417. That is, at time of writing, the British death toll for the
Afghan war. The latest victim was Pte Gregg Stone. He was 20. To put it
another way, he was 9 when the planes hit the World Trade Centre.
After over a decade, the victories of the Western Alliance in
Afghanistan are hard to spot. The Afghan opium trade is estimated at
$4bn, a quarter of which accrues to the farmers. The entire Afghan
economy is worth less than $18bn. Shariah is an embedded part of the
country’s legal framework. The corrupt government of Hamid Kharzai
barely extends to the suburbs of Kabul.
The right makes much of its veneration of the martial ideal, writing
off those who ask whether this is a good thing as effete,
liberal-socialist intellectuals who’d struggle to do a push-up.
Personally, I resemble that remark. However beyond buying their
Help-for-Heroes underpants, it’s curious how little of the aftermath
conservative politicians and commentators like to deal with. The
government is cutting mental health provision, even though soldiers are
more likely to suffer mental health problems. It is restricting access
to disability benefits, so those who have lost limbs in conflict will
have to justify their benefits to those famously compassionate assessors
from Atos.
Prime Minister’s Questions is perhaps the most stomach-churning
display. From Tony Blair onwards, our leaders have invoked the names of
the dead as an incantation of silence to stop the jeering from across
the aisle. That stopping these deaths is entirely within the power of
the Prime Minister is never mentioned. The subtle denial that there is a
war going on can be heard when political correspondents discuss
Britain’s deficit as “unprecedented in peacetime”. After all for them,
and almost all of us, it is peacetime. It is interesting of course that
our own crusader kings rarely impress the need to wear a tin hat for
democracy on their own children. I have very little time for the House
of Windsor, but its latest generation dutifully went off to fight the
government’s fight. Euan Blair preferred Yale. Perhaps his fathers’
words about the importance of ‘boots on the ground’ were kept to the
dispatch box not the dinner table.
Increasingly, Britain uses its armed forces to shore up a waning
sense of national identity and importance, to make ourselves feel we are
on the side of goodness and freedom. When the futility of our
interventions becomes apparent, we bring out the bunting, hence the
strange new event of ‘Armed Forces Day’ on the 30th of June. We vaunt
the heroes collectively as symbols of national valour. We demand young
people, disproportionately from the poorer areas of our islands, die, so
we can feel good about our country. In many ways this is a reversion to
the state of affairs that existed before the conscription of the World
Wars and post-War national service. War is what happens to other people.
The recent hand-wringing over Syria brings this point home expertly. There is nothing stopping those who believe in Responsibility to Protect
catching a plane to Lebanon, buying a gun and taking up the fight
against the brutal Assad regime. It’s what the International Brigades
did in Spain. Indeed, it’s what the Mujahedeen have been doing for
decades. However with the exception of a handful of journalists, there
seems a strange reluctance to follow this path. What liberal
interventionists really want is NATO to kill Syrians until the Syrians
stop killing Syrians. They want a vast military machine that comes at
the cost of a social safety net for America’s poor, staffed
disproportionately by America’s poor, to kill human beings they have
never met. Civilian casualties, which are an inevitability, are
acceptable.
I have no desire to die on the steppe or in the desert. Perhaps that
makes me a coward. But I’m not asking anyone else to die there either.
Going off the average monthly death toll for 2012, two more soldiers
will be killed between when I write this and when we fly the flags on
the 30th June. They will be in their twenties. They will be from the
North of England or Wales. Their deaths will be pointless, and
completely preventable. Can someone, please, tell me why they have to
die?
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1 comment:
fantastic post
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