The debate about whether the British should have a military presence East of Suez seemed to have been settled under the Wilson-Callaghan Government in the 1960s and 1970s. The process of withdrawal started with the independence of India and Pakistan (widely celebrated in the UK media recently on its sixtieth anniversary), was confirmed by the failure of the last imperialist fling at Suez in 1956 and reached its coda in the bloody withdrawal from Aden. Even the Thatcher-Major Conservatives restricted themselves to support for UN and US-backed intervention after that date (Iraq, 1990/1991).
The withdrawal was logical. The British economy was in no state to maintain the infrastructure for a global empire and modern capitalism no longer required that it hold territory to win markets. As the Treasury has found, military adventures are expensive, especially now that working-class lads are no longer cheap and expendable fodder but demand some serious maintenance in terms of living standards. Worse, contemporary ideology states that military adventures are not supposed to result in a financial return – for ‘ethical’ reasons.
As any sensible realist will tell you, if military action is not self-financing in terms of plunder or markets, then it is going to have to be paid for out of the current national budget; and if it is not going to be inflationary, then it is going to have to come at the expense of other government projects, including welfare. Even Adolf Hitler and General Tojo expected a decent long-term return on their otherwise economy-shattering short term adventurism and, in this, were little different, except in their brutal impatience, from the pragmatic East India Company.
Britain East of Suez today
Thanks to his predecessor and putting aside the usual small-scale training and special ops activity that the UK has often provided to keep the Western Alliance in working order, Prime Minister Brown inherited two significant engagements that placed the UK firmly back in the East for the first time since its final departure as sovereign power had been sealed with the hand-over of Hong Kong in 1997. For only four years, the UK was itself (pace the unresolved Falklands) without delusions of empire.
The presence in Iraq is obviously the most controversial. Brown clearly wants to get out. The US just as clearly does not want him to get out until it can get out. The resulting compromise is awkward and dangerous for everybody. Not enough troops to be a credible deterrent to a local revolt in the event of a US-Iranian conflict. Just enough troops provide us with the possibility of another heroic tale of noble defeat, in the tradition of Rorke’s Drift and Ishandlwana. This attempt to go East of Suez was doomed and is seen to be doomed. But what of the other engagement?
The second is, in fact, far more serious and it derives from a very particular imperial inheritance. When the US decided to strike out at the Taliban, it was not striking out at the regime of single country but at a complex of ethnic and faith-based alliances that extended across the border to Pakistan’s North West Province and included Central Asian elements. The Pakistani zone (Waziristan), in its turn, was not merely Islamist and tribal but it had relationships that spread back to the major cities of Pakistan and even into its military and intelligence services. Western operations in West Asia have to deal with a world beyond Afghanistan that encompasses Pakistan, Iran and Central Asia – as well as India with its massive Muslim population that sometimes chafes under the even more massive presence of aggressive Hindu nationalism. Russia, China, India and the superpower US are all as engaged in the local Great Game as ever they were in the days of the Tsar and Queen Victoria.
None of this in itself needed to have changed the depth of British involvement since the days when ‘specialists’ helped the Muhajideen against the Soviets in the 1980s. The US strike against the Taliban, backed without much subtlety by the last Prime Minister, brought into play some awkward facts. The UK’s largest Muslim minority is from Pakistan. Western engagement against Islamism in Western Asia would naturally create conflicts of loyalty. While MI6 might enjoy itself understanding the intricacies of Pathan tribal politics, it was MI5 that was going to have to pick up the pieces.
As we move towards 2008, the last Prime Minister’s over-speedy insertion of expensive military collateral into Iraq may now be slowly and nervously turning into a withdrawal, but his similar insertion of troops into Afghanistan is turning into only one aspect of a major wider and more serious security problem. His involvement has stirred up a hornet’s nest of resentment against Britain.
Not only are British troops fighting on Afghan soil but many in the region perceive that Britain is fighting against Islam and that it is engaged in a project to promote certain values at the expense of traditional education and culture. Worse, and most recently, it is actively complicit in bolstering a military regime (in Pakistan) through arranging civilian cover just so that it can eliminate Islamism further to the North and West. It may look like an ethical foreign policy to us but it looks like a revival of imperialism to them – only with (as in Algeria and Turkey) military and more secular interests operating ‘against the people’.
And so Britain arrived East of Suez on a false prospectus and without adequate resources and planning between 2001 and 2003. As we go into 2008, it is stuck there as part of a violent cultural struggle in which its allies are, in some cases, less liberal than some of its critics. The UK has been trapped into a commitment to a far-away country that will be expensive and possibly futile in the long run in terms of the original liberal aspirations of 2001. Already, Afghanistan has given up on one liberal value – execution by firing squad is back on the agenda.
But let us step back a bit and ask why we are out there at all. We are probably stuck in West Asia far more than in Iraq precisely because it is not only a military commitment. Blair’s entry into Iraq and Afghanistan could have been seen in many ways – an attempt to return the UK to a state of global ‘gloire’, backed by the US and with a UN mandate; an effort to create the conditions for peace in the region; or as an over-ambitious attempt to piggy-back a bigger power and rebuild a hard power presence in an important strategic zone. Perhaps a bit of all three.
Following the public humiliation of the Royal Navy by Iran and the post-Blair commitment to withdrawal from Iraq, the British presence East of Suez increasingly looks like hubris exercised by a government that, in its previous incarnation, had neither the intelligence nor planning resources, let alone materiel, to sustain its ambitions – whether humanitarian or geostrategic. Atlanticism rises or falls to the degree that the US can manage its own affairs wisely. The UK sold its soul to a geostrategic devil and now is paying in humiliation. It would have paid in more body bags if it had not reversed policy in recent weeks.
Iraq – Who Was To Blame?
The Financial Times is always my benchmark for establishment opinion and in the late summer it asserted what I believed: that the British had lost Iraq and that the only issue was how and when to withdraw safely. The only current justification for the slowness of the withdrawal is to maintain various political fictions that are hand-me-downs from the previous administration, above all about the importance of the US alliance.
Much of the blame for the meltdown in Iraq was being placed by British government spin-doctors firmly at the door of Rumsfeld, decisions that he and his advisers took in the months immediately following the invasion. This is a convenient narrative but it avoids having to deal with the inconvenient truth that suffering from American mistakes and incompetence was always the price that the UK would pay if it accepted American leadership in the way that Blair did.
The establishment narrative implied that, if the Americans had behaved differently and followed the British counter-insurgency approach, then all would have been well. This is the psychology of denial. It privileges British wisdom far beyond what the evidence can stand. In fact, as The Financial Times recounts on 21 August (a highly recommended article), the British never truly understood the complex politics of Southern Iraq before it occupied the area. Failure in Iraq may thus be regarded as yet another failure of intelligence rather than as a military failure per se: the poor soldiers never stood a chance.
If the ‘blame game’ centres on poor planning and a failure to commit sufficient resources from the beginning, both of these charges can be laid equally squarely at an incompetent Blair Administration as at the Bush Administration, although the resource complaint may yet fall into Brown’s lap since he was Treasury Secretary throughout the period.
Iraq fell between the stools of the historic Granita compromise between Blair and Brown so that Blair’s increasingly aggressive and unpopular foreign policy could not demand an adequate transfer of funds from ‘butter’ to ‘guns’. His Chancellor remained committed to domestic economic growth and redistribution. The last gasp of independent British imperialism was foiled (at the expense of the military) by the ‘enemy within’ – a genuine social democrat within the government. This may never be said in public for fairly obvious reasons but just because it is not said does not mean that it is not true.
Such an explanation would be no comfort to the Army. The Army is in a difficult political position. On the one hand, it believes (rightly) that it should not be used except where it properly resourced for purpose, and so it is angry at its lack of material, for which it perfectly reasonably blames the government. On the other, it is widely discomfited by the Iraq War as a potentially illegal occupation (not so the role in Afghanistan) working alongside ‘gung-ho’ Americans. It comes home angry at a humiliation that is not of its own making, with its own ‘stab in the back’ legend.
British officers were certainly open about their situation before withdrawal despite desperate MoD attempts to restrict their communications with the outside world. The view of the military in Southern Iraq was that the Americans would now fare no better: ‘Basra is a hell-hole because we do not have enough troops to control the city.’ This same officer added: ‘We have been left to hold the flag while politicians enjoy their holidays and wait for Bush to make a decision.’
Afghanistan
In Afghanistan too, there are mutterings – and not only about resources and the Americans. The populist story about the UK Embassy in Afghanistan being given a swimming pool for staff to relax in while the soldiery faces water shortages in Helmand Province may be exaggerated, but it indicates a profound insensitivity on the part of the FCO. It is another example of the British establishment’s unthinking propensity to appear to treat its soldiers like an improved version of lower class swine while fanning itself on the imperial veranda. Kipling would recognise the situation.
General Sir Richard Dannatt, Chief of the General Staff, said that Afghanistan was a ‘tough’ situation and that ‘in a tough fight we are bound, from time to time, to have fatalities and of course that’s tragic…. But I think it is even more tragic, doubly tragic, if people back home don’t really understand what the Army is doing, and what the Army is doing here is absolutely critical for the future of Afghanistan.’ And that is the problem: the future of Afghanistan is of very little importance to most people compared to house prices, hospital infections and the safety of their savings.
Dannatt is often quoted politically as someone clearly irritated at the British presence in Iraq so that a sort of implicit deal seems to have been struck to help square competing pressures. The Government effectively promised to get the UK Army out of the increasingly untenable situation in Basra in return for UK military commitment to the NATO ‘bush war’ in Afghanistan. This is presented as ‘winnable’ if efforts are concentrated on it. The problem is that Brits are dying in both theatres and that the public is still distant and unenthused about investing in Afghanistan.
If the body bags mount, at a certain tipping point, the operations in Afghanistan cease to be separable as the ‘good war’ from Iraq (the ‘bad war’). Cumulative deaths and lack of success (because of lack of resources) in Afghanistan may result in further humiliations to come. Afghanistan is also seen as the test bed for a better ‘British’ way to conduct the ‘war’ against terrorism and a chance to redeem liberal internationalism and NATO – an issue affecting Germany as much as the UK.
The post-Cold War NATO project depended on two propositions: that there was less need for a Eurocentric collective defensive force against Russia; and, given the propensity of institutions to try and reinvent themselves rather than close down as surplus to requirements, there was a new role for NATO in the projection of Western power as a force for stability and peace against global anarchy and latterly, insurgency. Both of these propositions are undermined by the return of Russia as a military power and the inability of NATO to project decisive power within the economic means of the West.
They are also heavily undermined if Afghanistan is a failure; and the Afghanistan model depends on a sequence of events where military victory, humanely applied, operates alongside political dialogue to permit investment in humanitarian efforts that create a public will for change in the liberal-democratic tradition. Nice if you did not have an opposition that was well armed and as intelligent as you are. It is easy if you do not patronize these people as the modern version of ‘savages’. Much more difficult if your military victory involves many civilian casualties and a determined attempt to destroy the economic livelihood of the peasantry while NGO officials ride around flouting local customs on the basis that their largesse gives them ‘flouting rights’.
The Northern Ireland scenario
As for political dialogue, an associated political casualty of the Iraq fiasco, and a reason for desperation amongst liberal internationalists over Afghanistan, is the much-touted ‘Northern Ireland’ scenario for troubled spots overseas. The circle around Blair suffered from hubris in believing that what worked in one set of conditions was transferable as political science without taking account of cultural and even existential variables. This probably derives from their ‘universalist’ instincts. We saw the same impulse in the neo-conservative camp and we saw it in the Kennedy-Johnson era. It is generally what happens when you let intellectuals near international relations. Answer – don’t.
Northern Ireland’s apparent success (in fact, far from as clean a success in terms of civil order than often believed) was central to the Blairite vision. It is still being touted as the solution to the Palestine Question and it was repeatedly presented as the model for Southern Iraq. When British troops leave Basra, they leave this delusion of Blairite foreign policy mouldering in its grave unless, by some miracle, NATO can get the warring factions of Afghanistan to agree on a power-sharing arrangement and lay down their arms. The same strategy is touted for Waziristan.
In fact, the policy is declining into something much darker represented by US tactics in Anbar and now Ninewah Province in Iraq. Find the non-ideological tribespeople, bribe them, give them guns and turn them on the Islamists. Fine as far as it goes – and it seems to have brought some sort of stability to Anbar – but we are sure it is not quite what the mild-mannered liberal and evangelical advocates of peace and reconciliation had in mind when they surged around the government for pet project funding.
The illusion of Northern Ireland is that constant dialogue and alternatively talking tough and offering concessions between reasonable people can shift a militarized problem into a civilian one; that politics is always the solution and that sweet reasonableness is part of politics. This works within a fundamentally liberal-democratic culture but not where there are no natural leaders, where the political environment is anarchic for as far as the eye can see and where those protagonists with authority do not slip so much occasionally into disrespect for the rule of law (as the British did in Northern Ireland) but have no concept of it in the theatres of concern. These are small wars of nineteenth century brutality constrained only by the access to events of the media and the moral compass of ‘good soldiers’.
West Asia in the round
Which brings us back to Pakistan. The British have put immense effort, with US and Saudi support, into managing the Pakistani political process with one end in view: getting Pakistan to commit to joint Western efforts to clear what they consider to be the vipers’ nests in Waziristan so that Afghanistan can be recaptured in a major 2008 offensive. The political shenanigans surrounding Musharraf, Sharif and Bhutto, with walk-on parts by the Supreme Court and a set-piece confrontation with the Islamists at the Red Mosque, have frustrated the hell out of military strategists. It is all taking so long!
The West waited for Musharraf to confirm himself as ‘civilian’ President. Pro-Western military and intelligence services were well supplied with armament and mildly purged of extremists. A newly democratic mandate, through a rather sleazy deal with the PPP, was planned. Islamists had fair warning of Islamabad’s, London’s and Washington’s intentions. But valuable military campaigning time had been lost.
The State of Emergency that was called in November 2007 demonstrated that there were far too many internal contradictions in all this. In public, driven by media outrage, the embarrassed West condemned the manoeuvre. In private, Western officials opposed the coup as tactically inept, but probably were not unhappy to see Musharraf silence the second front created by the uppity lawyers getting in the way of the Bhutto Plan. After a short burst of opprobrium, the President could return to an adjusted programme of political liberalisation that would, in the end, give sufficient cover to the Spring Offensive.
At the time of writing, it is unclear which way this will all go. By the Spring of 2008, either Pakistan will be back on a sufficiently democratic path with new constitutional arrangements for the West to draw a veil over the November ‘coup’ or we will be in a different and unpredictable ball game. The West wants a pro-Western democrat – Bhutto is preferred – to run things while the Army just gets on with the job of extirpating extremism in the frontier zones. This is now a very uncertain outcome at the time of writing.
Once the winter has passed, the West, Kabul and Islamabad must clear out Waziristan through a combination of political deals, bribery and superior force and they must push the Taliban back into the hills with minimum Western body bags – or something very serious may happen.
First, the allies (as in Iraq) will start to disappear: the German mandate will not be renewed in the Autumn of 2008 without some clear successes and British public opinion certainly will certainly tire of British engagement if it is all cost and no victory. New allies, like Japan, might be deterred. Second, if Islamism is not put in its box soon, it may develop legs alongside democratic discontent in Pakistan itself, ‘inspire’ some North Indian brothers and discover that it has more in common with the Shia poor than with Sunni elites. That way geopolitical madness lies.
So, a combination of an over-eager willingness to commit men and material to what everyone thought was a winnable ‘bush war’ in 2001 and the fear of the importation of terrorism through ethnic links between Pakistan and the UK has lead to the same levels of intense engagement in Pakistani politics as the French have in Algerian. French national interests always got bogged down in North Africa and now it looks, as a perfect example of imperial blowback, as if British national interests are going to get bogged down in West Asia.
Some Long Term Implications
The military commitment to Afghanistan is now the final test bed for the domestic political acceptability of any British hard power presence East of Suez or indeed anywhere outside the North Atlantic/Eurasian/Mediterranean homeland. Victory in Afghanistan and a stable liberal Pakistan is the prize but the sheer scale of the challenge means that the UK will have little resource for much else for the foreseeable future. Indeed, we should think of this now as less an imperial intervention East of Suez and more an extension of community policing in the West Midlands.
So, if West Asia is now homeland security grown large and British ‘gloire’ is at an end, then this raises some question marks about whether the UK any longer has the will or resources to be global sidesman to the US. The US, in any case, thinks far beyond NATO. NATO is a mere component of a system of security that it is expected will be put back in place, based on so-called pivotal states, once current difficulties are contained or (less often) solved. We would not underestimate American resolve to recover power and standing over the coming years.
From this perspective, the UK’s role, as a ‘pivotal state’, is looking less secure than, say, that of Ethiopia, Indonesia, Australia or Pakistan itself. The liberal West and free markets are now secured on the European Union. The US can enjoy the humiliating spectacle for Europe of Sarkozy trying to oust the UK as most favoured European nation, knowing that there will always be some European leader prepared to want to be America’s best friend.
Similarly, sniping between the US and UK military may lead to some serious military questioning about the precise value of the more extreme Atlanticist sentiment found in the corridors of power. Success or failure in Afghanistan (given failure in Iraq) becomes a test for whether the UK military can or should operate ‘out-of-area’ at all if Government will not trade butter for more guns.
The latest Comprehensive Spending Review indicated that, if there is money to spare, it would go to the security and intelligence services and into soft power arrangements (such as the BBC Arabic and Farsi broadcast channels) and not into the sort of military resource that could cope with more than one military intervention at a time.
The commitment to improving conditions for ordinary soldiers and their families and changes in compensation arrangements also suggest that the military is increasingly going to be seen as just one public service amongst many and that men’s lives will be used sparingly as highly trained specialists.
The lack of commitment to spending on armament is critical. It sets the liberal internationalist progressive wing of the Left, which would be prepared to spend working-class money to intervene against genocide and for democracy, right up against domestic Leftist concerns with education, transport and healthcare. It ensures continued divergence within the British centre-left between those who are becoming increasingly indistinguishable from post-neo-conservatives and who look to the US Democrats for leadership, and ‘national’ Leftists concerned with election victory and the delivery of public services.
Brown, whose prime concern is electability, almost certainly knows that the limits of military intervention have been reached. That is not to say that it won’t happen. It will happen (if only to shut the progressives up every now and then) but under very different and much more politically calculated conditions.
Blair lost the general population some time ago. Now the liberals are about to lose their leverage over public sentiment based on spurious appeals to ‘ethics’. The Burma protests will sit alongside the massive demonstrations over Iraq as examples of the utter futility of mass protest without hard power to back them up. The commentariat are diminished. Politicians understand that they, and not the drafters of (say) the Euston Manifesto, decide.
Meanwhile, within the West, Sarkozy and Kouchner can be expected to take up much of the slack on Africa. The West is increasingly trying to act through proxies, like the ramshackle African Union, but the message to British policy-makers is clear: the most recent attempt to go East of Suez (2001- ) has been a disaster. (The French attempt to remain South of the Sahara may well go the same way.) If the UK remains East of Suez now, it is not because it has to be there but because policy errors since 9/11 have forced it deeper into a mire from which it cannot easily extricate itself.
Putting all this together, the lack of political will to fund hard power within the West (outside the United States), the diversion of resources into soft power and into intelligence and homeland security operations, the ‘cat-and-mouse’ operations required to force emerging countries to act as Western proxies, and the lack of profit for the public and for business in continued out-of-core-area operations, the future looks grim for the liberal interventionists.
Darfur may loom on the horizon as a test case for the West in 2008 but it is West Asia that will finally prove that the old empires have nothing to contribute to the rest of the world except trade and culture; and that trade and culture are best served by keeping troops and ships available to defend the homeland and for genuinely well planned, collaborative efforts undertaken within the bounds of international law and public approval.
Tim Pendry runs the public affairs and communications company TPPR.
| www.tppr.co.uk
Notes
- <http://e-paper.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/iraq/article2284295.ece>