Politics
A full-scale war and a first foreign policy test for Premier Brown
Published 18 September 2006
While attention has been elsewhere - in the case of the political class on the struggle between Messrs Brown and Blair - Britain has been sucked into another full-scale war. A military intervention in Afghanistan that was supposed to be a limited "hearts and minds" operation in the southern province of Helmand is turning into a conflict of a ferocity even greater than Iraq.
This is the assessment not of an anti-war activist, but of the commander of British forces in Afghanistan, Brigadier Ed Butler, who described the fighting as "extraordinarily intense". The new head of the British army, General Sir Richard Dannatt, has said UK forces are "fighting at the limit of their capacity". Jaap de Hoop Scheffer, the secretary general of Nato, under whose auspices the international force comes, has appealed to member countries to provide planes, helicopters and troop reinforcements to take on the Taliban.
Meanwhile, the US secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice, warns that abandoning Afghanistan would "come back to haunt us". She points to the period immediately after the Soviet withdrawal in 1989 as one of several examples of the west intervening in the country, only to walk away.
She could, and should, cite another, more recent, period. After taking Kabul in December 2001, and achieving what seemed a twin victory of routing the Taliban government and the al-Qaeda training camps it hosted, President Bush was keen to move on to his chosen target of Iraq. Faith was vested in the new Afghan government of Hamid Karzai to provide stability in a lawless and disparate country.
But Karzai did not control the four-fifths of the country outside the capital. The Taliban, which had retreated into the border region with Pakistan, regrouped. Now commanders say that a guerrilla force that had been whittled down to a few hundred has grown to more than 10,000. Weaponry has been smuggled across with ease.
Over this period, the Americans allowed their forces to shrink in the south, failing to secure even the major cities and highways. The security vacuum was filled by the enemy. At least as important, Afghanistan received less money for reconstruction than other recent nation-building efforts, such as in the former Yugoslavia, Haiti and East Timor. As Rageh Omaar writes (page 27), a failure by the the US and UK to see through reconstruction and humanitarian projects has compounded the misery in Iraq.
Given the lack of security in Afghanistan, the help that was provided struggled to get through. Without fresh sources of income, locals fell back on the trusted poppy seed. The UN announced recently that opium cultivation has risen by 60 per cent this year alone. It accounts for half of Afghanistan's economy; roughly 90 per cent of heroin used in the UK comes from there.
Afghanistan should now be an urgent preoccupation of world leaders. It is likely to be the first serious foreign challenge for a Gordon Brown premiership.
The position is the worst imaginable - UK and Canadian forces in particular coming under heavy fire without a coherent strategy and without the best available equipment. The force size is too small to be effective and too large to be ignored. As we went to press, the death toll for the 5,500 UK forces in Afghanistan stood at 40, with the body bags of 14 soldiers flown home after the biggest loss of life on a single day since the Falklands war.
In the short term, de Hoop Scheffer's warning must be heeded. This must be a collective effort. Britain, while taking on the largest burden in Afghanistan, has no moral authority to complain about the reluctance of others, given its foreign-policy failings of recent years and the decision of the French, Italians and others to deploy troops under the UN flag in southern Lebanon, following Israel's recent failed invasion.
But ultimately, the decision must be taken whether to commit more UK troops for the long haul, or to withdraw. In early July the NS questioned whether this had become all-out war. It appears we have the answer. When the original announcement was made in January, parliament was virtually empty. Over the summer, as the situation deteriorated, holidaying MPs responded with deafening silence, providing scant support for British soldiers served up as fodder for an impetuous foreign policy.Breaking out of a rich, white ghettoOpera critics, including our own Peter Conrad (page 42), have been right to pan English National Opera's new production, Gaddafi: a living myth. Artistically it was a failure: Asian Dub Foundation's score was repetitive and incoherent, the script was at times laughably wooden, and the storyline felt more like a history lesson than drama.
In one important sense, however, the show has been a success. It has packed the London Coliseum with exactly the kind of crowd that every opera house is supposedly aiming for. Alongside silver-haired regulars sat large numbers of young people representing a genuine ethnic mix. According to the ENO, nearly three-quarters of the audience was seeing the building - recently restored with £22m of public money - for the first time.
Compare this with a visit to the Royal Opera House in Covent Garden. Artistic standards may be high, but despite talk of "outreach" and cheap tickets, the audience remains unacceptably rich and white. Opera receives more public subsidy than any other art form, with the ENO getting £16.9m per year and the Royal Opera House £25m. This confers a responsibility to make opera accessible to all, even if that means taking risks.
This particular risk may have resulted in critical failure, but the ENO should be commended for bravely connecting with new audiences at a time when the ROH is failing to do the same.
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