The plot thickens
It is as if we are stuck in a hideous loop.
The plot thickens
It is as if we are stuck in a hideous loop. Every few months, it seems, Tony Blair is once again hauled up to give evidence to the never-ending Iraq inquiry. Each time he is dragged from a luxury hotel in some distant land to London, where he gives the younger political generation a masterclass in how to evade direct questioning. The questioning always proceeds along the same lines: why did we go to war? But the real scandal is the British army was defeated in Basra, and the Iraqi people abandoned to death squads. The question that should be asked is ‘why did we lose?’
The politics of decline have returned, and our political class are starting to regard Britain as an island with no business trying to shape the world. Foreign wars are now seen as a Blairish fad. Our Afghanistan campaign is seen almost as an embarrassing remnant of the Blair era.
In Afghanistan we are hearing the same sort of excuses that were used during the disgraceful retreat from Basra. There were no British reporters in southern Iraq, so there was no one to contradict the Blair narrative that stability had returned and we were ‘handing over to Iraqis’. But who were these Iraqis we handed over to? They were policemen loyal to Shi’ite militias who imposed a reign of Islamist terror on the city. Now we are being told that we are ‘handing over to Afghans’ in Helmand. And indeed we have lined up a few Western-friendly governors. But the reality is that soldiers on the ground report that the Taleban have already appointed a series of ‘shadow governors’ who are preparing to take power when we leave in three years’ time.
One can argue that Britain should not have invaded Iraq, but it is hard to argue that, having decapitated the government, it was right to abandon the local people to face the consequences. Time magazine recently published a picture of a girl whose nose and ears were amputated by the Taleban when she tried to flee her abusive husband two years ago. The Afghans have noted what has happened in Iraq, and they are in no doubt about the sort of regime that will take control in Helmand if we leave.
The battle will not be won or lost in Helmand, but in Whitehall. It was Blair who started the tradition of naming the fallen soldiers in Prime Minister’s Questions. The military loathe this, as it underlines the sense of defeat and failure. When Brigadier Mark Carleton-Smith was commanding HM Forces in Helmand, he had this to say: ‘A steady drumbeat of casualties eats away at the stamina and resolve that the country needs to keep its nerve. The casualty rate is not high.’
The official Afghanistan casualty rates up to October — 0.85 per cent — may be small by historic standards. During the second world war the casualty rate of troops was at 11 per cent. But has a British lack of tolerance for casualties stymied our counter-insurgency capabilities? It is the type of question that an Iraq inquiry should be asking. On page 16, Paul Wood reports from Sangin on why the Americans appear to have fared much better. It is a question that Britain should be asking: or would be, if we were serious about winning such conflicts.
Going to war halfheartedly, without the resources needed to finish the job, is the mistake of the Blair years. It has diminished the reputation of our military, and led to avoidable loss of life on the battlefield. Blair may well argue that the hand-wringing over Iraq is a result of a loss of national self-confidence. But this is, alas, part of his wretched legacy.
Sherlock Holmes is devilishly hard to kill. Within a few years of his birth in 1887, Conan Doyle had already grown tired of Holmes, and tried smother him by demanding ever larger fees for his adventures. When the fees were paid, he was driven to desperate measures, throwing him over a waterfall in a story optimistically named ‘The Final Problem’. It didn’t work: Holmes was revived by a gigantic payment from an American magazine, and poor Conan Doyle was still writing about him in 1927.
Nor did his creator’s death, in 1930, put paid to the great detective. Since then Holmes has materialised in the worlds of radio, film and television in a variety of more or less convincing disguises. And now, at last, he has been officially reincarnated in print. The children’s author Anthony Horowitz — whose most famous creation is a skateboarding teenage superspy — has been commissioned by the Conan Doyle estate to write another, all-new Holmes mystery.
Poor Sir Arthur must be spinning in his grave; or at least, given his commitment to spiritualism, rapping angrily on the underside of a table. But Holmes’s admirers — however sceptical they may be about Horowitz’s promise to be ‘true to the spirit of the original’ — do have reason to be pleased that the game is still afoot. Almost 90 years after his official retirement, Holmes has finally shown himself the equal in commercial clout of that much-sequelled upstart James Bond, and with no gadgets required.
established 1828
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