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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