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

In his speech, Gordon Brown noted that “three quarters of terrorist plots originate in the Pakistan-Afghan border regions.”  This is the equivalent of saying it doesn’t matter whether a group of children stand on a beach or swim in the sea — all will get wet. 

The big security threat to the UK comes not from Afghanistan or the border lands of Afghanistan-Pakistan but from within Pakistan itself. The intelligence agencies know this and so does the British government. It is in Pakistan where terrorist training camps are.

It is in Pakistan where Osama bin Laden, Ayman al-Zawahiri and the remnants of al-Qaeda hide and plot. It is there where the issue of Kashmir has been a pathway to the radicalisation of some.

Currently, an estimated 400,000 Britons of Pakistani origin travel to Pakistan on a yearly basis.

If only a tiny fraction of this number drifts towards terrorism, then the UK has a major security headache. And turning that headache into a migraine for Whitehall is the potential threat to the United States by these same Britons.

One can see the obvious potential: travelling into the US with a British passport engenders less suspicion than the same visit using a Pakistani passport.

It is for this reason that rumours abounded in 2007 that the then Director of Homeland Security for the United States, Michael Chertoff, had come to London to raise the issue of requiring special visas for Britons of Pakistani background. Chertoff himself in an interview with The Daily Telegraph raised the prospect of a 9/11 style attack against the US being carried out by Europeans. 

Indeed, a credible counter argument exists to Brown’s continual insistence that a withdrawal from Afghanistan would pose a threat to the UK.  It is simply that, as with Iraq, the continued presence of western troops in Afghanistan represents a security threat to the west because of the anger and resentment they generate, particularly in the aftermath of American bombing strikes that kill Afghan civilians. Many in Britain accept this linkage.

A poll for the Independent on Sunday, 47 per cent of those surveyed believe that there is a greater terrorist threat to the UK because of the continued presence of British troops in Afghanistan (44 per cent disagreed with that contention).  There is certainly evidence to demonstrate a link between their presence and an upsurge in terrorism in Afghanistan. 

As Robert Pape, an academic expert on suicide bombing, recently pointed out in the New York Times, suicide bombings in Afghanistan were almost non-existent in 2004 with only 5 compared to 148 last year. What changed in this period was the growing presence of NATO troops.

Nor is the security issue in Afghanistan about al-Qaeda. As the American government readily admits, al-Qaeda no longer has a substantive presence in Afghanistan.

Why would it need one when it can function in the lawlessness of Pakistan or its affiliates can operate in parts of Africa? Certainly, even if Afghanistan became a stable and prosperous democracy, the security challenge of Pakistan would remain---it is Pakistan that helps to destabilize Afghanistan not the other way around. 

So the Brown government invokes the threat of terrorism within the UK as the chief justification for continuing British involvement in Afghanistan. It does so because this association invokes in the minds of the public airplanes crashing into buildings, skyscrapers toppling to the ground, and mangled bodies on the London Underground.

Such imagery works, although the problem for Whitehall is that its frequent invoking of the ultimate horror provides it with a “boy who cried wolf” hue. After all, the same government warned about weapons of mass destruction that could be deployed in forty-five minutes. 

Nevertheless, this bogeyman approach will not change with a David Cameron government for the simple reason that it remains the most effective card to play on behalf of a failed strategy.

True change in the centres of power in London over Afghanistan will only occur when Washington decides that it has had enough of the quagmire.

* Steve Hewitt is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Birmingham and author of The British War on Terror: Terrorism and Counter-Terrorism on the Home Front since 9/11 and the forthcoming, Snitch!: A History of the Modern Intelligence Informer.