Steve Hewitt: The real significance of Afghanistan to UK security is that it’s not significant
Dec 14 2009 By Steve Hewitt, University of Birmingham
It’s not just the Christmas shopping season that has begun. The undeclared political campaign is well underway as the clock ticks inexorably towards a general election in the spring of 2010.
Seemingly, that would now make Afghanistan a key political issue in the battle between the Conservatives and Labour for power.
The conflict certainly is in the news but not as a pivotal determinant of the election outcome for the simple reason that there is no real difference between the position of the two main political parties and neither really has an answer regarding how to emerge from the mess.
The Liberal Democrats do offer an alternative approach, but, according to the polls, they are not in position to form a government.
Thus, Afghanistan has become like the weather: everyone complains about it but no one does anything about it.
One reason for the current stalemate over Afghanistan policy is an external factor. There is a sense of suspended animation across Whitehall as “America’s Gurkha,” as apparently some in the government now describe Washington’s faithful servant, waits for the Obama administration to decide what strategic path to follow.
The options under discussion include dramatically increasing the troop commitment or a downscale, largely giving up on notions of nation building, and take a different approach with an emphasis on counter-terrorism as the defining factor of the mission. We now know that the US ambassador to Afghanistan has recommended against sending more troops because of problems with the Afghani government.
Not waiting to make a decision about Afghanistan is a majority of the British public. According to recent polls, almost two-thirds believe that the war is unwinnable and 71 per cent want British troops withdrawn.
In their view, this now eight-year-old conflict is no longer worth additional British lives.
Hence, the need for Prime Minister Gordon Brown’s reselling of the cause of Afghanistan in his speech of November 6, points he reiterated in his monthly press conference. Nation-building and the dream of a new democratic Afghanistan are not doing well after the corruption that surrounded President Hamid Karzai’s recent re-election.
The goal of achieving a stable Afghanistan has been damaged by the election. It is further weakened by the fact that even with a surge in U.S. troops the number would simply not be sufficient according to the US’s own counterinsurgency manual to have a chance at success. And that point applies simply to numbers of troops and not to the additional commitment in aid that would also be required from the United States and its allies.
Gordon Brown consequently had little choice but to resort to an old but effective selling/scaring point: invoke 9/11 and 7/7.
September 11, 2001, however, has already been used as a justification for originally going into Afghanistan in October 2001 to remove al-Qaeda and to kill or capture its leadership.
That goal was only partially successful for a number of reasons, including the shift in emphasis from Afghanistan to Iraq part way through the operation; a strategy that the government of Tony Blair backed publicly. The successful part of the approach was in driving al-Qaeda from Afghanistan.
The predicament for the United Kingdom arises from where it went next.
