impose systems on the crooked timber of humanity but Miliband has no such concerns.
He gives three reasons for engagement in Afghanistan. Two of these lodge New Labour firmly in a grand strategic camp in which the national interest is seen as identical to that of its chief ally expressed within an idealist and abstract notion of the 'West'.
Naturally, he cannot walk away from the prime motive for engagement that is presented to the British people - that we have to be there because the West Asian badlands pose a terror threat at home.
What is never said is that our active post-imperial engagement with the margins of the West fuels the very insurgency that might be imported back into the country and that some post-imperial ethnic minorities within the UK are disengaged from the Crown, in part, by such actions.
To the costs of the war must be added the costs of a complex 'soft' power operation to monitor and manage lower income ethnic communities, of an almost comically belt and braces security operation around the country and of trying to outmanouevre the extremists' equally evil twin, the BNP.
If we add to this the divisiveness of the war, popular anger and irritation at security measures, the palpable growth in tension between ethnic communities ... all at a time of economic difficulty ... it seems an expensive way of dealing with a threat which is not entirely proven as to its extent or importance.
Party & Crown
The truth is that a balanced budget and internal social cohesion are regarded as wholly worth sacrificing on the altars of the transatlantic alliance and the 'future of Western power'.
In other words, the tragedy of New Labour is that, after over hundred years of struggle to become the dominant ruling party in the country, it has become the Party of Pitt, Walpole, Wellington and Castlereagh rather than the Party of Paine, Jefferson, Shelley and Blake. It has become the Crown.
It is the Crown (not the House of Windsor but the State) that has determined, for complex historical reasons related to its power and institutional ambition, that the transatlantic alliance, NATO and the West represent a community in which it must have a place or have no meaning.
There is an historic rationale for this (albeit an imperialist one) and, even today, there are sound economic and strategic arguments for good relations with the United States, collective security and the defence of core liberal values in a global setting.
But this is not what is happening here. This is not good relations with the US, it is Alliance. It is not just collective security, it is NATO. It is not just defence of values but promotion and extension of values. The qualitative difference is important and it is proving immensely costly.
The Necessity For Settlement
We will leave you to read Miliband's lecture. You may decide whether to be persuaded or not. What is clear is that Miliband knows that our country can no longer afford the forward policy begun under Tony Blair in the late 1990s and he is looking for an 'exit' without the political costs of being seen to withdraw.
Strip away the tub-thumping, the 'our boys' talk and the attacks on the evils of the other side and what it comes down to is a simple fact.
If the West had more resources (and more support at home) it probably could win eventually but the scepticism of the British public, lack of support from wiser heads in Europe and growing budgetary problems no longer give the Government the option of being in on the kill or leading from the front.
With an election on the way, what New Labour has to do is demonstrate that past investment was worthwhile in support of what will be an American victory - or ensure that it withdraws with dignity and honour long before it turns into a wider West Asian American quagmire.
A close reading of the Lecture tells us just how much Western objectives have changed from the heady days when liberal progressives thought that they could bring their much vaunted Enlightenment values, to Afghan women in particular, through the barrel of a gun.
The British and Soviet imperial histories are used by Miliband to demonstrate that the Afghans cannot be beaten into submission but have to be seduced into "a self-governing, self-policing but heavily subsidised Afghanistan, where the tribes balanced each other ..."
Ay, there's a rub. The British (who succeeded) and the Soviets (who failed) had an interest in heavy subsidy because the troubled country was a chaotic threat to contiguous interests whether the British hold over Indian wealth or Soviet determination to maintain order amongst its ethnic minorities.
The essence of such Imperial strategies was complicity in a protection racket - sufficient funds would be applied to keep the Afghans concerned with topping each other rather than interfering in neighbouring countries. So much for Enlightenment idealism!
But Why Us?
But what on earth is the interest of the United Kingdom, an island on the edge of another continent within a global trading system that scarcely touches these backwoods, in taking part in the levels of heavy subsidy that are undoubtedly at the heart of of Miliband's Grand Master Plan.
Of course, Miliband is not expecting the British to pay, he expects the electorates of the 'West' to pay, that is hard-pressed Americans and Europeans who have far more worries about bailing out Greece than about the baksheesh expectations of Afghan tribesman.
All this effort seems increasingly absurd when compared with the exposure of another island nation with a similar profile, Japan, operating a similar distance from the country concerned and with equal dependence on Gulf oil.
Unless British foreign policy makers are genuinely and insanely concerned with the preservation of neighbouring empires (Russia, China, India) from dissolution regardless of the effects on the national budget, there are only two motives for the expenditure of blood and gold by the Crown.
Neither can be spoken of in blunt terms because, if the British population understood what was being said, there might be a political reaction that could lose this Government its mandate.
Social Cohesion At Home
The first truth is not that terrorism might be imported into British cities from Afghanistan but if Afghanistan is not settled then the destabilisation of Pakistan and so of Kashmir really does threaten to bring sectarian war into British cities - and not necessarily just as Islamism.
What discomforts the British is that post-imperial mass immigration, promoted for economic and ideological reasons, and not discouraged by a New Labour Government that gains significant votes from these communities, would very soon be linked to violent social disorder.
The size and spread of the warring communities and their concentration in the poorest areas of our major post-industrial cities creates a nightmare scenario for the Crown - one where Enlightenment values crumble in a local competition for resources fuelled for profit by radical ideologues.
The link between terrorism and mass migration is one that has not been proved. Discussion has sometimes been silenced as 'racist' - but anyone who watches the push and pull between the poorest communities and their homelands and growing 'ressentiment' amongst indigenous rivals is concerned.
So, for this reason alone, both Crown and New Labour (indistinguishable in their concern for social order) have increased the number of authoritarian tools for social control and have pressed, under security advice, to get the rest of the West engaged in settling Afghanistan before the infection spreads.
When Miliband speaks of earlier British imperial settlements designed to protect British investment in India, it suggests that his settlement is required to avoid the real cost of that massive overseas empire - chaos in an aging urban-industrial structure with low wage populations whose allegiances are obscure.
The Burden Of History
A second 'real' reason for engagement with Afghanistan derives from another burden from history - in this case, recognition of strategic and economic dependence on the US. This is an old story that does not need to be told again here - it is about the necessary displacement of one empire by another.
The point is not that this has happened but that New Labour and the Crown have become the depressed victims of that history. Questions are being raised that directly affect British post-imperial strategy.
First, is the dominance of London as global centre (which is the central economic core of the transatlantic alliance) really in the interests of the British people as a whole?
Equally to the point, have the interests of Crown, City and Alliance become wholly detached from the interests of the nation in the light of the recent economic crisis? This is more salient when we consider the social order questions raised by our decaying urban-industrial infrastructure (see above!).
Our engagement in West Asia would appear to require taxing the population to sustain the interests of Crown, City and Alliance. The economic benefits from that bloc may be regarded as questionable looked at from a council estate in outer Manchester or amongst the small retailers of Guildford.
Second, much as the British like to preen and swagger about their world status, no different of course in this from the French, the question arises as to why we bother when most people are not nationalist in orientation in the traditional way and would much rather the quiet life without ideology or 'service'?
The Crown and conservative authoritarians of all parties may like 'Great Power Status' [GPS] but it is becoming increasingly costly. The tension between the costs of sustaining it and maintaining social cohesion become much more manifest as economic conditions worsen (as we noted some years ago).
GPS is sustained through the same sort of legerdemain that has put New Labour in control of the State through means that undermine the nation. In this case, Britain's 'destiny' as an independent power is being undermined by a determination to seek GPS under the wing of another power.
The Politics Of Confusion
Miliband's Lecture is intelligent and informative but he cannot raise these questions himself because in so doing he would undermine the very basis for New Labour's role which relies both on denial about post-imperial causes of social disorder and on promoting the illusion of GPS.
Afghanistan, far more than Iraq which was just a costly mistake with no long-lasting effects on national cohesion, pulls together all the internal contradictions within the New Labour project.
The desire to build votes on economic growth and full employment has created the conditions for social disorder that owe too much to accidents of history on the North West Frontier while its determination to strut for its right-wing vote on the world stage continues to turn the country into a poodle.
In the long run, Afghanistan can be 'won'. The US might well be able to afford to settle a dowry for peace of sufficient size through its massive security budget but that settlement might be, for the British, a horribly expensive way to invest in maintaining social order in Britain's inner cities.
Many may ask why we lacked the courage to by-pass this war and just take our gold, put it into our troubled communities and save blood not only overseas but perhaps, one day, at home.