Quality | 2009.11.30
We cannot allow this foul insurgency to triumph | Julian Glover
If we scuttle away from Afghanistan we will inflict horror on its people. The wrong people will win: in three years they might not
There is a low shelf deep in the stacks of the London Library that holds the sad story of this country\'s engagement with Afghanistan . Its dusty contents come alive in the claims of those who say the British campaign in Helmand was doomed by history from the start: just another imperial expedition in a place we do not understand and in which we are always defeated. Pull out now, this argument runs; Britain comes to no good here. The records of Victorian campaigners show it.
Browsing the library\'s shelves last week in search of something to read on a flight to Kabul, I pulled down a red volume, published by John Murray in 1843. The Military Operations at Cabul, Which Ended in the Retreat and Destruction of the British Army tells at first hand the story of one of the great national disasters of the 19th century. In January 1842 the British garrison in Kabul, under siege , decided to retreat. Of the 16,000 men and women who fled, only one, a surgeon named William Brydon, made it alive to Jellalabad to tell the tale.
In the cavernous hold of an RAF C17 jet last week, I showed the book to the foreign secretary, perched nearby on a ministerial red box on the aircraft\'s steel floor. I spared David Miliband the page that records "the treacherous assassination of Sir William Macnaughten, our envoy and minister", but my implication was obvious. More than a century and a half after that terrible retreat, an army of similar size is again looking for a way out of Afghanistan. The parallels are easy; unfold a faded map from the book and you see that the boundaries of the British cantonment in Kabul in 1842 match quite neatly the site of today\'s Nato Isaf headquarters in the city.
"Our troops had now lost all confidence; and even such of the officers as had hitherto indulged the hope of a favourable turn of events began at last reluctantly to entertain gloomy forebodings as to our future fate," the book records. The modern British army is more upbeat than that; its fear is of a collapse of support at home, more than some military catastrophe in Afghanistan that makes its presence unsustainable. But the feeling, among both British military and civilian forces in the country, is of a mission heading for the end. The question is not whether to get out, but how and when.
Those last two points are much more important than people in this country realise. It is easy, from London, to be affected by live Sky News pictures of flowers thrown on corteges as they pass through Wootton Bassett , to see in the Daily Mail pictures of distraught mothers and headlines mocking politicians as they place wreaths of remembrance for the cameras – and then to write off the mission in a few words and demand we get out now. It is a lazy emotional response, and the wrong one: for Afghanistan, the military and Britain. Politicians who resist it (as Nick Clegg did yesterday) despite the short-term gains of giving in deserve much credit.
The lesson of that 1843 book is that how you flee matters as much as how long you stay. Premature and uncontrolled retreat will bring greater disasters than patience. Perhaps I have been swayed by a brief entry into the seductive bubble that surrounds any travelling British minister in Afghanistan – a world of armoured convoys, earnest DfID officials and wry diplomats – but I encountered no ignorance or stupidity, nor officials who have given up hope.
Remember two things. First: in this war Britain is tied to an American president whose election we celebrated and whose absolute intention is to get out of Afghanistan soon, not get stuck there. We should do what he asks.
Second: precipitous retreat would certainly result in the collapse of everything we have sustained in Afghanistan, and the triumph of a foul insurgency that would inflict horror on the people of the country and that does not have their support. Visiting a village outside Kabul, there was certainly one authentic moment: the raw howl from the row of men summoned to meet us when the translator mentioned the word Taliban. If we scuttle, they will have to live under them. We will not.
Faced with that, British defeatists lapse into a pernicious argument: that America will keep fighting for Afghans, even if we quit. But the paradox in this little Englander case is never admitted: that in the search for a smaller national foreign policy, they want to take the boldest foreign step of all: to break with America. It is the break with America under Obama that the pull-out-now brigade must confess to engineering.
More than that, there is a possibility that the Afghan war will not be a failure. Yes, the election of President Karzai was a fraud (though at least, unlike Gordon Brown, he has twice faced an election of some sort). Yes, many British soldiers and Afghans have died. But last week\'s presidential inauguration was not all fake; senior Afghan leaders from around the country, not all Karzai\'s cronies, were there; the Taliban could not muster such support.
If we give up now, the wrong people will win. If we give up in three years time, they might not. Talking to Miliband at the British embassy in Kabul, I did not come across an unthinking militarist but a liberal man almost tortured by war. Unhappily, he says we should continue. He is right.
For more information, please visit
http://www.guardian.co.uk/global/2009/no[...]horror-insurgency-wrong-people
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