War in South Africa — the second Boer war — was already brewing by Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee in 1897. Two years later it began. By the end of the century Britain was bogged down and struggling. On the Queen’s death in 1901 the unholy mess continued. In 1902 we were finally able to declare victory; but bloodied, shocked, shamed and considerably cut down to size. The whole campaign had been an ill-conceived, over-confident and grisly blunder. Even Kipling hated it. How could the numerical superiority and technical might of Britain’s armed forces be fought to cruel draw by a smaller band of ill-equipped zealots, as light on their feet as the modern-day terrorist? It was humiliating. We had bitten off more than we could chew, and an argument can be made that this was the beginning of the end of empire. The bitterness and grievance it generated echoed down through the whole of the following century, and beyond; and in South Africa it echoes still. It helped create the Afrikaner mindset, with all that that has entailed.
But search the newspaper archives of the period and you will undoubtedly find your Con Coughlins of the era arguing — as the Daily Telegraph’s executive foreign editor argued about the war in Afghanistan in The Spectator a fortnight ago (‘The Defeatists’, 19 May) — that our armed forces were doing a splendid job, that it was our duty to support them, and that to talk of anything less than victory was to betray the lives and sacrifices of all the young men who had died already in this cause.
It was ever thus, and one could just shrug one’s shoulders. But as an example of the genre, Mr Coughlin’s column really was such a corker that it should not be allowed to pass without comment. Coughlin writes with force and clarity and I can make a reasonable fist of summarising his case for readers who do not have his essay to hand.
His argument is preposterous. It is also casually and quite personally offensive to serving politicians who desire the common good no less than he, who agonise over outcomes, and who, when wars go wrong, carry the can in a way Mr Coughlin’s friends in the military curiously never seem to.
Coughlin makes one assertion that is clear-eyed and correct. Whatever the official communiqués may mumble, we are giving up on our war for the soul of what he calls ‘this basket-case of a country’. Departure by 2015 will be a kind of surrender, and we know it. Coughlin adds — and I don’t doubt it — that the Afghan army is unlikely to be able to hold the line once its western allies are gone. Quite so! I’ve maintained from the start that no Afghan state could, in the foreseeable future, maintain or pay for the military machine they need (or anything like it) from their own resources. I see this as a reason not to build the machine in the first place.
He then makes an assertion of such centrality that, had he confidence in it, he would surely have devoted the rest of the column to explaining it. He says we were winning. Briefly, he says, ‘We had a perfectly good strategy for defeating the Taleban and bringing peace to Afghanistan.’ He seems to mean the military ‘surge’ strategy. But the whole point of a surge strategy is to knock a problem on the head with a massive hammer, after which you can withdraw the hammer. I know of no definition of the word ‘surge’ that doesn’t connote a falling back after an increase. This was the attraction of the logic by which the Pentagon sold the surge to the incoming President Obama: give us the means, sir, they said, and we can effect a knockout blow, after which we’ll need less war-making, not more.
Mr Obama took them at their word. He gave them the means. They then proceeded to prove what any fool knows: that if you throw enough men and materiel at an insurgency you can beat it back. What the Pentagon were not able to demonstrate was the interesting part of its proposition: that this will permanently weaken the enemy, enabling you to pull back again. If we’re talking honour (Con Coughlin is, but I’m more hesitant), we could say that Obama did honour his side of the deal. The military did not honour theirs. They just kept asking for more.
When the military just keep asking for more, it falls to the politicians to decide whether to blow the whistle. Contrary to Mr Coughlin’s assertion (‘There was a time when Britain and her allies used to win wars. No longer’) Britain’s elected leaders have blown the whistle frequently in recent centuries. America only exists because we surrendered after a fight. India only exists because we surrendered before the big fight. Cyprus? We fought hard, then threw in the towel. Kenya? We fought a bit then wrote it off. Aden? Another fight, then surrender. Hong Kong? We didn’t even fight. Knowing when to call it a day is the unenviable but entirely honourable burden that the politician bears.
I hate the easy sneer with which a corps within my journalistic trade — a corps who exist in uneasy suspension between the sceptical vulgarity of the jobbing reporter, and the camaraderie of an inner circle of military experts, war correspondents, brass, braid and the officers’ mess — take casual swipes at what they insinuate is the gutlessness of politicians. Neither Con, nor I, nor Barack Obama nor David Cameron, nor Philip Hammond, nor Field-Marshal Sir Rooting Tooting, are going to die in this Afghan war. Other people’s sons have, and will. Maybe it was worth a try. But ten years is enough. Let this Jubilee Queen, unlike the last, outlive this hopeless war. And it is to the politicians that it falls to say so.
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