Spike Milligan lives. I encountered him last week among the Australian military contingent at Camp Holland: a Dutch-led base in southern Afghanistan, in the province next to Helmand.
Corporal Milligan, to be precise. But everyone calls him Spike. And though I’ve no reason to think he is or could be a fine singer or a world-famous comedian, Corporal Milligan has his famous namesake’s enthusiasm, optimism and punch.
I met him as part of a small posse of visiting journalists, the guests of ISAF (International Security Assistance Force) and Nato. Our hosts were keen to show us the good work being done by the military to improve the lives of ordinary Afghans, and the Australian-run Trade Training School at Camp Holland is something of a showcase. There, Spike Milligan and his small team of Australian and Afghan instructors teach young Afghan men from the nearby town of Tarin Kowt the basics of plumbing, joinery, steel-fixing, and the skills any builder’s apprentice needs to acquire.
It was afternoon. Away from the high-security perimeter walls and fences that surrounded our camp, a desert landscape stretched down towards lawless Kandahar and the deep south. Mountains like bare blades of rock rose to our north where faraway Kabul lay, mountains from which turquoise rivers — the only reason there are any inhabitants at all in southern Afghanistan — flow. But nothing green was visible. The temperature had been touching 40°C (104°F). The sun had been merciless. Now the height of the day’s heat had passed, and soon the training centre would be winding up for the day.
Sun or shade, however, Spike Milligan’s efforts were undiminished. A bundle of energy, he took us on a short tour of the skills-training facilities. In a big sandpit, half-buried, sprawled a geometrical maze of grey PVC waste-piping, demonstrating every T-junction, elbow bend, swept bend and ventilation pipe that a plumber could need to know. How, I asked, did the instructors know what skills to teach? ‘We keep our ear to the ground in Tarin Kowt, and we talk to contractors there. We ask where immigrant labour from Pakistan is being used: these are the skills in short supply.’
I inspected the machine tools section, the impressive lathes, the welding equipment — all near-new, all funded by the ISAF effort and much of it (I speculated) flown in specially or trucked along the bomb-infested track from Kandahar. I wondered too where the new wood, the plumbing supplies and the steel rods came from. This was state-of-the-art stuff: facilities that would have been the envy of many such schools in Britain. In the yard outside, in the flat, white glare of the sun, we were shown an entire wooden bungalow, beautifully constructed and ready to be deconstructed and reconstructed by trainees. ‘Once they’ve got their certificates at the end of their three-week basic course and their five-week full course, we help them look around for local builders in search of young workers.’
We talked to their Afghan instructor, Najibullah, who works with Milligan and — having the advantage of fluency in Pashto — does most of the hands-on teaching. There was no shortage of young men keen to learn; and, though there’s supposed to be a lower-age limit, some of the boys looked younger than 15. ‘It’s easy when someone explains,’ young Hamidullah, who was learning plumbing, told me. Another, Mohamed Sabar, said he was confident of finding work, once he had his certificate: ‘Otherwise it’s very difficult to get a job.’
Eager faces crowded around, bright with optimism and intensely curious, too, about us. Most were illiterate: in the province of Oruzgan where Camp Holland lay, illiteracy exceeds 90 per cent, and graduates of the training centre would mostly be unable to read their own certificates. But, though aptitudes varied, the students were quick-minded and positive. Milligan said it was the most rewarding sort of teaching because the students all wanted to be there. They’d have to be, given the challenges of getting through the security checks and into the camp every day. ‘Before I joined up,’ Spike told me, ‘these were my trades. I was a carpenter. So I fell into this job naturally.’
‘Sometimes,’ one of Spike’s superior officers told me afterwards, ‘we have to restrain his energy: he’s wound up like clockwork with enthusiasm for the job.’
By the time we left, the evening was approaching. Trainees were sloping off home with their (carefully inspected) knapsacks over their shoulders. Impressed, we repaired back to a shady canopy for tea and cookies, to check our notes.
And I reckon that, so far, this column that has emerged from them is very much the kind of report our Nato/ISAF hosts will have hoped might result from their generous and very considerable efforts to show us round. It has the advantage of being both honest, helpful to my sponsors, and true: the Australians are doing a classy job.
So I’m sorry to spoil it. But, in the back of my mind, lurking throughout that skills-centre visit, was this. You could have spun a library globe of the world, pin in hand, and brought it down randomly at almost any point between Ankara, Afghanistan, Azerbaijan and Outer Mongolia — or indeed within Afghanistan itself. And into that random place you could have parachuted Corporal Milligan, his team of instructors, a top-notch and expensively equipped workshop for teaching building trades, and all the building supplies necessary for instruction. And within a few months the good corporal, once he had found a local interpreter, would be doing great things. His training centre would be wildly oversubscribed, and he would be surrounded by the bright, hopeful, eager faces that surrounded us last week.
You could do this in a hundred thousand places in the developing world, and quickly know that you were doing good. So why Tarin Kowt? Why Oruzgan? Why Afghanistan? Well (runs the reply), it’s to help build bridges with the local population, to kick-start economic development, and to make young men less likely to sympathise with the Taleban.
Really? Stop for a moment and think. Once they had their certificates, and had found work, were young Hamidullah or Mohamed Sabar actually less likely to respond to the appeal of an insurgent effort to remove foreign occupiers? Were they less likely to opt for Taleban protection? Are young men in Britain who acquire skills from a training scheme brought in by a Labour government more likely to vote Labour? Think how much the USSR poured into education and training in Afghanistan; how much we British did in India, Cyprus, Aden, Kenya, Nyasaland.
Every stage in an argument whose consequence it is to turn Corporal Milligan into an aid-worker convinces me — except the last: that this makes London (or Sydney) safer from al-Qa’eda. It makes Milligan a better man. It offers a handful of trainees better lives. These things are good in themselves. But does it serve the Australian, or British, national interest? I remain unconvinced.
Matthew Parris is a columnist for the Times.
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