Up the Khyber

Another prominent leftist, Jeremy Seabrook, ridicules our mission in Afghanistan. "Stop the carry-on up the Khyber".

Those who most frequently invoke the lessons of history are the least likely to heed their sombre tutelage. How far back do you have to go to benefit from its pedagogic power? History is long, while time is short. It would be unreasonable to expect us to peer too distantly into the past; but the British relationship with Afghanistan is full of dissuasive warnings, for the most part unheeded.

Britain's official reasons for going to Afghanistan in 2006 were swiftly abandoned. The troops were to "keep the peace" in Helmand, although it is always difficult to keep what you do not possess. Their aim was to "restore order and flush out the rebels" from a place which has rarely seen order and in which rebellion is endemic.

And so it goes. The lessons of history....a place where rebellion is endemic....your Johnny Afghan doesn't understand democracy...well, maybe not that last one, but the meaning's clear enough.

The problem for someone like Seabrook is that it's difficult to paint this as an imperial adventure. There's no oil. We're there to do what we say we're there to do: defeat the Taliban, and help the Afghans build a reasonably decent society (though what "decent" might mean here is necessarily a bit vague). The objections are obvious: apart from that lessons of history stuff, there's the whole "quagmire" scenario, as well as the more basic point that, well, it's a backward country, why should we waste time, money, and lives, in a futile attempt to drag its peasant culture out of the fourteenth century? Let the bastards rot. 

Politicians, aware of this kind of sentiment, invoke the al Qaeda link, and the need to remove the terrorist threat on our streets, though Pakistan or Saudi Arabia might in that light be the better targets. But the point is, surely, that these arguments are the kind that are normally made by those on the political right: why should we bother with these people?...it's not our problem...they're backward peasants anyway. The argument from the left should be, or used to be in the old days, that, yes, in the spirit of international solidarity with the downtrodden and suffering, we should extend whatever help we can. 

It's not as if Seabrook doesn't understand what the Taliban are like:

The Taliban, devout and puritanical, introduced public executions, forbade girls to attend school and women to appear in public unaccompanied by a male relative. A Ministry for the Protection of Virtue and Prevention of Vice created a ferociously vigilant society.

So how does he get out of this?

There is yet another lesson of history, that suspect teacher in the failing school of globalism, and the most recent of all. Britain is caught up in yet another American president's war. Just as Blair was ready to be drawn into the fantasies of Bush in Iraq, so Brown has been beguiled by the saintly Obama in following him into the cloudy regions of Pashtun and Islamic division.

Yes, it's the trump card. Given a choice between helping the people of Afghanistan to escape a Taliban-controlled future, and anti-Americanism, the latter'll win every time. It's the only guiding ideology now for certain portions of the left.

Comments

[Bob-B]

Your last sentence is spot on.

[Tendryakov]

Absolutely agree with previous comment.

[Laban Tall]

Now be fair.

"why should we waste time, money, and lives, in a futile attempt to drag its peasant culture out of the fourteenth century ?"

That's a perfectly reasonable question to ask.

And it's not necessarily a question of 'letting the bastards rot'. Maybe the bastards don't see themselves as rotting ?

[Mick H]

Well yes, it is a perfectly reasonable question. Absolutely. My point is that it's a question that, politically, comes from the right, not the left.

[Bob-B]

One answer to the question above is that the great majority of Afghans do not wish to be ruled by the Taleban. Just four per cent favour a Taleban government according to this opinion poll:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/shared/bsp/hi/pdfs/05_02_09afghan_poll_2009.pdf

The rest would no doubt feel that they were 'rotting' if the Taleban were to return to power.

[sackcloth and ashes]

Never mind the fact that we actually won the wars of 1880 and 1919.

People like Seabrook who 'invoke the lessons of history' don't actually trouble to read it in detail.