Bad history is as much a risk to Britain’s security as bad policy
Aaron Ellis 8.50am
David Cameron has had a complicated relationship with history. Accuracy has on occasions been spurned, in favour of misleading but politically expedient analogies. The Prime Minister flattered an audience in Pakistan in April when he said that the British Empire was responsible for “so many of the world’s problems”, including Kashmir (to the irritation of many historians and journalists).
Arguably, bad history is a main reason why Mr Cameron supports the Afghan war. It is rooted in a superficial understanding of that country over the last two decades - an understanding which also informs a fear of failed states. That fear obscures the real problem of the war in which Britain and its NATO allies are enmeshed.
The Prime Minister accepts the conventional wisdom that failed states breed terrorism and offer a safe haven to groups like al-Qu’aida; if we leave Afghanistan now, then the country will collapse and the evil that was demonstrated so spectacularly on September 11th 2001 will be resown amidst the chaos. “This is a great example of a country that if we walk away from and if we ignore and if we forget about, the problems will come visited back on our doorstep”, the Prime Minister has warned. In the week of the 10th anniversary of 9/11, this is not a consideration easily dismissed.
In the Strategic Defence and Security Review (SDSR), the ‘lesson’ of abandoning Afghanistan is even transformed into a doctrine for pre-emptive action. We must intervene early in failed states with aid and a small military presence to offset the risk of future, dearer costs to our safety. This echoes the worldview of Tony Blair, which the Prime Minister had supposedly rejected when he said you cannot drop democracy from 40,000 feet.
The past is not quite as had been made out by politicians. Soon after Moscow stopped funding the Communist regime in Kabul, Afghanistan certainly became a failed state: government authority collapsed and rapacious, violent warlords filled the vacuum. But the Taliban reimposed authority over most of the country and it was under the umbrella of their authority that al-Qu’aida found shelter, something which worried the United States well before September 2001.
In the last years of the Clinton administration and in the early months of the Bush one, the Taliban came under strong pressure to hand over the terrorists they harboured. It has been argued that they resisted this pressure because Washington showed ‘no appetite for taking the level of political, diplomatic, military and economic risk required’ to make them think otherwise about the benefits of keeping Osama bin Laden and his associates in Afghanistan.
Conceptually, the lessons David Cameron has drawn from ‘abandoning’ Afghanistan are also flawed. The link between failed states and terrorism has been under continuous criticism since the mid-2000s. ‘In chaos, not even terrorists are safe,’ one study has noted sensibly. A country with no infrastructure, riven with factions vying for power, is not the best place from which to wage a global war. Terrorists need weak states, with pockets where the government has no authority, and alienated locals who can give their fighters the help they need. In other words, terrorists need Pakistan.
The problem this war poses London and Washington is not a quasi-military one, as the failed state narrative suggests, but a diplomatic one. How do we make the weak (but proud) government in Islamabad do what we want them to do – tackle al-Qu’aida – when they either can’t or won’t? Our safety depends on the answer to this question rather than pouring money and men into war-torn countries.
In his excellent history of British Foreign Secretaries, Lord Hurd, a TRG patron, wrote: “The most dangerous form of ignorance is that smidgeon of shallow knowledge which lacks any understanding of the characters or contexts of past decisions.” In my opinion, this aptly describes the foreign policy rhetoric of David Cameron.
Our current Prime Minister is not the only person to buy into the failed state narrative via a misreading of Afghanistan’s history; by ignoring the mounting evidence to the contrary, however, he has committed the government to an expensive but futile counterterrorism policy. Britain will invest itself financially and militarily in unfortunate, but strategically unimportant countries. Meanwhile, where there are terrorist safe havens, in weak countries with proud, autocratic governments, we will find ourselves fumbling about diplomatically – as we have been in Pakistan and Yemen.
This policy, informed by bad history, puts our security at risk and will prove costly to a government with dwindling resources.
Follow Aaron on Twitter @ThinkStrat
