An article in the Sunday Times today suggests that Tony Blair is exasperated that his wish to see a major deployment of ground troops to Afghanistan is being ignored by George Bush.
Meanwhile, Blair has had no support from America in his efforts to increase the coalition forces on the ground. He is said by military sources to have become “utterly frustrated” that the US “cannot see that it can achieve its tactical goals more quickly is the military, humanitarian and diplomatic strands of this operation run in tandem”. Washington is “myopically focused on Bin Laden and the Taliban”, the sources said.
Sorry Tony, but whilst you and your new best friend George make a fine couple at photo opportunities, there is no disguising that there are two fundamentally different world views at work here.
Tony Blair is the leader of a reformed socialist party who regards it as axiomatic that the role of the state is being ‘my brother’s keeper’. By extension Blair wants to take up ‘The White Man’s burden’ in Afghanistan. He wants stout and resolute British soldiers to prevent those messy Afghans from sliding into barbarism in the post-Taliban order. He presides over a nation which has a realistic view of the realities of war and has fought its last few rather well. As a result, the general British public has quite a high tolerance of combat casualties.
George Bush is the leader of a corporatist capitalist party with a significant anti-corporatist and anti-interventionist wing. He has support for a war of retaliation and the destruction of Al Qaeda and anyone who stands between the USA and Al Qaeda. Bush presides over a nation which has a rather squeamish view of war, at least with regard to American casualties, and very little interest in open ended military commitments. Whilst images of women in Kabul walking unmolested without burqas causes Americans entirely justified satisfaction, few seriously think that is why their airforces and special ops teams are killing people in their names.
Blair is not just wrong, he is dangerously wrong. An absolute prerequisite for coherent military operations is having clear and unambiguous goals. The Americans have set themselves exactly that: the destruction of Al Qaeda and any who give them succour. What Tony Blair is doing is applying his fuzzy socialist logic to a very simple strategic question and attempting to turn clarity into ambiguity. This is not a peacekeeping operation, it is not a nation building operation, it is not a humanitarian operation, it is a war against Taliban/Al Qaeda in reprisal for the mass murder of civilians in America: to think anything else is just a dangerous distraction. As I have been saying, we simply have no business trying to civilize Afghanistan at bayonet point, not only it is wrong, it simply will not work. Fortunately it seems that Bush and his advisors are able to see that too.
