A picture worth more than a thousand words

I had the first inkling that Time Magazine would suffer a backlash over its cover this week which can be viewed HERE, when I came downstairs Saturday morning and was told to take my hard copy of the magazine upstairs out of sight of the children.

The photo, of an Afghan woman disfigured by the Taliban, cuts right to the heart of the ‘damned if you do, damned if you don’t’ dilemma that Obama, Cameron and others are wrestling with as we try to find a way out of the quagmire.

Even the most heartless advocate of immediate withdrawal could not help but momentarily consider the implications for Afghan women if the Taliban are allowed to take back control, which was exactly what Time intended when they put the photo on the cover.

However, on the other side of the coin lies our own history in Afghanistan encompassing three previous engagements, namely the First Afghan War (1839-42), the Second Afghan War(1878-80) and the Third Afghan War (1919) which at best resulted in a partial victory for the British and at worst resulted in total catastrophe. It must also be remembered that the former Soviet Union had three times as many troops in Afghanistan in the early ‘80s as the war coalition has now and look what happened to them.

There can be no doubt that the photo is provocative and many do not like to be confronted with our dire choices in so stark a manner. This was a brave editorial decision by Time but the right one.

Obama’s Surge

Blogging offers the chance for instant opinion, but sometimes I can’t help but think that it is better to let things percolate through the brain cells a while before hitting the keyboard. Having been confined to my sickbed for a few days last week it gave me chance to think through the wider implications of President Obama’s decision to send a further 30,000 troops into Afghanistan.

My initial reaction was that Obama was on a road very similar to that which both Nixon and Kissinger trod in the early 1970s. As in Vietnam, America is propping up a corrupt government with a well armed internal insurgency. For “building the Afghan army” read “Vietnamisation”, for “troop draw-downs” read “withdrawal timetable”. The President does not like this analogy, but as Thomas Friedman said on The Daily Show, Vietnam was the “elephant in the room” when political journalists were briefed over lunch last week.

There is a wider question now though for both American and British foreign policy which is, “can modern democracies with a free press fight open-ended commitment wars?” The reason I ask is that the reality of the matter is that UK deaths in Afghanistan, whilst tragic have been astonishingly low, particularly when you consider the closer quarter nature of much of the fighting. Circa 240 deaths for a near 10 year commitment.

However, this perspective is lost in the media reporting from Afghanisation. Each death is now covered in an extremely personal manner. We know names, details of their family lives, we see coverage of a convoy of black cars from RAF Lyneham; we even have archive television interviews with the fallen. It was Stalin who said “one death is a tragedy, one million deaths is a statistic.” Without clear objectives and a timetable to “bring the troops home” it certainly looks like the British public cannot take too much more tragedy and that has deep implications going forward as to how troops are used in future. Short term, police actions such as that in Kosovo in the early 90s are likely to be the order to the day from now on.

Ultimately, Kissinger devised what became privately known as the ‘Decent Interval’ strategy to end American involvement in Vietnam. He knew the war was unwinnable, but tried to extricate America with as much face as he could retain. The idea was to build up South Vietnamese forces to a point where they could take up the burden of the fight long enough for America to extricate itself and leave a ‘decent interval’ before inevitable collapse. Ultimately American troops left in 1973 and the South collapsed two years later. Nobody will admit this is the plan for Afghanistan, but I suspect this is the road we are on.

A Cronkite moment?

The Independent’s editorial decision yesterday to call for a British Army pull-out from Afghanistan is, to use military speak, a first ‘beachhead’ in the national press for the anti-war brigade.

At present, this does not feel like a Cronkite moment, in which public opinion is turned decisively against a conflict by a trusted authority figure. Walter Cronkite’s famous declaration about Vietnam, live on CBS News (“this war is unwinnable”) was the beginning of the end for American involvement in South East Asia and prompted President Johnson to declare, “if we’ve lost Walter, we’ve lost the American public.”

The Independent does not have that sort of authority, but this is undoubtedly a key moment with the Indy tapping into an increasing public mood of disillusionment. The major political parties now have a national newspaper actively campaigning against continued involvement which will only add to the pressure on them to outline, during the coming election campaign, a coherent strategy going forward. I suspect vague declarations of “not giving in” and “seeing this through to the end” are not going to cut it anymore.

The issue now is, who will flock to the Indy’s banner? Both Labour and the Conservatives are wed to this war for different reasons. Labour, because they got us into it in the first place, and the Conservatives because the party’s history and culture will not allow them to be seen as anything less than stoically pro-war. There is enough skepticism about Project Cameron at grass roots level already without him going all pacifist.

However, I suspect the Lib Dems will be looking at this situation as an opportunity this morning. Clegg has been positioning himself as a war skeptic for some time now and I wonder whether a set of clear objectives for Afghanistan, measurable signposts for success over a 2-3 year period and even a timetable for withdrawal, would be a vote winner at the coming election. It would also give Clegg the opportunity to put the other leaders on the hook in any televised debate.

One more thought. All of this is dependent upon the current deliberations within the Obama Administration about the future direction and support for this war. By the time we reach a General Election in April or May 2010 America might be well on the road to total withdrawal hoping only for a Kissinger-inspired modern day ‘decent interval’ before Afghanistan returns completely to its centuries old lawlessness.