Crying Wolf: The Real Significance of Afghanistan for the UK’s Security is that it's not Significant

It's not just the Christmas shopping season that has begun. The undeclared political campaign is well underway as the clock ticks inexorably towards a general election in the spring of 2010. Seemingly, that would now make Afghanistan a key political issue in the battle between the Conservatives and Labour for power. The conflict certainly is in the news but not as a pivotal determinant of the election outcome for the simple reason that there is no real difference between the position of the two main political parties and neither really has an answer regarding how to emerge from the mess. The Liberal Democrats do offer an alternative approach, but, according to the polls, they are not in position to form a government. Thus, Afghanistan has become like the weather: everyone complains about it but no one does anything about it.

One reason for the current stalemate over Afghanistan policy is an external factor. There is a sense of suspended animation across Whitehall as “America's Gurkha,” as apparently some in the government now describe Washington’s faithful servant, waits for the Obama administration to decide what strategic path to follow. The options under discussion include dramatically increasing the troop commitment, with a consensus apparently building around 30,000 more soldiers, or downscale, largely giving up on notions of nation building, and take a different approach with an emphasis on counter-terrorism as the defining factor of the mission.

Not waiting to make a decision about Afghanistan is a majority of the British public. According to a recent poll, almost two-thirds believe that the war is unwinnable and almost an identical number want British troops withdrawn. In their view, this now eight-year-old conflict is no longer worth additional British lives. Hence, the need for Prime Minister Gordon Brown's reselling of the cause of Afghanistan in his speech of 6 November, points he reiterated in his monthly press conference. Nation-building and the dream of a new democratic Afghanistan are not doing well after the corruption that surrounded President Hamid Karzai’s recent re-election. The goal of achieving a stable Afghanistan has been damaged by the election. It is further weakened by the fact that even with a surge in U.S. troops the number would simply not be sufficient according to the US’s own counterinsurgency manual to have a chance at success. And that point applies simply to numbers of troops and not to the additional commitment in aid that would also be required from the United States and its allies.

Gordon Brown consequently had little choice but to resort to an old but effective selling/scaring point: invoke 9/11 and 7/7.  9/11, however, has already been used as a justification for originally going into Afghanistan in October 2001 to remove al-Qaeda and to kill or capture its leadership. That goal was only partially successful for a number of reasons, including the shift in emphasis from Afghanistan to Iraq part way through the operation; a strategy that the government of Tony Blair backed publicly. The successful part of the approach was in driving al-Qaeda from Afghanistan. The predicament for the United Kingdom arises from where it went next.

In his speech, Gordon Brown noted that “three quarters of terrorist plots originate in the Pakistan-Afghan border regions.”  This is the equivalent of saying it doesn’t matter whether a group of children stand on a beach or swim in the sea—all will get wet. The big security threat to the UK comes not from Afghanistan or the border lands of Afghanistan-Pakistan but from within Pakistan itself. The intelligence agencies know this and so does the British government. It is in Pakistan where terrorist training camps are. It is in Pakistan where Osama bin Laden, Ayman al-Zawahiri and the remnants of al-Qaeda hide and plot. It is there where the issue of Kashmir has been a pathway to the radicalization of some. Currently, an estimated 400,000 Britons of Pakistani origin travel to Pakistan on a yearly basis. If only a tiny fraction of this number drifts towards terrorism than the UK has a major security headache. And turning that headache into a migraine for Whitehall is the potential threat to the United States by these same Britons. One can see the obvious potential: travelling into the US with a British passport engenders less suspicion than the same visit using a Pakistani passport. It is for this reason that rumours abounded in 2007 that the then Director of Homeland Security for the United States, Michael Chertoff, had come to London to raise the issue of requiring special visas for Britons of Pakistani background. Chertoff himself in an interview with The Daily Telegraph raised the prospect of a 9/11 style attack against the US being carried out by Europeans.

Indeed, a credible counter argument exists to Brown’s continual insistence that a withdrawal from Afghanistan would pose a threat to the UK.  It is simply that, as with Iraq, the continued presence of western troops in Afghanistan represents a security threat to the west because of the anger and resentment they generate, particularly in the aftermath of American bombing strikes that kill Afghan civilians. As Robert Pape, an academic expert on suicide bombing, recently pointed out in the New York Times, suicide bombings in Afghanistan were almost non-existent in 2004 with only 5 compared to 148 last year. What changed in this period was the growing presence of NATO troops.

Nor is the security issue in Afghanistan about al-Qaeda. As the American government readily admits, al-Qaeda no longer has a substantive presence in Afghanistan. Why would it need one when it can function in the lawlessness of Pakistan or its affiliates can operate in parts of Africa? Certainly, even if Afghanistan became a stable and prosperous democracy, the security challenge of Pakistan would remain---it is Pakistan that helps to destabilize Afghanistan not the other way around.

So the Brown government invokes the threat of terrorism within the UK as the chief justification for continuing British involvement in Afghanistan. It does so because this association invokes in the minds of the public airplanes crashing into buildings, skyscrapers toppling to the ground, and mangled bodies on the London Underground. Such imagery works, although the problem for Whitehall is that its frequent invoking of the ultimate horror provides it with a “boy who cried wolf” hue. After all, the same government warned about weapons of mass destruction that could be deployed in forty-five minutes. Nevertheless, this bogeyman approach will not change with a David Cameron government for the simple reason that it remains the most effective card to play on behalf of a failed strategy. True change in the centres of power in London over Afghanistan will only occur when Washington decides that it has had enough of the quagmire.

Steve Hewitt is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Birmingham and author of The British War on Terror: Terrorism and Counter-Terrorism on the Home Front since 9/11 and the forthcoming, Snitch!: A History of the Modern Intelligence Informer.

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As a postscript: A poll done for yesterday's Independent on Sunday found that 47% of Britons believe that the continued presence of British troops in Afghanistan increases the threat of terrorism in the UK. 44% disagreed.
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/war-in-afghanistan-not-in-our-name-1820949.html