THE utter failure of the 20-year war in Afghanistan should be sounding the death knell for the ideology of liberal interventionism that caused this bloody morass.
Yet a growing clamour to somehow extend our military mission in the country is aimed at keeping the “forever wars” going.
Tony Blair’s furious tirade against withdrawal was no surprise. But Blair is not alone.
The parliamentary debate on Afghanistan was dominated by those who see the withdrawal, not the invasion, as the problem.
Labour’s Keir Starmer has asked the Prime Minister to consider extending a military presence beyond that of the US.
Now the Scottish National Party’s Nicola Sturgeon says Nato members should remain in the country “for as long as is necessary” — a dismal showing when the SNP opposed Nato membership as recently as 2012.
Starmer and Sturgeon point to the undoubted humanitarian crisis in Afghanistan, the terror of people fleeing the Taliban, as a reason to stay.
We’ve heard it all before. Humanitarian assistance and women’s rights were deployed as arguments for the original invasion. The result was 20 years of bloodshed, including the violent deaths of thousands of Afghan women and children — the latter making up 40 per cent of the victims of US and allied bombing over the last five years.
From the Labour front bench there is also a sense of betrayal by a US president they lionised. The charge they laid against Donald Trump — that he was retreating from US “obligations” to maintain a huge military presence all around the world — now appears to apply to Biden, too.
Their frustration is understandable. Starmer is in the process of returning Labour to the pro-capitalist, pro-war consensus it shared with the Tories through the Blair years, that began to unravel when Ed Miliband courageously opposed war on Syria in 2013 and was seriously challenged by Jeremy Corbyn’s call for an independent, peaceful foreign policy in 2017 — one that blindsided his political and media critics by meeting majority support from the public.
Shadow foreign secretary Lisa Nandy has endorsed a “progressive foreign policy for new times” that is a straightforward revival of liberal interventionism. And Labour’s bureaucracy are not so crippled by cuts that they are not diligently purging their own members every day, including for retrospective non-crimes such as having once given an interview to a group (Socialist Appeal) which has subsequently been banned (this is the fate of Pamela Fitzpatrick, a former candidate for Labour general secretary), in a bid to permanently erase Corbynism.
For the restorationists the collapse of the Afghan occupation couldn’t come at a worse time. Hence the desperation to discredit not the war, but the retreat. At the wilder end, John Bolton in the US and Tobias Ellwood here argue for indefinite occupation — Bolton referred to the permanent stationing of US troops in Germany, Ellwood to the number of troops in Afghanistan being outnumbered by personnel at its British embassy.
These arguments — besides being a reactionary endorsement of the US’s self-appointed status as global policeman — ignore the facts of the Afghan war.
The Taliban was winning before the US withdrawal, which is why that withdrawal had to be negotiated with it. And unlike Germany-based battalions or London embassy staff, the only reason US troops were not being killed in Afghanistan recently is because they had agreed a ceasefire with the Taliban which specified a withdrawal date.
Humanitarian assistance is certainly needed. It should come in the form of aid. It should come in the form of sanctuary for those fleeing.
Pressure should be put on our allies — not to join us in a military deployment without the US, a fantasy anyway, as Defence Secretary Ben Wallace admits, but to abandon the push by the EU to throw up barriers to the expected refugee flow and to set an example by welcoming the refugees ourselves.
