a lot can happen in forty years

"The Army's role might evolve, but the whole process might take as long as 30 to 40 years. There is absolutely no chance of NATO pulling out." General Sir David Richards, Head of the British Army, on the occupation of Afghanistan.

Interesting statement that, more for the attitude than the policy. One of the problems with saying that staying they´re for that period of time is that it sees ¨nation-building¨ as being like a treadmill. Put in enough resources and stick it for long enough and you can change the place into what you want it to be.

The trouble with these plans is that it doesn´t cede any say on things to the people that live there. It gives, for instance, 30-40 years of guerrilla warfare to the insurgents. You´d think that over time they might start getting better at it, particularly given that they´ve moved away from the suicide bomber model (which results in your terrorist dying along with your victims, rather than learning from mistakes and passing on experience to others). It doesn´t ask the Afghanis if they want that long an occupation, and whether some of them might be inclined to rebel against a long-term foreign presence.

In fact the whole idea ignores any problematic developments in the political and social life of Afghanistan. Peace is always political. For example, a lot of analysts say that in Iraq the decision to work with Sunni militia against international Islamist extremists was a far bigger part of turning around that quagmire than the surge was.

Beyond the complete disregard for what the population there might actually do or want. I´m always intrigued by the apparent need that international forces have to set up law enforcement agency and armed forces to defend their new little states. It´s weird because usually countries are able to do that sort of thing for themselves. For instance, the Taliban were able to establish an army and a police force that was completely totalitarian, all without a blue-hat in sight. And, obviously they could only possibly be overthrown by being bombed by the Americans, so it must have been pretty robust, right?

New democracies are supposed to have a broader base of support than brutal dictatorships, so why do nations set up by international diktat seem to have so much trouble?

ahhhh elections...

Now, I'm not out to criticise people trying to do stuff in solidarity with Iranian activists. But daftness is a pet hate of mine, so here goes.

Right so, today I read someone at the beginning of a very moving piece about what people have suffered after the Iranian elections reference Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as the loser of the election. I've no problem with saying that per se, but is it not a little ridiculous from the perspective of your average anti-Islamic Republic type? Before the elections we were informed that Iran is a theocracy, a clerical tyranny and in general a totalitarian dictatorship.

People who pointed out that the real situation was more nuanced, with a greater degree of civil society, dissent and disagreement internal to the system were generally derided as being the useful idiots of the Ayatollahs. Now, I've no problem dealing in broad brush-strokes like. But doesn't saying that Ahmadinejad is the loser of this election actually rather endorse the electoral system out there?

On some level it means that the election was a meaningful contest between real alternatives, which was outrageously tampered with to the benefit of certain people within the power structure. Like there had been a coup d'etat to overthrow a relatively well-functioning democracy, that spent the previous 30 years electing rightful presidents. Surely if it follows that the protests are about a rigged election, then the last one Ahmadinejad went off fairly?

That's horse-shit though. Iran's is a managed democracy, where the Ayatollahs pick the acceptable candidates and pretend it's a real contest. There's no more legitimacy in all the old-school reformists lining up behind the green movement, than there is in the Ahmadinejads of this world. In fact, the Islamic Republic is probably going through one of its least brutal phases.

Why give the Islamic Republic the redoubt that they're evidently looking for - that they can just retreat to the old reformism and then we'll start saying it's a real democracy. Even if they'd decided they wanted Moussavi instead of the incumbent, it wouldn't have made any real difference. If people on the streets is a meaningful opportunity to enact real change out there, then more has to be done than insisting that they stick to the logic of legitimacy within their own system.

Imperial hubris

I was just watching the mother of squaddie on Channel 4 News. Furious, she blamed the government for her son´s death, blown up in a lightly armoured vehicle venurable to roadside bombs. Moments later another squaddie expressed his disgust at the coming cuts to the military´s budget, and called the Prime Minister "a disgrace".

The reality is that this government or the next will cut government spending, and if you gave most people a choice, cut spending on the NHS or schools or cut spending on the military, they´d give you the same answer. That doesn´t make it easier for people who lose love ones because we´re waging a war that we can´t afford.

But that´s the point, whatever you think about the rights and wrongs of Afghanistan and its government, why is it that a archipelago just off the coast of mainland Europe should imagine that it needs to use its army and resources to support various governments in far-flung places all over the world. We don´t have the money, and at best these conflicts have a tangental relationship to our security (and most likely are actuallly detrimental to them). There´s no more reason that British troops should be occupying parts of Afghanistan than those of Sweden, Holland or Argentina.

From the soldiers and their families´point of view, they´re professionals asked to do a job, who feel they should be given the appropriate equipment to do it properly. If the British Army does it on the cheap, this is what´ll happen.

But, what if the money isn´t there? Surely the only argument, given that ´on the cheap´ is the only way that they can do it, is not to do it at all. That the British Army has no place supporting the government in Afghanistan, Iraq or any other far-off locale. Let other countries, those with money and pretensions to importance worry about all that shite.

And, if we weren´t busy invading places for a mixture of ideology, geo-politics and greed, what would we need an army for? Couldn´t we just say fuck it and spend the rest of the money on, say, windfarms and other forms of sustainable energy. We waste so much money make ourselves unpopular around the world, to "save people" who don´t want us to "save" them, wouldn´t it be better to spend it on helping people?

arf! obscure foreign policy irony ...

Sadly, I´ve no longer got the archives to my old site, so I can´t point to the stuff I did about how the US and their allies rigged the Afghan constitutional process. Basically they went through this absurd "consultation process" that was run by their proxy administration and then voted on by the self-same provisional government.

This was the original model for governance in Iraq, get some CIA croney (Chalaba, Allawi, whoever), set them up as provisional president, write a constitution that gave the executive all the power, then make sure they´re the only face on TV and radio, and will thus inevitably triumph in the forthcoming elections.

In the first post-constitution elections in Afghanistan, CIA representative Hamid Karzai had 90% of all the media coverage in the entire elections, on both TV and radio, as well as the entire resources of state on his side (compare that to say Hugo Chavez, who apparently suppresses free speech, by shutting one of the dozen media corporations that are all massively hostile to his government and pump out propaganda 24/7).

And now, guess what, they´ve fallen out with Karzai and are trying to shoe-horn in a Prime Minister role with more power (appointed by them apparently!), so they can undermine him! On account of him being a corrupt fucker who deals with all sorts of dodgy Warlord types. Turns out having a democracy and checks and balances is vital after all...

next on Fox: change ....... Has .......... COME.

If there´s one thing that Americans don´t worry about too much, it´s ´hubris´. One day in the job and this is The Whitehouse website informing us that ´CHANGE has come to America´. Given that Obama is a declared centrist, with no controversial opinions of anything whatsoever, in the midst of a wholesale crisis of American capitalism and confronted by one of the most entrenched political castes on the planet, all determined to keep their noses in their respective troughs. Perhaps a little humility might be in order at this point. You know, maybe wait a bit for declaring that the world will finally and permanently altered beyond all recognition.