Europe is not taking its Afghan war seriously

| 04-09-2009 | Spanish Politics • UK Politics | Written by Matthew Bennett | 4 comments

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The killing and dying continue in Afghanistan as in all wars but Europe and the US have neither any clear idea of what they are doing there nor a successful strategy for executing their plan and they won’t accept the implications of a proper moral commitment.

NATO has just dropped another bomb on another group of Afghan civilians and here in Spain, newspapers are hyperventilating this morning because Spanish soldiers in Afghanistan actually got into a fight and killed some Taliban.

More troops is the cry heard on both sides of the Atlantic in response: El Mundo already has a story up about the Spanish Defence Ministry considering troop increases and General McChrystal – Obama’s new top Afghan strategy dog – is about to recommend the US does likewise.

It is clear that different European countries clearly have different ideas about the concept of pulling their weight but whatever their contribution, all of them are tiny compared to US efforts and all are really there for the same main reason: to try and win the race to be Obama’s best friend.

Gordon Brown, unsurprisingly, can’t even get his special relationship right: hot on the heels of Al-Megrahi’s release back to Libya, there have been stories this week wondering if he will shortly be considering a British withdrawal (retreat?) from Afghanistan, not because it’s strategically right or wrong, of course, but because there are general elections to be won next May in the UK.

Europe is confusing in Europe for Europeans (and best not ask the British), so can we really expect it to be otherwise 3,500 miles away in the Helmand Valley?

Europe’s own path through history – from feudalism to today’s democratic parliamentary monarchies and republics – took rather a long time and involved much mutual blood-letting. It also required a few centuries of social, political and economic development.

And even before we ask if that’s what Afghans really want – it doesn’t look like many of them do – why do we think that we can turn Afghanistan’s version of warlord-tribalism into some kind of democracy in even the forty years suggested by the new head of the British Army General Sir David Richards?

Our governments don’t, really, which is why European presences are smaller or larger tokens to be charged to the ’support the US’ account. Our efforts are far from Churchillian, however much our current leaders try and use the positive aspects of his historical image in the media whilst replaying D-Day and talking of chummy World War II allied relationships.

If we were to look at how much effort – money, lives and time – was really required for this project, European countries would probably all need to bring back conscription.

Afghanistan is twice the size of the UK and larger than Spain. The Pashtun tribe which we are told supports the pesky Taliban so much, is, according to Wikipedia, composed of 13 million people in Afghanistan and if we add to them the 28 million Pakistani Pashtuns, we have a tribe almost as populous as the Kingdom of Spain.

Whilst certain Taliban practices are morally repugnant to educated, compassionate human beings around the planet, our own faulty moral thinking around Afghanistan is the main cause of our having not one but several current missions in the country.

If the underlying motivation is more about human rights (save the Afghan women and children!) than purely military options (kill the Taliban, hold the villages) or infrastructure development (Kajaki dam generator, schools, etc), we would need to rethink our entire uncommon European foreign policy outlook and take into account many other delinquent countries and groups.

There is a clear moral case – born of European history – to be made for intervention in Afghanistan and for trying to help Afghanistan develop as a country and a society. All we need do is read the stories of Afghan farmers mutilated by the Taliban for voting or brave Afghan women who live under 24-hour armed protection and receive bullets in the post from warlords for trying to educate Afghan girls.

But that case is not being made effectively and we are not currently prepared as countries either to resource that effort to any great extent or to accept the further moral and practical commitments that would imply to so many other people in so many other parts of an often nasty world.