Survival: Global Politics and Strategy, vol. 51, no. 4, August–September 2009, pp. 49–70
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British press attention to Afghanistan – for totally understandable and proper reasons – does not say much about the real priorities for UK defence policy. A campaign to target terrorists within ‘ungoverned enclaves’ has been transformed, especially after Britain agreed to take over responsibility for operations in Helmand in 2006, into a campaign to bring to Afghanistan good governance, aid and construction (not, significantly, reconstruction, given the country’s backwardness). Such objectives are entirely consistent with an ethical foreign policy and the principles of humanitarian intervention. The armed forces, a ‘force for good’, to use the Ministry of Defence’s own branding, are understandably comfortable with this mission. But it is less clear why British troops should be bringing these benefits to southern Afghanistan specifically rather than to other countries, and it is reasonable to wonder whether aid workers, non-governmental organisations and other agencies would not be better fitted to the mission than soldiers.
The British people’s own doubts about these questions mean that, though they have a high regard for the British armed forces, they are cynical about the task the forces have been asked to fulfil. This gap is the biggest challenge confronting British strategy today. Both the former Secretary of State for Defence John Hutton and, more recently, Prime Minister Gordon Brown have tried to address this gap by linking operations in Helmand to domestic security. Their line is that, by tackling the roots of terrorism in central Asia, British soldiers are preventing terrorism at home. By making this argument, they implicitly refer to the ‘new chapter’ added to the 1998 Strategic Defence Review (the most recent) in 2002, itself a reflection of American responses to the 11 September 2001 attacks, which argued that the answer to international terrorism within Western countries was pre-emption. That proposition, challenged on legal and ethical grounds from its inception, has now become circular: the ‘global war on terror’, by taking the war to the terrorists, itself stokes radicalism in the United Kingdom; the more there are threats of attacks, or actual attacks, in the United Kingdom, the more there is a need to fight in Afghanistan. There is no logical conclusion to the exponential effects of this argument.
The United States under President Barack Obama is endeavouring to break this circuit by curtailing its objectives in Afghanistan, effectively abandoning its humanitarian agenda and aims for good governance to concentrate on counter-terrorism. While this may seem sensible, the implications are in fact fraught. There is ambivalence between an apparent policy focus on counter-terrorism and the US Army’s operational focus on counter-insurgency, confirmed rather than rebuffed by the statements made by Lt-Gen. Stanley McChrystal since his appointment as the commander of the International Security Assistance Force in June 2009. And having spent time explaining the armed forces’ civilising mission – ensuring education for women, democratic rights and basic human rights – with arguments designed to win over or placate liberal doubts about NATO’s actions, can NATO states now abandon these goals without further domestic ramifications? How successfully will the…
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Hew Strachan is Chichele Professor of the History of War and Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, where he also directs the Leverhulme Programme on the Changing Character of War. Between 1992 and 2001, he was Professor of Modern History at the University of Glasgow and established its Scottish Centre for War Studies in 1996. He is a Life Fellow of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge.
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