Allister Heath meets Radek Sikorski, the Polish defence minister, and hears his robust views on al-Qa’eda, economic reform and the European Union
There are old Cold Warriors — and then there are those who actually donned combat fatigues, picked up AK-47s, and trekked halfway around the world. In the case of Radek Sikorski, a Polish Solidarity student activist who found refuge in Britain, the calling of the Afghan mujahedin proved irresistible and he spent a lengthy period in the late 1980s undercover with the guerrillas as they fought the Red Army to the death.
Today, the 43-year-old Sikorski, a former journalist for The Spectator and husband of one of the magazine’s contributing editors, Anne Applebaum, is Poland’s defence minister and a rising star in Eastern European politics. When I met him over a cup of tea last week at the magazine’s offices in Doughty Street — I believe him when he tells me that almost nothing has changed since his days — Sikorski was in reflective mood.
‘My first trip to Afghanistan in 1986 was with a Spectator advance towards expenses, which I think I’m now safe in admitting I partly spent on settling my debts for the last Bullingdon Club dinner at university,’ he says, trying but failing to sound sheepish about his time at Oxford and his membership of its most exclusive dining society. Sikorski’s English is beautiful; his accent — RP with a hint of transatlantic twang — is difficult to place and sounds almost more Middle Eastern than Polish.
His experience in Afghanistan turned out to be appropriate training for his new role in the Polish government. Poland, now a member of both the EU and Nato, sent troops to Iraq and also to Afghanistan, famously incurring the wrath of France and Germany. ‘Who would have thought in those days that I would one day find that experience useful in shaping Poland’s security policy and preparing a Polish contingent for a Nato mission to Afghanistan? If you had suggested that when I travelled with the mujahedin it would have seemed pretty bizarre.’
Sikorski’s unusual understanding of guerrilla warfare also means that he has strong views about America’s failure to capture Osama bin Laden four years ago, a time when he was almost certainly hiding in Tora Bora, a vast complex of caves halfway up an Afghan mountain. Many analysts believe the debacle was one of the most crucial Western defeats of the war on terror. ‘I spent six weeks in Tora Bora when it was a mujahedin base against the Soviets and I therefore followed with some bemusement the American assault on Tora Bora, which duplicated all the Soviet mistakes,’ he says. ‘The Americans did what the Soviets did. They attacked uphill, as a result of which, after some resistance, the guerrillas — in this case al-Qa’eda — just left across the mountains, into Pakistan and then back into Afghanistan.’ The answer, Sikorski believes, would have been to send troops on the passes and attack downhill, chasing the enemy on to the plains and destroying them.
Despite the West’s failure to capture bin Laden, he is keen to emphasise how well Afghanistan is now doing. ‘Afghanistan is having its best time in 25 years,’ he says. ‘I was immensely cheered to go back there last year and to see that some of those remote villages that I visited have schools for boys and girls.’
He is equally upbeat about the sector of Iraq under Polish control and has just returned from his third trip to the country. There were once 2,500 Polish troops in Iraq; now there are 900, and local Iraqi troops have been trained to take their place. ‘I would be surprised if we stayed much beyond the end of this year, simply because our mission has been fulfilled. In our sector, the Iraqis have taken over.’
He doesn’t like to talk of a war on terror: ‘Terror is a means, you can’t have a war on a method. It’s a war on al-Qa’eda, on the jihadists.’ But he believes strongly that the road to victory in the propaganda war against the terrorists lies in reaching out to moderate Muslims and especially to women. ‘Most people just want to be left alone, make a better life and give opportunities to their children. We need to find allies among the broad swath of moderate, reasonable Muslims. We should focus like a laser beam on women in Islamic societies who are our natural allies.’
When he lived in Britain, he would often be told that it was no surprise that some countries were communist because they had no tradition of democracy, something which irritated him profoundly. The equivalents today are those who dismiss democracy in the Middle East or Islamic countries as culturally alien to the region. This Sikorski also rejects: ‘If a country as poor as Afghanistan has this democratic longing, then maybe others do too’.
The need to show that they belong firmly in the West remains very important to all Eastern European nations. Membership of Nato is one way to ensure this. ‘We are a country on the border of the area of democracy, free markets and stability, and an area where these things cannot be taken for granted. Two hundred and fifty kilometres from our capital we have Belarus with President Aleksander Lukashenko, not exactly a democrat, and we follow the developments in Russia very closely as well. For us, Nato still has a whiff of the traditional role of military reassurance.’
But whereas many other Cold Warriors have become implacable Eurosceptics, Sikorski has become a staunch believer in the European project. He is concerned about ensuring the security of energy supplies, a topic much in the news now that Russia seems increasingly prepared to exercise its muscle and cut off gas supplies to countries it finds insufficiently co-operative; in this area, like many others, he believes the answer lies partly in greater European integration.
‘We want to have a normal commercial relationship with Russia. Russia has the energy. We need it; we want to buy it from Russia. But we don’t want a situation where monopolies or blackmail are possible,’ he says. The solution, Sikorski argues, is to develop a pan-EU approach as well as infrastructure links to the Caspian Sea basin across Ukraine. ‘It would also be a way of helping Ukraine pay its way in the world.’
He is an equally enthusiastic proponent of greater European defence integration, rejecting my suggestion that this may in fact be a bad idea. ‘I admit that I was sceptical until a few years ago, but I think that experience has shown that there are issues where Europe really needs to show a military presence and where the US may just make a pass. Bosnia is one, and I can imagine other such situations.’
He wants greater ‘synchronisation and specialisation’, which he claims would allow Europe to get ‘more bang for its euros’. He believes that even though EU countries spend E150 billion a year on their defence, the money is achieving very little. ‘It is wasted on a heroic scale, simply because there is so much duplication. If each US state had its own army, navy, air force and general staff and procurement policy, they would have the same situation.’ He admits that ‘armed forces are the hardcore of sovereignty and nobody is going to give them up any time soon’, but disagrees with the view that increased European military integration would chase away the Americans from Europe, arguing instead that it would make Europe a more worthwhile ally for the US.
His view on the European constitution — he stresses that this isn’t necessarily that of his government — is that Europe needs ‘articles of association, a document that would describe the final architecture of Europe’. It would be a very broad and brief document, ‘a constitution that delineated once and for all what the federation would do, and what would for ever remain in the province of the nation states’. Sikorski’s dream constitution would be crystal-clear, intelligible even to high-school students; like the US constitution, it would be ‘a document that would be a focus of European loyalty and an instrument for the citizens to curb the ambitions of the bureaucrats’.
Like many British Europhiles, he insists that Britain has won the arguments about Europe but it doesn’t know it yet. ‘I think 20 years ago it wasn’t at all a foregone conclusion that the EU would be an English-speaking union — it is now. The British message of the single market, a Thatcherite idea, is now at the core of the European project. Deregulation and economic competitiveness, those aspects of the British approach, are now philosophically in the ascendant. That, on the other hand, is something some people on the Continent do not know yet.’
But he also argues — again, he insists this is not necessarily his government’s view — that Britain should have done more to regain the lead after the No votes in France and the Netherlands last year. ‘I was surprised that when the draft constitution failed, Britain did not propose an alternative, workable constitution. Britain could have taken the lead on something very important.’
Sikorski is on less controversial ground with his support for Poland’s economic reforms, which include a privatised pension system. ‘Western Europe will have to implement such a reform if it is not to go bust,’ he says. ‘The wind of change in terms of economic competitiveness is coming from the East.’ He is right, and we can be sure that Sikorski, a man to watch, will be at the forefront of this changing Europe for many more years to come.
Allister Heath is associate editor of The Spectator and deputy editor of the Business.
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