Fortnight Publications Ltd.

Nation Building?Author(s): Frank CostelloSource: Fortnight, No. 401 (Dec., 2001 - Jan., 2002), pp. 14-15Published by: Fortnight Publications Ltd.Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25560467 .

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esi

a* War behind the lines

Tony Blair's hands-on,

presidential approach to 'the war on terror'

has earned him

praise. Gary Kent

sees a leader come

into his element.

Frank Costello,

below, watched the bombs drop on Af

ghanistan

VJeneralissimo Blair was most vulnerable after

winning an historic second-term for his New Labour

army. Externally, Labour was re-elected with far

fewer votes as a result of both apathy and antipathy.

Internally, Labour's foot soldiers had mutinied by

refusing to fight in the electoral trenches and thou

sands had deserted under Blair.

Once the battle was over, Labour's officer class in

Parliament defied the high command by refusing to

accept the summary political execution of their most

popular Regimental Sergeant-Majors, Gwyneth

Dunwoody and Donald Anderson?New Labour

generals wanted to dismiss them from two powerful

scrutiny committees.

The first post-election Army Convention, or Con

ference as it is more widely known, threatened to be

a bloody affair as dissenters prepared to go over the

top. Roy Hattersley, now in exile in the Lords, penned several seditious tracts for the Army's most popular

papers, the Guardian and the Observer. The crusade

for Real Labour was gathering recruits. Several hun

dred rank and file members signalled their support to the ermined general. I myself joined the provi sional (no joke) steering committee of the Cam

paign for Real Labour.

And then everything changed on 11 September

.

My own samizdat article urging Blair to go, so that the

party could retrieve its soul, bit the dust along with

other treasonous initiatives. There was a virtual truce

on domestic issues behind the lines and the Conven

tion really only had one item on the agenda?not the

expected splits?but winning a war.

Our great leader came into his element. Blair was

accused of being little more than an ambassador for

the US but he did seem to be providing the brains to

match US brawn. Anti-war fifth columnists were slow

off the mark and it seems as if the strategy has

worked, so far.

Blair's good war also altered the balance of power

in the high command. Before the war, Blair's Field

Marshall Gordon Brown had been fighting constant

rearguard actions to preserve his dominance over

domestic strategy. Brown had also alienated many

potential supporters within headquarters.

The truce is now over and various junior medics?

known as spin-doctors?have emerged from their

fox holes and started to organise the respective

camps. It's called the Tee Bee Gee Bees, after the

initials of the two principals. The terms of their

engagement are muffled?some say it's more money

for public services, which appeases middle class

voters, versus covert redistribution via tax credits for

the poor. In military terms, it's the debate between

firing off headline-grabbing cruise missiles and send

ing in the Special Forces. A mountain of doctoral

theses will emerge one of these days. But the big

question is whether the UK should join the Euro

pean single currency. Gordon had devised the pre cise terms of surrender and assigned himself the

power to decide on when to activate the secret codes,

sometime within the next year or so.

Blair, the seasoned and respected statesman, now

feels that it is his decision to make. The two men have

been awkward comrades for some time and Blair

had apparently resisted calls from his aides to take

Brown on. Now the wraps are coming off and Blair is

telling Gordon to remove his tanks from the Down

ing Street lawn. What Mo Mowlam calls their "crip

pling" battle is conducted by semaphore but there is

clearly what Blair's powerful and outgoing adjutant,

Anji Hunter calls a "Peyton Place" feel to the con

stant sniping, as the respective camps jockey for

position. And Brown is reportedly pushing Blair to

make good on his secret pact in 1994 at the Granita

restaurant in occupied Islington to stand down once

a second term was secured. Blair could yet stage a

coup andsackBrown. Civvy street beckons for Brown.

Or, if he is very lucky indeed, some sort of master of

the universe job in redesigning the international

financial architecture.

As for Blair, the signs are not auspicious. With or

without Brown, Blair will both have to make good on

the promises given to a seething Middle East and to

focus once more on making the trains run on time.

He may have won a war in a faraway place but

political leaders have won wars before, only to be

purged afterwards. Think of Churchill in 1945. Or

George Bush senior, who won the Gulf War but went

from toasts to toast very quickly. What counts is what

works?on the home front. Isn't history exciting? +

Nation building?

A he recent admonition by British Secretary of

State for International Development Clare Short

against the lack of a US agenda for rebuilding Af

ghanistan after the current conflict subsides along

with the need for a more substantive overall humani

tarian response is one that the Bush Administration

would do well to heed. Short's comments should be

met by something far greater than an attitude that

her views are a necessary concomitant to be endured

against the back drop of the British Government's

otherwise unmatched support of the US led military

effort against the Taliban regime forces and Bin

Laden's Al Qaeda terrorist band. Indeed Short is

doing the US as well as the beleaguered people of

Afghanistan a favour. While some in the darker

corridors of the US Administration may on the

contrary wish to see Afghanistan levelled as Carthage

was by the Romans of old, the reality is that a radical

change in the playbook followed to by the Bush

White House to date is needed if its efforts to defeat

14 Fortnight December 2ooi/january 2002

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^M review 2001 I

the murderous minds and foot soldiers responsible for the atrocities of September 11 th are to succeed in

the long term.

More than once in his campaign debates against Al Gore, then Governor George Bush decried US

inspired attempts at 'nation- building' with central

Europe the obvious example. Since September 11th

there has been a glimmer, but only a glimmer so far,

that President Bush now recognises it is not in his

country's interest to retreat from helping uplift those nations that have been battered by conflict.

Indeed even a cursory review of American history

during the last half century shows that the Marshall

Plan for rebuilding war torn Europe and Japan was

as much a benefit to the US as it was to its recipients. This was so in terms of American prestige as well as

commercial benefits.

But the job of rebuilding Afghanistan?indeed a

better word would be 'building' Afghanistan given its lack of economic development to begin?will not

be easy. Redevelopment initiatives do not succeed

anywhere from the top down no matter how much

money is spent. Over two decades of almost unend

ing violence driven by tribal divisions and outside

interference of the most negative type has left Af

ghanistan resembling a scene from the 1980's Mad

Max films.

With only 12 per cent of its land arable in the best

of times, and 71 per cent of its people illiterate?the

rate is even higher for women who are banned from

formal education?Afghanistan and its 25 million

remaining citizens (at least three million have fled,

many of them during the heightened current con

flict) constitute a vast humanitarian problem and a

nightmare scenario for developing modernisation.

The lack of a common language and deep ethnic

divisions make such efforts all the more difficult.

In the aftermath of the collapse of the Taliban's

rule in the cities of Mazar-e-Sharif and Kabul, the

world witnessed the site of joyous residents re-attach

ing their television aerials as merchants in bazaars

filled up their shops with video players and radios, as

women removed their veils and children flew kites

freely again. But Afghanistan at its core requires far

more than the reintroduction of a consumer culture

driven by western produced goods. Unless the effort is undertaken by the West with

the cooperation of the Afghan people and its neigh bours to break the cycle that produced support for

Osama bin Laden and his network?poverty, dicta

torship and entrenched religious anti modernism

coupled with the treatment of women as mere chat

tel?then efforts attempting to encourage invest

ment and economic expansion will only benefit a

few.

The replacement of the Taliban regime with a new

incarnation of warlord rule and the perpetuation of

another wave of despotism sustained by brutality will

surely exclude Afghanistan from participating in

any panacea deemed by Tony Blair and George W.

Bush as part of the New World Order.

And without a serious soul searching also under

taken in the Arab World of the conditions which

allowed bin Ladenism to flourish as a purveyor of

hatred and mass murder, paternalistic efforts armed

at modernising Afghanistan from the top down will

at a minimum be ineffectual. Last month in the

Pakistani newspaper The Nation, a Pakistani business

man focused on the obligations of Muslims and

Arabs to themselves in breaking the cycle of destruc

tive hatred and the degradation of the humanity of

their own peoples:

"We Muslims cannot keep blaming the West for all

our ills. The embarrassment of wretchedness among us is beyond repair. It is not just the poverty, the

illiteracy and the absence of any commonly accepted social contract that defines our sense of wretchedness;

it is rather the increasing awareness among us that we

have failed as a civil society by not confronting the

historical, social and political demons within us...

Without a reformation in the practice of Islam that

makes it move forward and not backward, there is no

hope for us Muslims anywhere. We have reduced

Islam to the organised practice of state sponsored mullahism... Oxford and Cambridge were the

madrasas of Christendom in the 13th century. Look

where they are today?among the leading institutions

in the world. Where are our institutions of learning?" For America to play

a constructive and effective

role in helping assist such a process a return on a

large scale basis to some efforts that helped build

respect for it as a compassionate nation such as the

Food for Peace Program and the Peace Corps initia

tives of the Kennedy years would be well worth

revisiting in Afghanistan and throughout the devel

oping world. They can serve as building blocks that

can help lay the foundation for capital investment

and economic development by the rest of the devel

oped world joining with the US and Britain. Like

wise, the ending of ignorance is also an obligation for the western world as well and it should encom

pass more than the recent rush to acquire a copy of

the Koran.

Bush?needs to change

strategy

DECEMBER 2001/JANUARY 2002 FORTNIGHT 15

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