17th August 2021
When I was at school in the 1980s, the well-meaning progressive teachers showed us the film Threads.
The purpose, no doubt, was to make us pupils think critically about the cold war and the (then) nuclear arms race.
The primary impact it had on me was, however, different – and this was because of how the film portrayed the telephones in the bunker.
The film gave me a life-long fascination about the nature of practical political authority and control.
Here on YouTube some helpful person has put together the bunker scenes from the film:
If you watch these scenes with special regard to the telephones, you will see the telephones going from an active means of communication, to an inactive means, to being discarded, and then to finally damaged beyond repair.
And this matches the collapsing political authority of those in the bunker.
To begin with there are other people at the end of the telephone, and then there is nobody, and then ultimately nobody cares – or knows.
The political authority of those in the bunker, like the communications, is cut off.
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The lesson I learned from this as a pupil was it was not enough to have people who want to be in control and to believe themselves to be in control – there also had to be infrastructure, and for there to be people to accept that control.
Without such infrastructure and deference, those ‘in control’ are akin to the motorist wriggling a gear stick or pressing the brakes when both have been disconnected.
Those ‘in control’ may as well be playing with some grand political simulator.
And so I became interested in processes and transmissions and logistics and policies and rules and laws, and less interested in personalities and partisanship.
To answer the question: just what happens when the telephone rings out but it is not answered?
I suspect that this not the intention of the film makers, or the teachers.
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I mention this because of the impotence many in the West now feel about the fall of Kabul.
There is a general sense that something should have been done.
Here is our current foreign secretary:
Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab says "no one saw this coming, we would have taken action if we had" regarding Taliban takeover of Afghanistan
— Sky News Breaking (@SkyNewsBreak) August 17, 2021
The phrase “no one saw this coming” could be the motto of the United Kingdom government since at least 2016.
And here is Susie Dent, the subtle genius who no doubt will be regarded by future historians as the best political commentator of our age:
Word of the day is ‘imprescience’ (19th century): a total lack of foresight and foreknowledge.
— Susie Dent 💙 (@susie_dent) August 17, 2021
All true: but even if we had the foresight, what could have been done?
Of course: the execution of the final departures could have been better.
But beyond the arrangements for the final exit, it is difficult to see what further control the West could have had.
I'm as depressed as anybody about what is happening at the moment in Kabul. I certainly think Biden could have handled it a lot better. But I do not have the confidence others seem to have that the Taliban could have been kept at bay indefinitely.
— Lawrence Freedman (@LawDavF) August 16, 2021
European leaders are right to see the collapse of Afghanistan as another blow to the credibility of the West. However, not a single one of them would lift (or did lift) a finger to prevent it.https://t.co/My68DeorAB
— Anne Applebaum (@anneapplebaum) August 17, 2021
And part of the problem for the United Kingdom is that not only do we have no control, we also have no meaningful policy for what we could do.
Here, there are some hard truths on the lack of any meaningful United Kingdom policy in this RUSI post:
‘This week’s ignominy may be set instead against some of the blithe statements made just six months ago in the Integrated Review: that the UK will be ‘a problem-solving and burden-sharing nation’; that it already demonstrates a ‘willingness to confront serious challenges and the ability to turn the dial on international issues of consequence’; that the UK will embody ‘a sharper and more dynamic focus in order to adapt to a more competitive and fluid international environment’; and that it will ‘shape the international order of the future’.
‘The UK’s Afghanistan experience demonstrates none of this.
‘Instead, it speaks to a generation of political leaders who have too easily fooled themselves that being Washington’s most reliable military ally constitutes in itself an effective national strategy.
‘Such a relationship may be one element of an effective strategy, but it cannot simply be the strategy.’
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Yesterday this blog looked back to a 2017 Financial Times post where I put the old calls for ‘regime change’ together with other simple notions from the first part of this century, as part of a general politics of easy answers:
Since 2017, with the ongoing experience of Brexit but also with Covid and many other things, we still see the politics of easy answers.
The sense that all that needs to be done when something must be done is for politicians to want it to be done.
The hard and complicated work of policy and (meaningful) strategy is often not even an afterthought.
We have politicians in their modern-day bunkers, thinking that having telephones to hand will be enough for their will to be done.
But political power hangs on, well, threads.
And those threads snap easily, if they exist at all.
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With the deeply compromised Trump on one side of the Atlantic and Johnson with his workshy accolites on the other, it is unreasonable to say that nobody could see this coming. Perhaps we have only just started to reap the harvest of the toxic combination of vested interests and laissez-faire leadership.
The invasion of Afghanistan always struck me as an example of “Something must be done. This is something, therefore we must do it.”
But we have found that invading countries doesn’t work. Not because we don’t have the military muscle to barge our way in, but because as democracies we can’t muster the sustained savagery necessary to overcome the inevitable resentment of a population at being told what to do by foreigners.
Eventually public support for an occupation wanes, partly because we aren’t prepared to take continuing casualties in a situation that doesn’t seem to improve, partly because our troops will occasionally commit war crimes which sicken people when they hear about it, and partly because even politicians eventually recognise the self-contradicting idiocy of trying to impose democracy and self-determination at the point of a gun. And so Western policy becomes a scramble for the exit.
But the government we leave behind is almost never strong enough to stand on its own (otherwise we wouldn’t have needed to invade in the first place) and soon either falls or comes to an accommodation with the resistance. Either way, we end up with the country in the hands of people who are more our enemies than before the invasion.
The Germans have a word for attempting such things: “Verschlimmbesserung”, an improvement that makes things worse.
So we need to learn to remove desirable but unworkable options from our repertoire of foreign policy initiatives. That in turn requires that we address the question of what to do instead.
Do we have a particular crop at this time of elected politicians who believe saying, “Make it so!” is all one needs to do to make it happen?
Many Members of Parliament now have little experience of life outside of electoral politics and its supporting occupations, like think tanks, PR and professional political advice, using the word professional loosely in this context.
Of those MPs that have had a more broader experience of life they seem disproportionately drawn from the armed forces; public sector employment; that lucrative industry dedicated to moving finance paper around and academia.
I am not saying they do not live in the real world, but they do seem to live in a part of it less real than that in which the rest of us exist.
Dominic Cummings, in particular, lives in a world almost entirely all of his own.
If the political goal is UNDERSTOOD and SHARED by all those with some influence on the programme, then what the “leaders” aim for might happen.
We’ve not been in that situation for some time. The nearest we came to it was (1) in the first year (only) of Blair’s premiership (remember the aspirations to “cool Britannia”, the Sure Start social cohesion and social uplifting programmes and the new focus on education for all?); and (2) in Corbyn’s wholly unexpected successful Labour leadership bid, the 2017 manifesto and the joyful energy of the rallies and new campaigning groups?
Both Blair and Corbyn were / are excellent communicators with intriguingly new, exciting, ambitious visions for the future that most Britons could commit to … The masses of different groups and individuals within the UK certainly UNDERSTOOD their platforms and largely SHARED them.
The only UK politician I can think of today with the kind of influence Blair and Corbyn both had is Nicola Sturgeon. If Scotland’s able to discard the heavy drag of England’s controls over the polity then it’ll be interesting to see whether a new approach to politics and democracy itself takes root there. Maybe Scotland will rescue us from ourselves?
Alas, I cannot find the exact quotation, but Aneurin Bevan once observed in print that he felt like a railway signalman when he became Secretary of State.
A signalman in a box wherein the wires to some of the levers were broken; other levers when pulled resulted in the opposite response to that which they labelled to produce and only some levers when pulled produced the expected outcome.
Yes, I think I recall that observation – and it is a good one
That rings a bell – can someone find it?
The only thing on point I could find straight away is Churchill talking in 1936 about lack of coordination between the three branches of the armed forces. https://api.parliament.uk/historic-hansard/commons/1936/jul/20/supply “What would have happened if, instead of this row of shining levers and these men doing their task in this systematised method, there had only been a harassed stationmaster rushing about with red and green flags or lamps, endeavouring to arrange the traffic by hand?”
There is the well-rehearsed anecdote of Bevan recounting his search for power at his local council, county council, and Parliament, and seeing it disappearing around the corner each time. But that is a different thing.
More recently Cummings was talking about ministers thinking they hold the “levers of power”, but finding that when the levers are pulled, nothing happens.
There is much talk about the machinery of government, as if there were some mythical central engine room with buttons to be pressed and levers to be pulled by some great social engineer, all connected to a deterministic mechanism that that produce the desired results instantly. But it is smoke and mirrors, string and sealing wax. Most of the time, government ministers are waving flags and lamps from a hilltop in an effort to attract the attention of a truculent gang of people to encourage them to begin changing what they were doing. And the general population are more truculent and less attentive than the civil service.
One of those posts that leaves a cold hard sinking sensation in the pit of the stomach (and not just because of the Threads reminder – although I could not even watch the video clips again all the way through – and those I did watch had the sound off).
“The hard and complicated work of policy and (meaningful) strategy is often not even an afterthought.”
That line sums up pretty well the mess we are in – and have been in since Cameron came to power. He was the easy, glib, slick, well oiled answer to the difficult question of who should be PM.
I am afraid to say that Rachel Reeves, who has aspirations to be Chancellor of the Exchequer in the next Labour Government, believes that an edict from Her Majesty’s Treasury to all points public sector to buy British (more than is currently the case) will be responded to with alacrity rather than with a reasoned, formal submission from Treasury officials as to why such a policy might well be bad for British exports and would certainly be detrimental to morale in parts of the public sector.
Any hopes one may have entertained that the adults would be back in the room under Starmer’s Labour may be set aside on perusal of the current central plank of Labour’s economic policies for the next General Election, its plan to buy, make and sell more in Britain (to boost British exports).
I am sure the policy tested well with (Leave voting) pensioners in focus groups drawn from the constituents of Red Wall seats. Currently they seem to be the only voters whose opinions really matter to the Government, the Opposition and much of the media.
https://jodatu.wordpress.com/2021/07/31/is-labours-proposed-policy-of-buy-make-and-sell-more-in-britain-much-ado-about-nothing-or-potentially-harmful-to-the-united-kingdoms-export-trade/
It’s a long time since the idea that the UK could have a significant military influence in the world other than by supporting the US had any real credibility. Perhaps not since Suez. If the US has decided that it no longer wants to pay to be the world’s policeman, and US voters don’t particularly care what happens to people in countries on the other side of the world, then the UK needs to adjust to its new place in the world. Even if we were still in the EU, our old role as a link between the US and Europe would be less important now that the US seems not to be as interested in having that link.
There’s an interesting piece by Stephen Bush on the New Statesman website today in which he suggests that the real break in US foreign policy isn’t between Trump and Biden, but between Bush Jnr and the three presidents who’ve come after him, none of whom share the Reagan/Bush/Bush interest in using US armed forces to change the world. Some people will regret that, some will welcome it, but the UK is unlikely to succeed in persuading the US to change back, so we may as well get used to it.
I’m painfully aware that none of what I’ve said here is in any way helpful to those people in Afghanistan who welcomed the western-inspired changes in their country and are now left stranded with the Taliban. I have no answers to that. I don’t even know how to go about formulating a question.
I agree, but I also think there is another dynamics at play. A failure of leadership, an inability or unwillingness to try to motivate the electorate on fundamental issues even when the appropriate strategy is clear. I have three examples.
1. Obama should have closed Guantanamo. Strategically, it was the least complicated of the three here. It required making the argument. I know one cannot spread one’s political capital too thinly, but…
2. Red lines on Assad’s use of chemical weapons in Syria.
3. Global warming. There is only one way about it at present. Tax carbon emissions at the appropriate rate (carbon market, whatever, they are equivalent) and compensate the low-income losers.
I understand the difficulty of carrying the electorate over but I can’t see leaders even trying. Blair was doing it, but chose the wrong issue: the Iraq war..
My clearest recollection from 9/11 has always been that email in the afternoon about it being a good time to release bad news.
The sentiments in that email predated 9/11 but have been turned into an art form since.
The views expressed yesterday by parents of deceased army personnel seem to have been imprinted in my mind in much the same way.
Military recruitment is going to get harder in the future but you have A1 and Robots who will always respond to telephone calls and herein lies the danger.
The British Army’s establishment is currently at its lowest level since 1714.
Were, for example, the Police Service of Northern Ireland to seek armed support from the military it is doubtful if the British Army would have sufficient boots on the ground to respond effectively.
British Defence Doctrine is based on the Principles of War. The Master Principle of War is the selection and maintenance of the aim.
So, when you invade a country in order to destroy Al Qaida, why, once you have achieved that aim, do you reformulate the mission in terms of a systemic transformation across the country re-defining success in terms of “democracy-building,” “state-building” and even “nation-building” and seeking to transform a culture, a near-impossible goal whose ancillary consequences were never fully considered.
Apologies if someone has already posted this link but I thought it was a considered and useful piece from a politician who, increasingly, seems at odds with his party:
https://www.theneweuropean.co.uk/tom-tugendhat-the-price-of-inaction-can-be-more-than-action/
That piece by Tugendhat in the New European is lacking in some departments. Most critically it fails to examine the failures in the UK’s think critically, “It is true that a nation’s foreign policy has one core goal: to secure the interests of its people. But this is being conflated with today’s narrow domestic priorities” is missing some crucial key words.
If he were to write, “It is true that a nation’s foreign policy [should have] one core goal: to secure the interests of its people. But this is being conflated with today’s narrow domestic [partisan political] priorities, ” then not only would he be making a more valuable contribution to the debate about the validity of Western intervention, but he would also be making a more honest point about the failure of UK grand strategy with respect to both the USA and Europe, as we see very clearly with Brexit.
Failure to be honest with oneself always leads to unhappy endings, but unfortunately all too often not only for oneself.
When I read that Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab said “no one saw this coming, we would have taken action if we had” I was rendered speechless. This was either utter incompetence of the chocolate teapot level, or coldly calculated wilful mendacity. Both are quite possible from Raab but in this case I’m sure its the latter.
In my opinion the current debacle in Afghanistan arises from a fatal lie that western leaders told themselves and their voters.
This past weekend the Observer editorialised that “Afghanistan can be pulled back from the totalitarian, terrorist abyss – and the Taliban brought to heel” a recommendation which nicely illustrates this fiction – and a great deal of hypocrisy as well given the UK sustained ‘stop the war’ campaign run by the UK left for at least a decade.
In testimony to the United States Senate Committee on Armed Services on February 25, 2003 General Eric Shinseki US Army Chief of Staff said that after overthrowing Saddam Hussein “something in the order of several hundred thousand soldiers” would probably be required for the pacification and transformation of postwar Iraq and that they would need to stay in Iraq for at least 20 yrs.
In saying this he very publicly contradicted the Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld who had said that ‘under 100 000 troops’ would be needed for the invasion and postwar occupation.
Bush and Rumsfeld where furious and Shinseki’s influence on the Joint Chiefs of Staff waned and he soon retired.
Now we know Gen Shinseki was right – knocking over Saddam in Iraq or the Taliban in Afghanistan was the easy part and the question he was asking of the US (and UK) was if it was prepared to get fully behind what will have to be a full scale military colonial occupation of that country lasting at least a generation and probably two?
Whether you are talking about Iraq or Afghanistan Gen Shinseki understood and said out loud that unless you are prepared to commit a few hundred thousand troops to occupy every town and hamlet and stay for a generation and accept huge casualties among your own then its an unwinnable war. He was asking ‘are you prepared to get behind what will have to be a decades long bloody messy campaign to transform a feudal patriarchal society and suppress militant Islam?’
Spurred on by the imperative to do something about Al Qaeda post 911 Western leaders Bush and Blair did not want to hear that and embraced the lie that regime change was easy and would be supported in their own nations and welcomed in Iraq and Afghanistan and by their regional neighbours. They were spectacularly wrong on all fronts.
I hope it’s in order to use this facility to comment briefly on Damon Linker’s theses, retweeted earlier by DAG, as I don’t have a Twitter account. The points are vaguely pertinent to this blog, anyway.
On Linker’s second thesis, regarding the conduct of senior US generals, I would argue that anyone who has been following the excellent quarterly reports and occasional lessons learned papers published by @SIGARHQ can have been under no illusion as to the capability of Afghan security forces. This was not an intelligence failure; it was a failure of leadership to pay heed to intelligence. Our own generals are just as guilty, as the CDS’s piece in The Times last week showed. And for the likes of Ben Wallace and Tom Tugendhat to even think that a hastily-assembled European coalition might have propped up the Afghan government after US withdrawal shows that they weren’t paying heed, either. Their reactions owe more to (understandable) emotion than strategic clarity.
On Linker’s first thesis, that Biden’s options were to withdraw or escalate, I think that’s unarguable. He might have made two additional points to head off some of the hastier responses.
First, comparisons to nation-building efforts in South Korea, Japan and Germany fail on the basis that the US did not face an insurgency in any of those states, so its troop presence was (and remains) endlessly sustainable. US soldiers take their families with them on assignment, marry locals, take leave locally, and use local training facilities to keep their full range of skills sharp. Such postings remain a perk and a routine part of US military life. Afghanistan? Not so much. Biden differs from the vast majority of the commentariat and foreign policy community in that, through his son, he is directly exposed to the human impact of their theories.
Second, for all the idle talk of a continued US presence being ‘low cost’, there seems to be precious little comment on its cost to Afghans. The aforementioned SIGARHQ reports show civilian casualties of fighting between Afghan security forces, Taliban and other groups running at around 1,000 per month. Meanwhile Afghan security force casualties run so high that they haven’t been reported openly since 2018. With the Taliban gaining control of rural Afghanistan, much of the state’s tax revenue, and the home villages (and therefore families) of security force members, the situation stopped being indefinitely sustainable a very long time ago: certainly before Biden came to power, and arguably before Trump. The undeniable suffering which Taliban rule will bring could only have been averted with a surge, more war, and more civilian deaths, but without any certainty that the eventual outcome (including Taliban butchery) would be any different. Acting to prolong conflict in those circumstances, even indirectly, is not the obvious moral slam-dunk so many seem to think.
None of this is to say that the withdrawal couldn’t have been better handled: it most certainly could, although it would have involved interpreters (and the like) being extracted in secret to avoid precipitating a collapse of the Afghan security force morale any earlier than eventually occurred. That would have been difficult to keep up for any length of time.
Apologies for the digression.
Take a step back and look at the limits to what governments can do. Seems to me they are all becoming more circumscribed in the feasible things they can do. We must worry they do not behave like rats in a shrinking cage.
Take electric cars, a very limited answer to people’s transport needs and one that is limited not by engineering but by fundamental physics. Take global warming, driven by population and its use of energy. Neither cutting population nor energy use is something governments want to do. Food production looks like a major problem coming up on the horizon – do we use land for housing or land for food or land for nature. Perhaps corporate Zils for them and Leafs for us is the direction of (their) travel.
From experience we know that nothing will happen until water is lapping around our feet and there are bread lines in all Western cities.
Seems to me the optimism era is over. All governments are hemmed in by realities. Governments may bluster and cover up but reality will continue to intrude. So far governments have been able to rely on technologists to push the boundaries. I think that option will cease to deliver.
I suspect we are, for some time, facing the laws of diminishing political returns. Even now we can easily dredge up the blusterings of Biden/Trump/Obama/Cameron and all the rest. Not only are fewer and fewer of their levers connected to anything but we can easily see (if we look) that the linkages are broken and more are breaking every year.
Your post, taken with the comments of Andrew Wilson, Jonathan West and Peter Sketch, raise question that looms large. What do peace-loving liberals and liberal régimes do to deter repressive, violent and illiberal rulers? We (collectively) reject colonialism, either on principle or because we are unwilling to pay its costs. We now have plenty of evidence that short military interventions don’t work. There are sufficient unscrupulous economic actors to blunt economic sanctions. So faced on top of those with the hunger for inward-looking simplism which is palpable across Europe and the US, how indeed do we further the cause of the peace-loving, the women and the liberal elsewhere?
That is a very good question, and there is perhaps no easy answer.
Some years ago I had an acquaintance who is a diplomat, who in recent years had mainly been posted to countries outside Europe. I once asked him how bad had been the effect of such things as the Iraq and Afghanistan wars on the reputation of the West.
His reply was very interesting. In some ways the reputation of the West hasn’t been damaged at all, in others the effect had been quite devastating. Western values of self-determination, democracy, rule of law, equal rights and so on seem to be shared by people more or less the world over. Widespread acceptance of these principles hasn’t been much damaged by recent events. The West is held in high esteem for having promulgated and fought for these values in the past.
However, what has massively disappointed people is the extent to which western governments don’t act according to their stated principles in their foreign relations. Western governments are perceived as being hypocrites in this matter and are widely mistrusted as a result.
Muslim anger at the West in particular seems to a significant extent to be driven by a recognition of this hypocrisy particularly in the way the West has proved incapable of breaking its habit of interfering in the government of Middle-Eastern countries, in flat contradiction of principles of self-determination. They have supported dictators despite their stated desire for the spread of democracy.
So perhaps we could live our values a bit better. That might do a great deal to defuse anger. Most people only turn to violence (against us or whoever else is in power) if they perceive that there are no nonviolent means of addressing reasonably justified complaints.
It may take a generation or two of consistent restraint for the world to believe that we are serious about a new approach. But all that means is that we need to start sooner rather than later.
I very much like the idea of “living our values”. We could probably all do that better as individuals, even. To achieve it at the level of the state would surely require us to elect a government composed of people who also lived these values. But could voters collectively do this? Even setting aside the excesses of the incumbents, we do seem to succumb to the “cake and eat it” line
Of course the grand fiction underpinning the entry by the US was that it needed to prevent a terrorist group from having a base. Fair enough. But having done that, it should have exited.
It did not do so and another decade of ‘just a little bit longer to support the industrial military complex’ was always the theme playing along merrily in the background.
The engagement piece with both the Taliban and the people’s of Afghanistan seems to have been ignored. In that guise any sense of ‘Western Democracy’ was always a forced fit. The Brits tried and failed. The Russians tried and failed and now the US and its complicit allies have also failed.
The gaping hole in the security architecture left behind due to a lack of actual engagement with the NON military peoples of Afghanistan has meant a simple stroll down the road by Taliban personnel just biding their time to walk into a vacuum.
See the short 1963 Czech film, Josef Kilian. A man is trying to find comrade Kilian, but no one ever heard of him. The man wanders the streets of Prague when he spots a “Cat rental company”. He rents a cat and goes home but when he returns next day to return the cat the company is gone with no evidence it ever existed. He continues to search for the mysterious Killian, along with others with equally odd issues. When they finally find Kilian’s office, it’s empty save for a telephone ringing. (The film carries on from there.)
Not a deeply insightful comment I’m afraid – commenters above are clearly very well informed (or very good at sounding well informed!)
But just wanted to say that this post is superb, the best I’ve read here – and I’ve followed for at least five years.
Being a programmer by trade, one of the central messages of the article is kind of obvious to me – putting a bright shiny button in an app (e.g. let’s add one that says “Leave the EU and become a buccaneering trading nation”) is just 0.0001% of the effort.
The product manager/politician can now proudly show the app and say “See?! Hold me accountable! I’ve delivered the capability I said I would”. Then they take their bonus/board seats/lecture tour and run before someone notices that no one ever did the 99.9999% of the work to design and implement what that button needed to do.
Thinking about it, I think this sort of thing is called a mock-up in the UI world. Effectively perhaps that’s how we’re running the country now.
Possibly one of the worst bits is that the product manager/politician may truly think that everything that has to be done has been done, it’s not simply the case of knowingly selling snake oil. Perhaps someone designed a “framework” and they think “job done”. But a framework is just a framework.
The similarities between poor software design and poor political design continue to hit me.
Afghanistan on the map looks like the bit that the other stans didn’t really want. Rory Stewart’s notes describe it is a patchwork of different shires who do not always get along. Not the easiest place to start for state building.
That the US should not have gone in with large numbers in the first place is (& was) obvious. Their desire to kill OBL / please home voters should only have been undertaken by SF backed with political patience, without the need to drag in Nato as a small posy of fig leaves. Less cost, less loss, less disappointment, but more thinking. Strategic thinking in particular, gathers few votes in these days of Worhol’s 15 mins of fame.