Opinion - News Analysis   

Afghanistan, a post-imperial spasm

The British government is lining up the former leader of the United Kingdom’s Liberal Democrat party and the international community’s high representative in Bosnia Paddy Ashdown to rule Afghanistan. This is not a silly season story or a Gilbert and Sullivan spoof, merely a measure of the lunacy now polluting British foreign policy. Mr. Ashdown has time on his hands and British Prime Minister Gordon Brown wants to show himself as firm a liberal interventionist as Tony Blair. He, too, wants to make Afghanistan a peaceful and prosperous democracy and may as well start now. So Paddy’s the man.

Mr. Ashdown returned recently from Kabul consumed with imperial zeal. In The Guardian he admitted the current chaos, a city awash with thousands of troops and aid workers from some 36 countries, all supposedly involved in “se curity and reconstruction” and almost none able to leave the capital by land. A reputed 10,000 NGO staff have turned Kabul into Klondike during the goldrush, building office blocks, driving up rents, cruising about in armoured jeeps and spending stupefying sums of other people’s money, essentially on themselves.

In the provinces, the Americans are running a guerrilla army out of Bagram, trying to kill as many “Taliban” or “Al-Qaida” as possible, while the British heroically re-enact the Zulu wars down in Helmand. Neither takes any notice of President Hamid Karzai, whose deals with warlords, druglords, Iranians, and Taliban collaborators are probably the best hope of stabilising Afghanistan when the foreign occupation is over. But since that is claimed by Britain to be virtually never, the only certainty is a rising tempo of insurgency.

Mr. Ashdown said he found “bewildering ... the international community’s tendency to repeat whatever fails.” He then illustrated his own point by repeating the inane conditional optimism. Success, he wrote, was still “probable” if we “increase resources and redress the disastrous failure of the international community to get its act together.” All that has been said and tried for six years with conspicuous failure.

Mr. Ashdown’s bewilderment shows that he does not understand occupation. Over time, the occupying force falls apart and its components fight for their own vested interests. Consider three policies now being pursued in Kabul. The first concerns drugs. There are 15 separate organisations devoting their time to eradicating Afghanistan’s one indigenous source of income, opium. In that time, the opium harvest has broken every record, while trying to suppress it has alienated farmers and fuelled insurgency. Everyone in Kabul knows the policy is both stupid and counter-productive, but since grants and jobs are tied to it, the policy is entrenched and will not change.

Then there is the bombing of Pashtun villages for sheltering the Taliban. Thousands of civilians have died as a result, inducing hostility to occupying forces and a desire for revenge that recruits thousands to the cause of killing western troops. But soldiers sent to fight the Taliban have been ill-equipped and outgunned and needed air support, while air forces have craved a “battlefield role.” Again, the policy is known to be counterproductive yet continues because it delivers a cheaper “kill rate” and satisfies military interests.

A third policy is the most overhyped in British military history, that of “winning hearts and minds.” Not only is it meaningless without adequate security, which would require 50,000 rather than 5,000 troops in Helmand alone, it also involves tipping large sums into nervous tribal villages, tearing apart power structures and creating feuds, the money usually ending up with warlords or the Taliban. All this is known in Kabul, but the money has been allotted and must be spent, however counterproductive the outcome.

In each of these cases, the mismatch between what makes sense and what is implemented is total. Mr. Ashdown is right that the same mistakes are constantly made. But his belief that they can be overcome by a British “coordinator” with enough money and power is naive. He will get neither. Kabul is already a monument to how vested interests can negate the best of interventionist intentions. Toppling foreign regimes is a dangerous and unpredictable business. But when invasion becomes occupation, freelance nation builders become freelance empire builders, each with budgets and jobs to protect.

Getting out of Basra is now a firm diktat of British defence planning. The only sensible question in Kabul is how long before the same diktat applies there. The longer British officials think they can win a war against the Taliban, the more it risks tearing Pakistan apart and sucking Iran into the conflict, both of which would be completely daft. Yet that is where liberal intervention is now leading. It is a post-imperial spasm, a knee-jerk jingoism and plain dumb. — © Guar dian Newspapers Limited, 2007

Printer friendly page  
Send this article to Friends by E-Mail

Stories in this Section

A trail of destruction
HIV awareness in the workplace
The decade of our discontent
Beijing racing to meet the deadline
Myanmar: Rhetoric and reality of Indian democracy
Just how tough are our brains?
Afghanistan, a post-imperial spasm
Corrections and clarifications
123 agreement
Srikrishna report
Sane counsel
From the past
Women only spaces

Copyright © 2007, The Hindu. Republication or redissemination of the contents of this screen are expressly prohibited without the written consent of The Hindu