15th August 2021
On this depressing day of news from Afghanistan, we also get the sorry spectacle of domestic performative politics.
As Kabul falls – in minutes and hours, as opposed to the ‘thirty to ninety days’ of some recent expert commentary – the United Kingdom government is convening a COBR meeting and parliament is to be summoned.
The foreign secretary has even cut short his holiday:
Shared my deep concerns about the future for Afghanistan with FM Qureshi. Agreed it is critical that the international community is united in telling the Taliban that the violence must end and human rights must be protected.
— Dominic Raab (@DominicRaab) August 15, 2021
Why did we not realise before that we could just ‘tell’ the Taliban to protect human rights?
Well, that’s them now told.
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All this political theatre – this post facto posturing – misdirects us from an even more depressing truth.
That the government of the United Kingdom – for all its post-Brexit claims – is internationally impotent here as in other areas, but it cannot accept this.
It would not have mattered much – if at all – if the COBR meeting and the recalled parliament had happened before the fall of Kabul.
Only the sequencing would have been different.
We have the illusion of focus, and the pretence of control and influence.
We tell ourselves and others that we can do something, and that we will do something.
But it is only for show.
While Kabul falls, in real time and in fast-forward.
Our government cannot admit its international irrelevance – not even to itself.
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‘World-beating’
The UK is a small player in this, and while this is a reminder that the UK can’t simply will itself into being a global player agin, it’s the actions of the US that count.
I find myself looking at the actions of the current president (a Democrat) and remembering that the previous Democrat encouraged pro-democracy uprisings in Syria only to hang the rebels out to dry when a US intervention would have been needed to prevent them being crushed by Assad. And I wonder why any liberal or pro-democracy group anywhere in the world would trust the US as an ally after what has happened here. The message seems to be that when things get tough, the Americans will go home.
Do you have any proof Obama ‘encouraged’ pro-democracy uprisings in Syria?
As far as I remember the uprising in Syria (and elsewhere in the ME and N Africa) was triggered by the successful popular overthrow of the Tunisian government.
In Syria the Assad government responded by mass killing of civilians using its airforce and heavy artillery and even poison gas. Mindful of the bipartisan opposition to more US military involvement in the ME given the Iraq debacle Obama went to Congress for an authorisation (which Bush never did before launching the invasion of Iraq) for a 3 month campaign using air and naval assets so as to degrade Assad’s offensive capability and control Syrian airspace. The motion never even made it to a vote in Congress and Obama dropped it.
In the UK anti-war sentiment was so high that the House of Commons worried that Cameron might get the UK into bed with a US military action in Syria passed a motion forbidding any UK involvement.
It was shortly afterwards that Putin alarmed by how close his client Assad had come to a western military action that almost certainly would have toppled Assad, sent in a sizeable Russian military force and including in particular a state of the art ground to air missile defence system so sending a message to the west that if they contemplated any future action it would be very costly in casualties and as such politically impossible at home.
Our government is not irrelevant, if it were then we would not be hearing tales about Afghani people that have helped us being refused help from us and getting murdered instead.
Our governement is not irrelevant, it is leading the field in the western world at being utterly despicable shits.
The famous words of Dean Acheson, in 1962:
” “Great Britain has lost an Empire and has not yet found a role. The attempt to play a separate power role—that is, a role apart from Europe, a role based on a ‘special relationship’ with the United States, a role based on being the head of a ‘commonwealth’ which has no political structure, or unity, or strength . . . This role is about played out.”
As part of the EEC, and then the EU, Britain was allowed to continue with the delusion that it was a major player on the world stage, a nation looked up to by others for its skilled diplomacy, its pre-eminence in the shaping of international law, its sense of “fair play”, and thus the ability to punch above it’s weight.
Boris Johnson and his cronies, in a few short years, have cast that reputation onto a bonfire. Indeed, in the last few months, they’ve poured petrol on it. And yet, here they are, still deluding themselves that anybody cares about what the UK says, thinks, or does anymore.
The end of British (or, more accurately perhaps, English) Exceptionalism? The point at which, finally, Britain gives up all pretence of being a world power and settles upon its true status, a middle-sized, middle-ranking European state with few friends in the world, a reputation for mendacity, and a determination to make things right?
Sadly, it would appear not.
It would be funny, it the consequences weren’t so tragic.
Spot on Dexter.
England has become (even more) irrelevant.
You’re just not believing hard enough, Shaun…
But it’s not just Afghanistan, it’s Iraq, Syria, Lybia and arguably the former Soviet Union. ‘The West’ i.e. America seeks to impose its form of democracy and neoliberal economics to protect or further its own interests. When did this approach last work, possibly in the Balkans?
Listen to Gen. Parker at 15:54 here https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m000yt96
My experience (admittedly very limited) suggests that all countries are prone to this kind of theatre.
I grew up and spent my younger years in Canada – and whenever there was a major world crisis, Parliament would get recalled and a debate would be had – and then the world would not even really notice Canada’s ‘contribution’. To be fair, at that time, the Canadian population was in the mid-twenty millions, which limited the resources available for international intervention (especially with a behemoth to the south of the border), but that did not mean the theatre did not have to go on. I suspect every country wants to feel it has a role to play.
I would say that the difference is that the UK is now taking on a similar role but has not yet realised its limited capacity in the world, except that most Canadians actually believed that the country was making a significant contribution, when the reality was that it was, while understandably so, quite limited. I fear that this delusion is more widespread than just the UK.
Perhaps, to be fair, there was a small difference. Canada had at least prided itself in its ‘peace-keeping’ role, which was, to a degree, an acknowledgement that it had a specific role where it could play its part. The UK may not have yet quite defined its own niche.
In order to define that niche, the UK would need to comprehend what it was, as well as understand how it is now seen in the eyes of the rest of the world.
I agree with your opening assessment – “performative politics”.
But you then address only HMG. You ignore others. E.g. Keir Starmer’s “What I want to see is our government stepping up and leading this, and calling for an urgent meeting of Nato and an urgent UN security council meeting”. Lisa Nandy’s “Why has it taken until today for the Foreign Secretary to decide to cut short his summer holiday?”
Faced with that from the official Opposition no government could sit back and leave an open goal.
It’s depressing if the tribalism of modern politics forbids criticism of the whole political class.
It always interests me how people drag in HM Opposition in situations like this, as if responsibility for the decision to bail on Afghanistan is somehow shared between the Tories and Labour.
What Starmer and Tandy might or might not say about this is frankly an irrelevance.
What Johnson and Raab say about this is also an irrelevance. They are completely impotent.
You’re correct, though; questioning what the opposition parties are “doing” in the face of this calamity is nothing more than deflection.
Now Boris and Priti are spared having to house and feed all those interpreters and other helpers. Took some skill to avoid that one.
Anyway, I am sure the Chinese will make a better fist of turning Afghanistan into an ideal society. So, all’s right with the world, just turn off the newsreels for a day or two.
The families of the soldiers killed or seriously wounded in Afghanistan over the past years may legitimately question what it was all for now that the country has been handed over to the tender mercies of the Taliban with the unspeakable evil that implies.
You are right: the impotence is palpable. And yet again a serial failure by the UK and US, repeated now in Afghanistan but equally exposed in Libya and Iraq; we win the fighting war and then signally fail to plan for and invest in the peace. The Americans hate the comparison to the great “shining lie” that was Saigon and Vietnam – but only because the comparison is so apt. The same mistakes made. Top brass and the Pentagon assuring the White House that the Afghans / South Vietnamese army was in cracking shape, when just a few minutes at the sharp end would have exposed the opposite was the case. The UK has now lost four times in Afghanistan, rightly regarded as the graveyard of empires from Alexander the Great onwards. High time we realised we are no a middling sized country in Europe, not a mighty power bestriding the globe. Fat chance.
I wonder if that’s the underlying problem?
I come from a family of – to be blunt – shortarses, all of whom had chips on their shoulders about it throughout of their lives, and a concomitant tendency to resort immediately to fists as a way to prove that their stature said nothing about their “worth.”
(I’m a lofty 5′ 8″ – a veritable Colossus among my clan – but I have something of the same instinct.)
Classic “Napoleon Complex”, really – and I often see that same tendency in how the UK behaves.
The UK; the Scrappy-Doo of global power and influence, since 1945.
Remind me, why is Afghanistan is considered the graveyard of empires since Alexander the Great? Can you give me a list of the empires that came to trouble there in the subsequent 2400 years?
I mean, Alexander himself was not turned back from Afghanistan. He conquered Sogdiana and Bactria, and then married Roxana, daughter of the satrap of Bactria. He carried on campaigning into India for several years more before returning to Persia and Mesopotamia, where he died.
While in Bactria, he founded cities, including Alexandria Eschate, which lasted for hundreds of years under successor Hellenistic Greco-Bactrian and Indo-Greek kingdoms.
The Romans came nowhere near. It was not the graveyard of the Kushans, or the Sassanians, or the Mongols. Regional powers, such as the Durrani Empire, came from Afghanistan to dominate their neighbours.
Sure the British (and more recently the Russians, and the Americans) have struggled to impose their will in Afghanistan since 1842, but there is much more to say about the history of Afghanistan than warring tribesmen.
Yes, the ‘graveyard of empires’ line has to do a lot of work for over 2000 years
Dear Mr Green
I agree that to recall Parliament is probably beside the point.
However, I think that in the Foreign Secretary’s place I should wish to be in the department in case there is any prospect of meaningful joint representations with other countries to what is the new government of Afghanistan, at a time when speed may be of the essence.