Weak Government, The Afghan War and Torchwood
Sunday 12 July 2009 at 11:56 (WARNING: This posting contains important spoilers regarding the BBC Sci-Fi Series Torchwood. You are advised to bookmark it and read it later if you have not yet seen the full series and want to do so.)
The sharp increase in deaths amongst serving soldiers in Afghanistan (8 men in 24 hours, 15 in a week, and a total now exceeding Iraq) is now headline news.
The argument is less over whether we should be there (which might be interpreted as insufficiently supportive of ‘our boys’) and far more over whether sufficient resources have been provided to protect them from the Taliban’s intelligent strategy of leaving behind a few men but many roadside bombs.
The Military Situation
There are not enough soldiers and helicopters to do the job in Afghanistan. The Land Rovers, Vikings, Jackals and Vectors are certainly not up to the job either. Above all, the longer the war goes on, the more mayhem and the greater the loss of local ‘hearts and minds’.
The greatest risk is that the Afghan Presidential Election proves to be a farce in the key province of Helmand. This portion of a much wider war has to be ‘won’ within perhaps six to eight weeks or it may well come to be regarded as a defeat.
The Sunday Times shows a photograph of every dead soldier, mostly in their early 20s. Many of these are apparently dead because they were travelling by road in inadequate vehicles and not by helicopter.
The Taliban are not fools. They have largely withdrawn to fight again later, but they have left behind guerrillas who have created a new type of guided minefield, placing IEDs (roadside bombs) that can be triggered for maximum damage. The troops retreat from one bomb and then get caught in another.
The Government at a every level, right up to the Prime Minister, is preparing the public for a summer of deaths of young men. Their argument remains that the mission is ‘vital to the safety of the world’, a somewhat grandiose interpretation of what should have been little more than a police action in 2001.
The Brown Government has now committed itself to remaining until the job is finished - much as Johnson’s did in Vietnam with probably a very similar outcome. The concern within the military, of course, has nothing to do with whether the British should be in Afghanistan (that is a political decision).
The military concern is with the tools being provided to do the job. If anything, Sir Richard Dannatt is an aggressive booster for the somewhat dubious justifications for the war. But conditions on the ground are now helping to create a political crisis at home.
Growing Tensions Between Government & Army
We have been reporting the growing tension between the military and New Labour for quite some time. Even before the credit crunch, there was a debate about expenditures between ‘guns’ and ‘butter’. The military pointed out that a progressive foreign policy of the Blairite type requires adequate funding.
The military complaint has lately been that too much was going into expensive hardware that was irrelevant to anti-insurgency operations and to the security services, with not enough support for boots on the ground.
The underlying strategic debate has now come out into the open as Secretary of Defense Gates starts to shift the US from Cold War megatron power (big and expensive metal objects) towards soft power support, intelligence and tactical flexibility.
This debate should have taken place in the UK long since, but its ‘poodle’ approach to the US, waiting on Washington for a lead, and electoral considerations have mean its own Strategic Defence Review has been left until far too late, just as its economic base is getting ready to crumble.
Until the Northern Rock crisis, the military might have expected sufficient compromise to get important concessions. Now, they are scrabbling for a diminishing pot. The Government is scarcely likely to cut health and education before it has won its election.
Governments have, in the past, been able to appeal to the standard soft militarism of the British working class and to the sheer weight of industrial jobs linked to the killing machine in order to deliver a fair proportion of budget to the ‘guns’ side of the equation.
The credit crunch and the associated political scandals have completely changed that scenario. The Government has to manage big wasteful job-creating metal-ware projects, its naked fear of domestic insurgency and major overseas commitments, all within a shrinking budget.
Weak Government & Torchwood
If you scratch the surface of public opinion, you find that there is still stomach for supporting the troops but little stomach for the war in Afghanistan or for toadying up to the Americans (who no longer seem to want us anyway).
New Labour is also undoubtedly gambling with its fiscal policy. The entire political class is at best distrusted and, at worst, in pockets, actively hated. It now acts as if this is not so - or just does not matter.
The military are thus faced with the problem of a weak Government which does not have the political credibility to throw more funds after bad in an endless mini-Vietnam undertaken for strategic reasons now lost in the mists of political time.
The public may be disengaged rather than anti-war, but the Government knows that it cannot afford to shift funds too noisily into its foreign and defence policy away from its domestic public sector nor can it conscript men - nor accept too great a death rate - without shifting that perspective dramatically.
The army is also beginning to lose ‘hearts and minds’ not so much in the mass of the population but increasingly amongst the liberal influencers who feed prejudice and opinion. An example of the shift lies in the popular sci-fi series Torchwood.
Torchwood is a horror story that played for five consecutive nights on prime time TV last week and will be repeated regularly. It is not at all about Afghanistan but it is about the relationship between the people and the organs of the State in these troubled times.
In this story, the Government was shown to be self-centred and cynical, prepared to take no responsibility for its past actions, and duplicitous to an American ally which effectively ran the country in a crisis. Sections of the population were to be judged disposable.
Some people were deemed less ‘useful’ or not ‘nice’ (a fairly common trope in liberal fiction) but the link to New Labour was very obvious in one line – these sections were to be identified for destruction through school league tables, ‘after all what is the point of having them otherwise’.
Hokum Is Power
Much of this may be too subtle for many of its audience, but the sight of British troops willingly rounding up people as a machine of the State was graphic and vivid. It had troops in our council estates, seizing children from schools.
Many public servants were portrayed as deluded in their obedience to orders if not ‘bad people’, but the core image was a revolutionary one – of agents of the State as enemies of at least some of the people and certainly of those most vulnerable and most currently angry at their condition in life.
Of course, this was fiction and ‘hokum’. Yet, like the X-Files in its time, such stories reflect what audiences are thinking privately. They also guide their thinking in the near future and an election is only a year away.
A theme was the authorities’ constant reference to ‘trust’, the sort of nonsense ‘spin’ perpetrated on the people by Blair. The message of the writers was undoubtedly to trust no-one in authority. This was coming from the premier nationally-funded broadcast network that needs public money to survive.
All this preamble about the mood in the country is necessary because military resentment at continued failure by Government to deliver the funding that it requires to pursue a war not of its choosing, and as auxiliary to a foreign empire, is becoming an increasingly open matter.
Senior New Labour figures are now fighting back, accusing the military of interfering in politics (an extremely rare accusation in the UK). But what do the military actually want? Not a great deal. They need 2,000 more troops (a debate that Brown does not want to have in Parliament) and helicopters.
The alternative is the worst of scenarios – more British deaths in a war that, if it is won, will be a public humiliation because the Americans will, with their superior force, be the ones who do the work in the end. To many military, it might be better to withdraw than be degraded and humiliated in this way.
The Political Problem
The political problem, the Torchwood factor if you like, is that this debate is being played out over the heads of a sullen public that does not trust the political class as a whole, let alone the Government.
Genuine concern for soldiers on the ground is tempered by a more general irritation with the indignity of the country’s poodle status and a growing distrust not only of the politicians but of all the organs of authority transmission, including the police, the media and local government.
This distrust is on the cusp of spreading to the Armed Forces. It gets complicated at an elite level because none of the political parties has had the imagination to tell the truth – that a mid-sized power needs to rethink its global role.
The Liberal Democrats strut as if they were statesmen even if they do make the most sensible analysis of current events.
The Tories continue to try to encourage the natural instincts of the officer class to support them. New Labour anger grew in part because Sir Richard Dannatt, Chief of the General Staff, dined with Tory MPs to lobby for the additional troops that he needs.
There is a great deal at stake here. Perhaps the public is still passive, alternating between a degree of traditional support for ‘our boys’ and cynicism, but the growing military-Tory alliance is a major breach of the convention that soldiers do not dabble in politics.
However, the military is now close to desperate – it faced a certain degree of humiliation in Basra and it faces something similar in Helmand. It needs a diversion of resources but the British Government fears being mired in a mini-Vietnam at election time.
Behind all this is the fear that the Government itself is just not fit for purpose. The Sunday Times reports that the departing maverick Minister, Lord Malloch-Brown, the classic loose cannon, has averred that Brown’s government is more ‘chaotic’ than many administrations in the developing world.
This makes sense – the Prime Minister appears to have a track record of dithering, his claims often lack substance, he has no ‘vision’. His Cabinet is watching the political car in which they are passengers hurtle towards the cliff, with the driver insisting that he knows what he is doing.
If true (and we must take the Sunday Times with a pinch of salt), Malloch-Brown’s complaint would appear to centre on the problem of ‘strategic thinking’ – which rather confirms the failure to drive forward the Strategic Defence Review.
State servants need a strategic vision so that they can make decisions.
Too strong a vision without administrative control can lead to the chaotic evil of national socialism or the tyranny of communism. Too little can lead to a social anarchy that starts from the top and steadily works its way down to the street. The fish, as they say, rots from the head.
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