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Good News From Afghanistan? (Commentary Magazine, July/August 2014)

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On the Unheralded Transformation of Kabul 

“Everybody knows the war is over./ Everybody knows the good guys lost.”

-Leonard Cohen

Everyone knows that there has been no progress and no development in Afghanistan, that the West’s efforts there since the overthrow of the Taliban have been a gigantic waste of blood and treasure. Everyone knows that the Afghans are corrupt, vicious, and ungrateful, and want us to leave immediately. Everyone knows that U.S. air strikes invariably kill vast numbers of civilians and therefore recruit ever more people to the insurgency. Everybody knows that all the aid money has been squandered, or stolen and taken to Dubai for laundering. Everybody knows that our clueless troops spend their days and nights offending local sensitivities by burning Korans and outraging the sanctity of the women’s quarters—that is, when they are not desecrating enemy corpses. Finally, everyone knows that the Taliban has won the war and is waiting to retake Kabul as soon as the last foreign troops are no longer in the fight—which, President Obama has now informed us, will be the case at the end of 2015.

There have been few times in the modern era when “everybody” has been quite so misinformed or so willing to see catastrophe when none has taken place.

To acknowledge this does not require an optimistic take on Afghanistan’s future or even a belief in the original rightness of the Afghan “nation-building” mission. It is merely a matter of looking past the overall impression fostered by a mainstream media that long ago grew bored of both the war and the complexity of the actual country known as Afghanistan.

I went back to Afghanistan this past winter after an absence of seven years. Flying this time on a commercial airline—one of several that serves the country—I encountered a Kabul transformed, and almost entirely for the better. This came as something of shock. I follow news and events Afghanistan quite closely, and this abundantly obvious, indeed unmissable, transformation generally has gone unnoticed or unmentioned by those whose very job it is to report and comment on the country.

The new international terminal isn’t ritzy, but it is partly solar-powered and has free Wi-Fi. You don’t feel like you’re flying into a war zone or a city traumatized by terrorism until you exit the terminal and walk several hundred yards, in sight of watchful Afghan army soldiers and Humvee gunners, to get to a parking lot that is too far away for even the largest vehicle bomb to do much damage. Then you get onto a highway that, like all the main roads in central Kabul, is of astonishingly good quality for this part of the world, and it’s packed with traffic. Seven years ago, when I traveled with International Security Assistance Force foot patrols through town—inconceivable now that all security in the city is run by Afghans—most of those roads were quiet, full of potholes, and largely free of civilian vehicles.

The physical and economic growth of the city was immediately apparent. From the middle of town to the suburbs, Kabul has been astonishingly altered by the arrival of shiny shopping malls, vast wedding halls, and restaurants. There are huge new suburbs spreading out across what was recently farmland or desert. Some are planned and boast rows of 20-story apartment blocks. Others, illegal and slum-like, spread up the slopes of the city’s surrounding dun-coloured hills and, lacking running water, look and smell like Brazilian favelas.

On the outskirts of the city are busy concrete factories and huge lots filled with Caterpillar and Komatsu diggers. Everywhere you look, there is frenzied economic activity. The center of town is protected by the “ring of steel”—a series of checkpoints. The paramilitary police who guard them are nothing like the ones I remembered from 2006 and 2007. They don’t look like sloppy, sleepy Third World cops. They are alert, equally suspicious of white, brown, and yellow, and carry their weapons like people who know how to keep them clean. They ape the look of American and allied Special Forces to an almost absurd degree, with goggles on their helmets, combat knives strapped to their body armor, and flashlights attached to their rifles.

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Inside the ring of steel is a street where every other store sells the latest in computers and electronic goods. (You can choose between genuine, name-brand SD cards and USB sticks or decent fakes from China.) There is another street with several huge sporting-goods shops. Presumably they were set up to cater to the military contractor market, but they have found a domestic market and have stock superior to anything in either India or Pakistan. Everywhere there are small, lively workshops. Seven years ago, I remember, there were already two surprisingly good cellular telephone networks. Today there are more, and there are mobile phone shops and billboards for 4G cellular services all over town. Coverage was at least as good as New York City’s. At least two-thirds of the population have cellphones.

In the center of town, about a third of the men are wearing jeans instead of salwar kameez (the long shirt and pajamas worn by both men and women in Afghanistan and Pakistan). About half the women are not in the light blue burqas that are ubiquitous in much of the countryside, and I saw some in tight jeans and the flimsiest of head scarves.

The traffic in Kabul, once as sparse as you would expect in a devastated, civil war–torn city, is now comically terrible. There are rush hours at least twice a day during which vehicles barely move. These would seemingly provide amazing opportunities for terrorists who are not themselves stuck in traffic. As in other parts of the Third World, most cars and trucks are Toyotas, though in one small parking lot in the center of town I was surprised to come upon a gold Hummer, two Mercedes, a BMW, and a Ferrari.

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Over the three weeks I spent in the Afghan capital, I was struck by the lack of a visible foreign military presence in the streets. There is a huge base at the airport, and the ISAF headquarters and the ultra-secure embassy complexes are very visible. An hour out of town are the military academies sponsored by the British and Americans. But Kabul does not look or feel like a city under foreign military occupation. You do see from time to time convoys of huge mine-protected armored trucks heading to and from the U.S. base at the airport. You are more likely to encounter mini-convoys of three or four bullet-proofed Toyota SUVs filled with people wearing helmets and body armor as per embassy or ISAF regulation. They maneuver together and are a constant irritation to Afghan drivers.

Most of the city center is astonishingly clean. I was startled to see groups of men in uniform overalls picking up trash, something almost unimaginable in this part of the world. In India or Pakistan or Nepal, when trash is picked up, it is by rag pickers, the poorest of the poor, or consumed by the cows, pigs, and dogs that cohabit the streets of subcontinental cities with the homeless.

Most remarkable of all is the number and size of the so-called poppy palaces—the gaudy, high-walled mansions of Kabul’s rich. Despite the nickname, they are as likely to have been built by men who have made fortunes from construction and security contracts as from drugs. They are protected by the latest in cameras and security systems. Some were built by speculators aware of the extortionate rents that foreigners were willing to pay for villa accommodation within the ring of steel.

That was when the city was heaving with aid workers, foreign-security contractors (mostly expelled by President Hamid Karzai after his reelection in 2009 and replaced by Afghan security guards), consultants, and entrepreneurs. Rents have all but collapsed with the shrinking of the international presence that has been underway since Barack Obama’s December 2010 announcement of a 2014 departure date for most U.S. forces. When the “internationals” presence was at its height in the mid- to late-2000s, a lot of money was spent and thousands of foreigners enjoyed a spectacular social life that people deployed to Baghdad at the same time could only dream of. The Thursday-night poolside parties at L’Atmosphere bar-bistro and other places were wild, with that febrile carpe-diem spirit often found in war zones and which owes as much to boredom as fear.

Today the brothels (loosely disguised as Chinese restaurants) have closed, and it is the Afghans themselves, not the aid workers and embassy officials, who are buying khaki cargo pants and stolen PX products at the huge Bush Market. There are still a half dozen or so restaurants patronized by foreigners, however, and all are delightful places with lanterned gardens, nominally illegal booze, excellent food, and, for the most part, serious security. Much to the shock of the international community, one of these restaurants, Taverna du Liban, was recently attacked by the Taliban, who murdered 21 of its guests and staff. Despite that horror, the city generally has been safer for expats than outsiders might imagine, and security has improved in the last year and a half. There are even tourist groups to be seen visiting the spectacular Babur Gardens and the ruins of the Darul Aman palace. According to longtime foreign residents, ordinary crime is a bigger threat than terrorist outrages, especially in certain parts of the city where muggings are rife.

There have been a handful of kidnappings of expats during the past five years, but these have mostly been opportunistic crimes by local criminal gangs or the results of nefarious dealings by those expats; it is well known that some of the foreigners who work in Kabul are really there because hashish and heroin are readily available. Most kidnappings are of locals and by locals and connected to business disputes. The level of violence in general is lower than in murder capitals such as Caracas, Tegucigalpa, Kingston (in Jamaica), or Juárez, let alone Baghdad. Most of the time the city is quiet and does not feel like a capital at war. When things do go wrong, however, they do so dramatically and bloodily.

The Taliban are masters of the “spectacular.” Although fewer and fewer of their attacks come to fruition and although the effectiveness of Afghan security forces has radically increased, any attack on a foreign target is, inevitably, a strategic triumph in the information battle space. Such attacks foster the impression of chaos and insecurity and imply the possibility of a Taliban victory to media consumers at home. The Taliban’s leaders have long understood that the really important battle for hearts and minds isn’t taking place in Afghan villages but in the newsrooms and cities of the West. One of the worst errors made by the Coalition and foreign observers has been mistaking the Taliban for mere rural primitives. Indeed, they understand the imperatives of information warfare against democratic countries at least as well as Western militaries, perhaps better.

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Over a $10 beer at the famous Gandamack Lodge, the preferred drinking hole of the press corps and much of the international community, I asked Jeremy Kelly, the longtime Kabul correspondent for The Times (London) and other papers, why I had never seen any articles about the transformation of the city and its economic vivacity. Kelly, a tough thirtysomething Australian who has traveled through much of Afghanistan by motorbike, sighed and said that editors just aren’t interested in hearing that kind of news from Afghanistan. It does seem to be the case that mainstream newspaper and TV editors got bored with the Afghan war years ago. And therefore the only Afghan news that interests them now are “green on blue” attacks by Afghan troops against international forces, alleged allied atrocities, and successful terrorist attacks: all stories that seem to confirm the wisdom of getting out as soon as possible.

Of course, Kabul is not Afghanistan—although at least an eighth of the population lives in the capital. But then neither does Helmand or Kandahar City or Khost, where the war with the Taliban is most evident, represent Afghanistan. The Northern city of Mazar-i-Sharif is even more orderly and peaceful than Kabul. And Kandahar, in the Pashtun heartland, seems to be quiet and firmly in government control. While Kabul has grown to be a city of at least 5 million people, the tripling of the populations in cities such as Heart and Kandahar reflects a deeper transformation of the country, one that continues behind the storyline of a lost war and wasted, failed international assistance.

The country is now much more urban than it was a decade ago, with almost half the population living in cities. And in terms of development, no country in the world has made so much progress so quickly. Life expectancy has risen from 37 in 2000 to around 60 today. Maternal mortality, the highest in the world, has dropped from 1,600 per 100,000 births to 367 per 100,000, and the infant mortality rate is half what it was. Even more significant, per capita GDP increased fivefold and the country has enjoyed 9 to 10 percent growth annually since 2000—admittedly from a very low base.

Vast amounts of aid have, of course, been stolen, misused, or wasted. But you only have to spend a few days in Afghanistan to see that it did not all end up in bank accounts in Dubai. It’s also worth remembering that few heavily aided countries are subject to the same scrutiny as Afghanistan. Having seen a lot of aid in a lot of countries,1 I’m not convinced that Afghans are more likely to steal or misuse aid dollars than citizens of any other brutalized, impoverished, and politically dysfunctional country.

Foreign analysts tend to focus on the role of aid in Afghanistan’s development, but they should pay more attention to what is arguably a greater engine of change. The country’s economic, cultural, and political life have all been reshaped by the return of more than 5 million Afghans from foreign exile. Whether they were in Iran or Pakistan (which each had about 2 million Afghans) or in America and Europe, the returnees have brought with them skills, knowledge, expectations, and entrepreneurial drive that were previously lacking. It is because of the exiles in Pakistan that cricket is now a national Afghan sport, and it is because of the exiles in Iran that Afghanistan won a bronze medal for Taekwondo in the 2012 Olympics. Aid was not responsible for setting up the first television channel or mobile network; an Afghan-Australian businessman was.

A fifth of the population, as opposed to 6 percent in 2001, has access to reliable electricity. Sixty percent of the population, including 48 percent of women, own cellular phones. More than 65 percent of the population has access to the Internet. Primary-school enrollment has risen from less than a million in 2001 (only 5,000 were girls) to more than 8 million (more than 3 million are girls). University enrollment has gone from less than 8,000 in 2001 to more than 77,000, with many Afghan students studying abroad. There are 84 television channels and 50 independent radio stations.

Thanks to these changes and vastly better highways between cities, Afghans are much less isolated from each other and the world than they once were. They are also becoming much better educated and therefore less vulnerable to, or interested in, the Taliban’s appeal. Polls indicate that the great majority of Afghans do not want the Taliban to return to power and have a negative view of the insurgency. Almost 50 percent of the population are younger than 15 years old. They have no memory of life under the Taliban and have opportunities for literacy and education that much of the adult population were once denied.

Are we defeated?

It is difficult to get a wholly convincing, comprehensive impression of the military situation in Afghanistan. But you don’t have to be an optimist about the future or unduly credulous of ISAF pronouncements to see that government forces are not (yet) on the defensive and that the Taliban have little chance of taking over any province or any city in the near future. This is despite spectacular official corruption, nepotism, and ministerial incompetence; despite the pathological obstructiveness of Karzai; despite the inconsistency and inconstancy in allied strategy; despite dreadful mistakes by Coalition forces; despite the cash flowing to the insurgents from the Gulf states; despite the tremendous skill and determination of the Taliban’s sponsors in Islamabad; and finally, despite the hugely demoralizing effect of President Obama’s announcement of a U.S. pullout in 2014 regardless of the facts on the ground.

There is no question that Obama’s announcement had a catastrophic effect on morale, pushed Afghan fence-sitters onto the Taliban side, made intelligence-gathering harder, and weakened American leverage over the Afghan government. And it is still hard to believe that an American president could so foolishly or carelessly undermine the efforts of his own troops. On Obama’s recent Memorial Day visit to Afghanistan, he seemed to have a new awareness of “the sacrifices we have made…the gains you have helped to win.” But five years of the Obama presidency have taught observers to take such rhetorical allusions very lightly.

Afghanistan’s 350,000-strong National Security Forces have nearly doubled in size since 2009 and now conduct 95 percent of operations against the Taliban. During the 2012 and 2013 fighting seasons, they led the charge against the insurgents and consolidated control of all 34 provincial capitals. Coalition trainers are often impressed by the skill of Afghan bomb-disposal teams and the physical courage of Afghan National Army soldiers, especially when well led, and when corruption and incompetence in the officer corps have not undermined the supply of food and ammunition to the troops. Afghanistan’s special forces in particular are able to operate effectively on their own. These include specialized police units and the paramilitary forces of the powerful intelligence service known as the National Directorate of Security.

On the other hand, local police in Afghanistan have earned a justified reputation among frontline Coalition troops as unreliable, underpaid, corrupt, incompetent, lazy, sometimes treacherous, sometimes brave, dope-smoking pederasts. Given that policemen everywhere in South Asia tend to be little more than uniformed, licensed bandits, this should not have come as such a surprise to Western trainers and planners. They also have an unenviably high death rate, as they are considered soft targets by insurgents.

At least the Afghan National Army is now decently salaried with an increasing number of soldiers, paid via mobile-phone accounts rather than in cash. Despite having to recruit from a relatively illiterate population, it has become a much more professional and tactically proficient fighting force than it was only a few years ago.

Unfortunately, the Coalition’s focus on getting trained infantrymen into the field as soon as possible—which was perhaps understandable when the Coalition thought it had years to set up a modern army—meant that relatively little attention was paid to teaching Afghan leaders and ministries about planning, logistics, and budgeting, or to equipping Afghan forces with fire support in the form of aircraft and artillery, or to giving them an ability to transport their own forces across the country. Unlike Coalition forces, the Afghans have little ability to evacuate their casualties by air, and given their high-casualty rates, this has a bad effect on morale, retention, and recruiting.

When it was announced that the United States and its Coalition allies would be all but abandoning the mission at the end of 2014, to the shock and dismay of Afghans and Coalition forces alike, ISAF started scrambling to fill some of these gaps. There have been some successes: For a long time it was feared that the Afghans would not be able to maintain the Humvees or Ford trucks supplied to the army and police once the U.S. contractors had home, but mechanics have now been trained to do so.

On the other hand, the Coalition was remarkably sleepy about the need to develop indigenous air capacity. Only in the last year or so has it begun in earnest to train and equip2 Afghan pilots, and in any case the Afghan air force has yet to find a way to keep expensively trained, English-speaking pilots and maintenance crews from leaving to work for the country’s new commercial airlines.

Fortunately, even if today’s Afghan military does not have all the capacities or capabilities of the Soviet-trained Afghan armed forces, it does not have to face an insurgency as large or as well funded and well equipped as the Mujahadeen were in the 1970s and ’80s. That is why almost everyone agrees that there is very little chance of the Taliban’s capturing any Afghan city, let alone Kabul, after the departure of ISAF forces later this year. They do control large areas of certain provinces, but they lack the capacity and perhaps even the desire to take any of the country’s cities.

This assumes that the international community will not breach its commitment to fund the Afghan National Security Forces through 2017. It also assumes that the Bilateral Security Agreement between Afghanistan and the United States will be signed before the U.S. administration loses patience and pulls out all its troops. The BSA, as it is known, sets out the conditions for a continued American military presence in Afghanistan until the end of 2014. Without such an agreement, there will also be no long-term U.S. civilian presence in the country and no U.S. ally would consider keeping forces in Afghanistan. It was supposed to have been signed by the end of 2013, and the Obama administration threatened a “zero option”—pulling every soldier and adviser out of the country by the end of 2014—if it wasn’t signed by the end of January 2014. After all, the two governments had been negotiating the deal under which U.S. troops would stay after 2014 to “train, advise, and assist” Afghan forces for more than a year.

Sticking points included an unsuccessful Afghan demand that America guarantee Afghanistan’s security against foreign incursions, i.e., against Pakistan, and give an “apology” for past mistakes, as well as America’s insistence on total immunity against prosecution for its troops. The BSA was endorsed by the Afghan Parliament and then by a Loya Jirga assembly of tribal elders, but Karzai refused to put his signature to it.

Luckily, both of the leading presidential candidates in the running to succeed Karzai and most of the political class are very keen to see the agreement signed. That means that the big danger is not so much the Taliban’s returning in triumph to destroy what they see as the fleshpots of Kabul, but a return to the warlordism and civil war that devastated the country after the Soviet departure.

At the time of writing, the Afghan presidential election is entering its second phase, since no candidate won the first round. It is significant that the election was held at all. It is no secret that Karzai did not want to give up power. As late as November, there was much talk in Kabul of the president’s postponing the elections for “security reasons” or declaring a state of emergency, perhaps after ensuring a certain amount of chaos in key districts. He is also rumored to have been building a residence on the presidential estate so he can be a permanent “adviser” to his successor. Perhaps because his refusal to sign the BSA with the U.S. does not have the agreement of tribal leaders (as evidenced by a recent Loya Jirga) or because he knew that postponing the election might push even the Obama administration too far, Karzai seems to have accepted that he will indeed be leaving office.

This is just as well. Karzai’s behavior over the past four years, especially toward the allies whose financial and military support ensure his government’s survival, begs for psychiatric explanation. Among other things, he has accused NATO of secretly arming the Taliban. Notoriously, and perhaps in an attempt to win over Taliban sympathizers or Pakistan’s hawks, he has repeatedly berated ISAF for achieving nothing in Afghanistan3 and inflicting civilian casualties. At the same time, he has not expressed any sympathy for victims, Afghan and other, of the Taliban, let alone the 3,400 NATO troops killed there since 2001.

Some of this hostility may reflect an eccentric jealousy of the popularity of Coalition provincial reconstruction teams, whose effectiveness and concern for the welfare of the population contrasted so starkly with those of central-government officials. But Karzai seems to have little sense of the extent to which his anti-Western rhetoric alienated the countries that bankroll his regime, and also to have entertained the delusion that he could replace America and the West with regional supporters such as Turkey, Iran, and India, perhaps boosted by China or Russia.

His profound paranoia became apparent before the 2009 elections—elections that he shamelessly fixed—when he was convinced that the United States and its allies were determined to find a candidate to replace him. The irony was that America was, if anything, too easy on Karzai. Our toleration of depredations by his family and friends deeply alienated ordinary Afghans who assumed that America knew and approved of that corruption. Had Washington been more ruthless while it still had abundant leverage, that might not have been the case.

Another explanation for his irrational behavior puts blame on the Coalition and is more plausible. Throughout the mid-2000s, the United States and ISAF forced Karzai and his government to go along with the pretense that Pakistan was not hosting and sponsoring, and in some cases arming and advising, some of the worst Taliban groups. Afghan representatives were made to attend “tripartite” meetings on Afghanistan’s security with the Coalition and Pakistani officials. Those officials must have been laughing into their teacups as straight-faced American diplomats talked about the “contribution” of their Pakistani “partners.” If our troops who faced Pakistani-sponsored Talibs and occasionally Pakistani special forces were disgusted by this, it was perhaps unfair to expect Karzai to take part in such a grotesque charade and stay sane.

A smooth transition of power to either Abdullah Abdullah or Ashraf Ghani will represent a triumph for both the Coalition and Afghanistan. Ghani is unique in Afghan politics. A Pashtun intellectual with a Ph.D. from Columbia University who honed his expertise in development while working for the World Bank, he was finance minister from 2002 to 2004. He co-wrote a book, Fixing Failed States, that is required reading for anyone interested in aid and development. Dismayingly, this technocrat chose as his running mate the Uzbek warlord General Abul Rashid Dostum, who was a key ally of the United States in 2001 and of the USSR during the 1980s, and who has never given up his private army.

His rival for the presidency, Dr. Abdullah Abdullah, is a former foreign minister and trained ophthalmologist. He is half Tajik and half Pashtun and fought alongside the Northern Alliance leader Ahmed Shah Massoud, who was murdered by al-Qaeda just before 9/11. Abdullah won the most votes in the first round of the election. A strong critic of Karzai’s anti-Western rhetoric, he has said he would sign the BSA within a month of being elected. But one of his two running mates is “Engineer” Mohammed Khan, a former deputy head of the Hezbi I Islamist party, whose military wing is the second largest insurgent group after
the Taliban.

Neither is entirely attractive. But both leaders are apparently sane and promise to be more pragmatic and less obstructionist than Karzai. There is a chance they will not be quite so intent on a centralized form of government that is fundamentally unsuited to Afghan society and prone to corruption and bad governance. Both leaders clearly understand that Afghanistan desperately needs U.S. forces to stay after 2014 in sufficient numbers to lead, guide, train, and support the Afghan military if the developmental gains of the last decade are not to be lost.

At the end of May, President Obama announced that America will keep 9,800 troops in Afghanistan after the end of 2014, assuming that the next Afghan president signs the BSA. That is an improvement on the 5,000 troops the White House had originally been considering, a number so inadequate to the task that it would almost have been better to have none at all. U.S. commanders generally believe they would need a minimum of 14,000 troops on the ground until 2017 to carry out the mission effectively and safely, and perhaps considerably more, depending on what happens in the next fighting season. Still, it’s possible that 9,800 could be sufficient to back up and train Afghan forces, especially if the U.S. keeps enough air power in the region.

Unfortunately, the president also has declared that, irrespective of the facts on the ground, the deployment will be cut in half by the end of 2015. All but 1,000 of those remaining forces will be gone by the end of 2016. It is hard to exaggerate just how foolish and irresponsible it is of Obama to put a fixed date on the deployment, thereby telling the insurgents that no matter how exhausted they may be, all they have to do is hold on for two years.

But the truly awful aspect of this retreat is that America may be about to abandon Afghanistan just when it seems to have turned a corner—when a new leader is about to take power after a peaceful democratic process, when economic growth is transforming life for millions, and when the security forces are beginning to become genuinely effective in a limited but promising way.

It wouldn’t be the first time that the United States has chosen to lose a war without being defeated in the field, or risked rendering meaningless a huge expenditure of blood and treasure, or let down a beleaguered ally. But it would likely rank high in any list of the nation’s strategic blunders and shabby betrayals, and its fallout might be felt for many years to come in the region and beyond.

Afghanistan is not the only country that has changed dramatically since late 2001.

Footnotes

1 See my book Aiding and Abetting (Civitas, 2013).

2 The Afghan air force was due to be given 20 inexpensive, easy-to-maintain but highly effective COIN aircraft Brazilian-American A-29 Super-Tucano propeller attack planes. However, thanks to the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on Defense, it will now get only a handful. This is a decision that could have far-reaching effects, given that Afghan forces are used to working with U.S. forces that rely on consistent and effective close air support. Afghan forces are also used to relying on Coalition air transport to move them around the country, and most of that will not be available after this year. The November 2013 U.S. cancellation of a contract to buy Russian MI-17 transport helicopters—familiar, powerful, and simple to operate—supposedly because the exporter has ties to the Syrian regime—will also adversely affect Afghan military capacities after we go.

Sixteen second-hand Italian Air Force Alenia G-222 transport aircraft bought for the Afghan air force have been mysteriously retired. It’s not clear if they became unflyable because of corruption-related Afghan failures to maintain them properly or if, as seems likely, the Italian suppliers failed to supply promised maintenance support as per their contract.

3 Karzai told the BBC in October 2013: “The entire NATO exercise was one that caused Afghanistan a lot of suffering, a lot of loss of life, and no gains because the country is not secure.”

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India à la Modi (The Weekly Standard, June 2, 2014)

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Hope and Change on the Subcontinent

The Indian elections that ended with a resounding victory for the Hindu nationalist Narendra Modi and an even more resounding defeat of the ruling Congress party have huge implications not just for India’s potential prosperity, political evolution, and unity but also for the region and the world economy.

For most of the seven decades since independence, the Indian National Congress party—and therefore the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty—has ruled India and dominated Indian political life. The Fabian socialism, bureaucratic protectionism, and tiers-mondiste “nonaligned” inclinations of Nehru and his daughter Indira Gandhi set the tone for mainstream Indian politics for well over half a century. And that family’s quasi-hereditary hold on the prime ministerial residence has been reproduced on a smaller scale in parliament, with seats that are essentially passed on from one family member to another, and in the states by hundreds of hereditary political fiefdoms.

The fact that up to a third of India’s citizens still lack access to clean water or reliable electric power, that a quarter of the population is illiterate, and that the country’s transport infrastructure is decades behind that of China can largely be laid at the door of the Congress party and the Gandhi family—although the country’s leaders have a habit of blaming their failure to improve the population’s lot on the legacy of colonialism, the restraints imposed by democratic politics, or the “foreign hand” (i.e., the malign influence of the CIA and Pakistani subversion).

It was only in 1991 after a huge balance of payments crisis and decades of feeble growth that India’s leaders finally began to liberalize the economy, allow some foreign direct investment, and dismantle parts of the notoriously corrupt “License Raj,” in which permits were required for almost every form of economic activity. These reforms, as limited as they in fact were, unleashed long-suppressed entrepreneurial energies and led to a massive leap in growth and the emergence of a new, ambitious, 300-million-strong “middle class” (characterized by owning at least one major electrical or motorized device, like a fridge or scooter).

However, the reform drive petered out in the face of opposition from the hard left, from an intellectual elite whose reflexive hostility to capitalism, “globalization,” and “neoliberalism” remains undiminished, and from business families and associations that benefit from a system founded on cronyism, connections, and monopoly. Corruption scandals, often involving government programs supposed to be “pro-poor,” have grown larger in scale and more frequent.

Partly as a result of all this, India’s economic rise has stalled. Annual growth of more than 8 percent has dropped to 4 percent. These days you no longer hear nearly so much ebullient talk in New Delhi about India as a “superpower” or this being “the Indian century.” Foreign companies, many of which have fallen prey to red tape and bureaucratic protectionism, or to New Delhi’s habit of retroactively imposing punitive taxes, are now much more cautious about investing in India. Millions of Indians who believed the hype about the irresistible rise of “Incredible India” feel betrayed by their rulers.

All except in one Indian state—Gujarat—where Narendra Modi has been chief minister since 2001, and where businesses, foreign and domestic, not only don’t have to fear the destructive whims and ruthless predation of bureaucrats and politicians but feel positively welcome. Since Modi came to power Gujarat has become a hub for pharmaceuticals and the automobile industry and boasts the country’s largest oil refinery as well as its biggest private-sector, deepwater port. It has grown much faster than India as a whole. And while India has dropped on the Fraser Institute index of economic freedom, Gujarat has gone up.

It is hard for foreigners to appreciate just how extraordinary this is without understanding how little purchase free-market ideas have had in India—and the extent to which the Indian right has tended to be as protectionist, statist, and xenophobic as the center and left. For instance, only last year Modi’s party, the BJP, opposed allowing foreign direct investment in “multibrand retail,” i.e., supermarkets. (The current mom-and-pop system of distribution leads to some 30-40 percent of food produced in India being spoiled.)

Of course, Modi cannot take all the credit for the economic success of his state. Gujaratis have long been known as one of India’s most entrepreneurial peoples and are among the most successful ethnicities in the Indian diaspora. Moreover there have been scores of articles in the English-language Indian press claiming that Gujarat has not in fact been such a success and that its poverty indices are actually worse than those of other states. These are not all agitprop on behalf of a political and cultural establishment that has long loathed Modi: There is still great poverty in Gujarat, and the state’s unique growth has not benefited all its citizens.

On the other hand there has been something bizarre about the inability of many mainstream Indian commentators to admit that Gujarat is obviously better governed and economically healthier than much of the rest of India. An outsider can hardly help but notice the difference between Gujarat and the rest of India within moments of crossing into the state. Most obvious is the quality of the roads, and the fact that Gujarat enjoys electric power 365 days a year, a boon painfully rare in the rest of India.

You almost wonder if the establishment’s apparent blindness to Gujarat’s economic superiority is somehow connected to that general complacency about poverty and degradation that so baffles foreigners visiting the subcontinent. Similarly, when Modi gets little credit from the political class for the fact that he is not personally corrupt and runs an administration that by Indian standards is remarkably efficient and honest, you wonder if the postcolonial establishment has not become deeply, cruelly complacent about graft.

That said, there are plenty of reasons why a fair-minded Indian who accepts and appreciates Modi’s accomplishments in Gujarat might still be worried at the prospect of his becoming prime minister. After all, conceding that he has achieved the economic equivalent of making the trains run on time would hardly lessen the gravity of the crimes Modi has been accused of, chief among them responsibility for a horrifying 2002 massacre in his state.

Nor is it clear that Modi’s party at the national level is genuinely enthusiastic about or capable of bringing the “Gujarat model” to the rest of India; since it was last in power in 2004 the BJP has arguably seemed more concerned with Hindu nationalist cultural and symbolic sectarian issues.

However, Modi’s success as chief minister of Gujarat enabled the party—which in many parts of the country has proved itself to be every bit as venal and incompetent as its rivals—to campaign convincingly on a platform of administrative competence and friendliness to enterprise. And because Modi is in so many ways an outsider (and had to fight long and hard to achieve supreme power even in his own party), the BJP was able to cast itself as a party that is fighting the system on behalf of ordinary people.

That the apparent economic success and relative honesty of Modi’s administration in Gujarat inspired so many Indian voters shows how desperately fed up much of the electorate is. It also suggests that India’s democratic institutions may be becoming less amenable to control by a small, English-speaking, quasi-hereditary political class that has coasted for years on the prestige of having achieved independence from Britain.

Rahul Gandhi, the handsome but feckless scion of the Nehru-Gandhi clan, seemed visibly shocked by the lack of deference he encountered campaigning in traditional Congress strongholds. It was as if decades of broken promises of “bijli, pani, sadak” (electricity, water, roads) had finally come home to roost. Hundreds of millions of Indians, who now enjoy some access to mobile telephony, satellite TV, and the Internet, no longer accept poverty as their destiny.

Just the fact that Modi was his party’s candidate represents a breach with Indian politics as usual. At 63, Modi qualifies as youthful in a system in which many powerful figures are well over 70, and is the first prime minister born after independence. He has been able to leverage his dominance of a single state into the leadership of a major national party, something that other charismatic outsiders, like the film star Jayalalithaa and the Dalit (untouchable) leader Mayawati have not succeeded in doing. Most significant of all, Modi actually comes from the people. 

Modi is the largely self-educated son of a humble railroad station tea seller who comes from the Ghanchi caste of oil pressers. (The Ghanchis count as one of India’s “Other Backwards Castes,” an official category that entitles members to certain affirmative action benefits.) He himself sold tea from a bus station stall as a child.

Barrel-chested, bespectacled, neatly bearded, Modi doesn’t look like anyone else in Indian politics. He’s an equally far cry from both the gangsters and caste-activists who achieve political power in lawless districts of central India and the smooth talking political families of New Delhi. He is a traditionalist who made inspired, almost Obama-like use of social media in his campaign. He is known to be ruthless, thin-skinned, and vengeful, though probably no more a threat to a free media in India than the Congress party, which tried to clamp down on Internet freedom in 2012.

Moreover, not only has Modi not made a fortune as chief minister (and you can get seriously rich in Indian politics), he is famously abstemious. This has huge appeal in a culture steeped in religious asceticism, and which is heartily sick of flagrant political graft. As important as his personal rigor, Modi is celebrated for imposing his morality on the Gujarat government and making it stand out in India for its accountability, transparency, and (relative) honesty. It may help that he has no immediate family of his own. Though married at 18 (probably not consummated), he lives alone, and for politics.

For all that, Modi is deeply controversial and inspires as much fear as hope, in particular among India’s 150 million Muslims but also among those concerned with press freedom, women’s rights, and human rights violations in the many Indian states where security forces are battling local insurgencies.

Observers who should understand the term better have inaccurately or at least prematurely labeled Modi a fascist. But there is no question that he and the BJP have been involved in some of the darker and more frightening events in modern Indian politics, beginning with the violent 1992 destruction in the town of Ayodhya of a celebrated 16th-century mosque that Hindu fundamentalists believed had been built on top of the birthplace of the god Ram.

Moreover, Modi is a lifelong member of the RSS (for Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, which roughly translates as “national volunteer association”), an association of Hindu militants founded in 1925 that has a distinctly paramilitary style that reflects the admiration of its founders for Europe’s fascist movements. (Its members march in white shirts and khaki shorts like Boy Scouts but carry sticks and practice military drills.) It was a former RSS member who assassinated Mahatma Gandhi.

It is true that Hindu nationalist parties and politicians have been unfairly caricatured by the Indian establishment in much the same way that the American media caricature Christian evangelicals. But there is also little question that Hindu nationalist parties and politicians have been responsible for some very nasty, atavistic manifestations of intolerance in recent years.

Although Modi and his party have issues with the phrase “Hindu nationalist” and claim to be genuine secularists, they do espouse Hindutva, a vague but compelling ideology that combines Hindu religiosity with social conservatism and a deep sense that India’s core culture has been suppressed by first Muslim and then Christian conquerors.

For them the great unsettled question about what it means to be an Indian has a simple answer: It means to be culturally if not religiously Hindu. For the postcolonial elite the answer was more complicated and had to do with Nehru’s upper-class, British-educated, Bloomsbury-influenced worldview, and his obsession with Mao’s Great Leap Forward.

Modi and the BJP also oppose caste and religious affirmative action policies and the existence of a separate legal code for India’s Muslim citizens. For decades Congress successfully cultivated certain minorities—Muslims,adivasi hill tribes, dalit untouchables—by establishing various forms of affirmative action including “reservations” in government hiring. Arguably this led to deepening social division and even greater inefficiency and cronyism. Modi says he believes in “a bigger pie, which would benefit everyone.”

Modi himself has opposed some of the more extreme manifestations of the Hindutva ideology by calling for “toilets not temples” and “development not deity.” On the other hand, if he carries out BJP election promises to build a temple on the Ayodha mosque site or to bring the already tense Kashmir Valley under central control, it will be surprising if communal violence does not result.

Modi is most controversial because of his alleged role in the Ahmedabad massacres, in which more than a thousand people were killed, most of them Muslim. The violence was triggered by an incident on February 27, 2002, at a train station in the town of Godhra in Gujarat. A train carrying Hindu activists and pilgrims from a demonstration stopped at the station, where passengers got into an altercation with Muslim vendors on the platform. A Muslim mob then attacked the train, apparently in the belief that the activists had kidnapped a Muslim girl who had been helping her aged vendor father. One of the train cars then caught fire, and 59 people died. The next day, February 28, Modi called the burning an act of terrorism. Simultaneously, mobs of angry Hindus started attacking the neighborhoods of Muslims in Ahmedabad and other cities. 

The savagery was eye-watering. There was mass rape, looting, arson, and murder by blade and flame. Children were forced to drink kerosene or gasoline and then set on fire so they burst like bombs. The violence continued for four days, some of it in front of the cameras of India’s new 24-hour news networks. A curfew imposed after the first day of rioting seems to have gone largely unenforced by the police, and the savage attacks ended only after troops were deployed and given a “shoot to kill” order.

In general, sectarian riots in modern India tend to be orchestrated or tacitly condoned by politicians and community leaders rather than spontaneous eruptions of communal hatred of the kind that occurred towards the end of British rule. In this case the Hindu mobs of Ahmedabad had in their possession copies of the electoral rolls—which list the religion of each household—and so were able to quickly find their victims.

A Gujarat court later found the chief minister guilty of “inadequacy, inaction and negligence.” Modi, who is famous for keeping a close eye on all his officials, has never apologized for the failure of the authorities to stop the riots or even expressed much regret that they took place. Nor has he responded to the claim that it was his speeches following the train fire—at one point saying that every action has a reaction, on another occasion saying that the “people of Gujarat have shown remarkable restraint after grave provocation”—that inspired some of the violence. The closest he came to condemning the massacre was to say that he felt about the rioting as he would about the accidental running over of a puppy in the street: “If something bad happens anywhere, it is natural to be sad.”

While there is no conclusive evidence that Modi himself authorized or directed or overtly enabled the violence, and a special investigation ordered by the Indian supreme court did not find him legally culpable, his role seems analogous to that of Russian officials during the anti-Jewish pogroms under the czars. He may not have ordered or encouraged the riots, but the shocking inaction of his police force certainly ensured that they spread and took many lives. It is common knowledge in India that if a riot goes on for more than a couple of days, it must have some kind of official approval. After all, disturbances are not uncommon here, and the country’s various paramilitary security forces are large, well-armed, and well-prepared to deal with disorder—and not at all hesitant to use deadly force when they deem it necessary.

Perhaps the most infamous modern example of a riot with official approval was that of November 1984, when in the wake of Mrs. Gandhi’s assassination by her Sikh bodyguards, anti-Sikh mobs took control of Delhi and other cities and killed, raped, and burned for four days. Congress party politicians and officials led rioters into Sikh neighborhoods, openly exhorted them, and in some cases provided them weapons, including the kerosene that was used to burn victims alive. It is said that when Rajiv Gandhi was asked why the army had yet to be sent in to suppress the violence he told his interlocutor: “When a great tree falls, the earth shakes.” At least 3,000 people were killed in Delhi and some 5,000 in other cities. Over the next 30 years there were multiple, mostly bogus government investigations into the riots, but it was only in 2013 that a few relatively minor figures were actually prosecuted and convicted. This is one of the reasons why Modi supporters scoff at jeremiads about Ahmedabad from supporters of the Congress party. 

There is little reason to believe that a Modi premiership will mean more pogroms. There has been no recurrence of anti-Muslim violence in Gujarat in the 12 years since the riots, not even after the Pakistani-sponsored terror attack on Mumbai. And while Modi has never admitted the abject failure of his government to protect Muslim citizens, he has not otherwise engaged in dangerously divisive or sectarian activity since then. Moreover his achievements in Gujarat have won him surprising support from some prominent Muslims, including various film stars and M.J. Akbar, one of the country’s leading editors. Pre-election polls showed as many as 13 percent of Muslim registered voters supporting the BJP.

There’s no question Modi campaigned as a moderate and a modernizer. His was not a divisive or rabble-rousing campaign, and it had nothing in common with the campaigns of Hitler and Mussolini. Modi’s emphasis was on economics not enemies, internal or external, with no talk of restoring Hindu honor or avenging humiliation by Muslim and Western conquerors. And Modi is probably unique in the annals of populism, especially in India, for wanting less protectionism and more foreign investment.

All that said, there is always a possibility that Hindu or Muslim extremists could exploit Modi’s election as an opportunity to engage in communal violence. If that happens Modi’s claim to be a leader for all Indians will be put to the test.

Some observers think the Modi-led BJP may be more likely to achieve a workable, sustainable peace with Pakistan than Congress has been. Modi will have the advantage of a majority government that speaks with one voice. And the fact that no one in India doubts his nationalist and anti-Pakistan credentials might make it easier for him to make necessary concessions to Pakistani paranoia. Certainly the last BJP government in 1998-2004 could count among its achievements not just economic liberalization but a better relationship with Pakistan.

But these things aren’t predictable. A Modi premiership could well lead to even greater tensions between the two mutually hostile, nuclear-armed neighbors. Modi has always talked tough about Pakistan, and quite a lot of support for the BJP comes from Indians who feel that their country has been too feeble in its reaction to Pakistan’s many provocations. Many BJP voters want India to have a much more assertive or even aggressive foreign policy, as befits a regional superpower and a great civilization.

While Pakistan is not as responsible for outbreaks of ethnic separatism as the post-independence elite would like to believe, there is no question that it trains, arms, advises, and sends militants—sometimes led by its special forces—across the border into Indian-controlled Kashmir in the same way that it sponsors the Taliban in Afghanistan. In 2008, it sent terrorists to attack Mumbai. New Delhi, for its part, has long responded to Pakistan’s ceaseless sponsorship of India’s insurgents with some covert proxy warfare of its own, reportedly backing separatist rebels in Baluchistan and the MQM militants in Karachi. It is possible that Modi will order the Indian intelligence service to step up paramilitary efforts against Pakistan, especially if Islamabad engages in acts seen as provocative.

Modi may also seek to grow his country’s military and economic support of Afghanistan, a country India had close relations with until the Taliban takeover. This would fan Pakistan’s already hysterical fears of an Indian-sponsored knife at its back, increasing the likelihood of an Afghan civil war that is largely a proxy war between the countries.

Modi has had so little concrete involvement in foreign policy that it is hard to know if his hard line on Muslim terrorism in India and what seems like a general unfriendliness to Islam will have ramifications for India’s foreign relations. Will he want to or be able to maintain India’s close relationship with Iran? India is now one of the Islamic Republic’s biggest trading partners, and under Congress rule, New Delhi has positively relished defying American admonitions about doing business with Tehran.

India is also a consistent supporter of the Assad regime in Syria and the remaining tyrannies of the Middle East, partly on the grounds of 1970s-style Third World solidarity (India is the only big country that still takes the Non-Aligned Movement seriously). It seems unlikely that Modi will adopt a less cynical and more pro-democratic approach to the Middle East. But it will be worth watching to see if a Modi-run India might be more protective of its millions of poorer citizens who work in the Gulf states, often in brutal and appalling conditions.

In general it is not clear if Modi’s undoubted dealbroking skills, honed in the electoral wards and bazaars of Gujarat, will translate into international politics. His education is limited. He is uncomfortable in English. He is not well traveled. The BJP slogan of “modernization not Westernization” suggests that he might be more comfortable with foreign leaders like Shinzo Abe of Japan than with Europeans and Americans. Indeed, what Modi’s prime ministership will mean for relations with Washington is a fascinating question.

Modi was barred from entering the United States in 2005 because of his alleged role in the Ahmedabad massacre. His visa was revoked under the 1998 International Religious Freedom Act, thanks to lobbying by an unusual coalition of evangelical Christian, Muslim, and Jewish groups, human rights organizations like Amnesty International, and Republican politicians.

Yet despite his hyperpatriotism and what he considers to be his own mistreatment by U.S. authorities, Modi and his people do not come from a milieu that is instinctively hostile to or suspicious of America. In general, the BJP has tended to be the most pro-American (and pro-Israel) of India’s parties, and the financial contributions of U.S.-resident Indians to the party continue to influence its attitude to America. So it is certainly possible that his premiership could change Indian-American relations for the better.

Relations have cooled dramatically since the Bush presidency, partly because of Obama administration incompetence but mostly because of ferocious Indian reactions to perceived insults such as the arrest last year of an Indian diplomat for exploiting her servant and lying on immigration forms.

This cooling might continue if a Modi government should bring about a worsening human rights situation in India. As it is, India’s armed forces and security services enjoy almost total impunity for crimes committed in counterinsurgency operations in the several states that are wracked by rebellion. Torture, the disappearing of alleged militants, and “encounter killings”—executions disguised as shootouts—are common. Under Modi, India’s vast internal security apparatus, much of it set up along Soviet lines, is likely to have an even freer hand, especially in Kashmir.

It would also be hard to imagine Indian-American relations improving if the status of women in India is seen to decline. In the recent past, BJP officials have made notoriously noxious statements about the place of women in society, even justifying rape and other violence against women in retribution for scandalous behavior such as going to bars unchaperoned. Set against these is Modi’s claim that he is a law and order candidate and the relative safety of Gujarat’s streets for women and even Muslims.

If Modi really were to initiate a reorientation of Indian foreign and defense policy away from implicitly anti-American “nonalignment,” New Delhi would find a genuinely enthusiastic ally in America and its military. The timing is propitious for a major reconciliation given that America’s imminent withdrawal from Afghanistan means Washington will no longer be so vulnerable to Pakistani blackmail concerning our main supply routes to Kabul. American policy towards Pakistan may, finally, take account of multiple betrayals by our supposed allies in Islamabad. Freed from most of the need to cultivate Pakistan (and perhaps in a state of open hostility to it), the United States would have much to offer India, and a great deal to gain from a new, formal alliance. This might include access to her superb intelligence sources in Pakistan, and the possibility of fruitful cooperation with her powerful and expanding navy—something especially useful at a time of growing tensions in Southeast Asia and increasing Chinese aggression.

In the salons of New Delhi and Mumbai, and among most of the people who went to the 10 or so private schools that almost everybody who is anybody in India attended, Modi’s name has long inspired disgust and horror. For them his victory has provoked dismay, and the kind of bafflement that Pauline Kael famously expressed when Richard Nixon was first elected (“but nobody I know voted for him”).

Deepak Lal, one of the most interesting writers on contemporary India, says the question about Modi is whether he is a Margaret Thatcher or an Adolf Hitler. Lal prefers to think of him as a Thatcher, but the jury is certainly out. And he could well turn out to be something in between, like a Putin. The Indian electorate deserves full credit for finally and convincingly turning out the complacent, corrupt, and incompetent Congress-led coalition, but it has gambled an astonishing amount of hope on Narendra Modi.

Jonathan Foreman is the founding editor of a Mumbai-based magazine, The Indian Quarterly.

http://www.weeklystandard.com/print/articles/india-la-modi_793487.html

Posted by jforeman at 4:06 pm Tagged with: , , , , , , ,

Remembering on Memorial Day

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When I was living in New York in the 90s I always liked Memorial Day Weekend. It marked the beginning of Summer of course. And if I was out at the beach I would make sure to visit one of the little war memorials that all the Long Island villages have, and pause in front of the flags and flowers.  It moved me but in what I now see was a abstract, generalized way.

These days when Memorial Day comes I remember two fine men, two soldiers whom I had the privilege of knowing just over a decade ago. Both of them looked out for me in Baghdad in Spring 2003 during what the military calls OIF1. At the time both men were in the 4-64 AR – the 4th Battalion, 64th Armored Regiment, which was then part of the 3rd Infantry Division but has since been disbanded. 

Their names were Sgt Matthew Deckard and SSG Clint (William) Moore.

Clint was in the Scout platoon and for a while I rode in his Humvee. Matt Deckard drove an M1 Abrams but I rode with him in an Bradley fighting vehicle on the unit’s first “presence patrol” in Baghdad (which was when the photo above was taken).

Matthew Deckard, who was 29, was killed on September 16, 2005 when an IED destroyed his tank in Baghdad. He left behind a wife and three children.

Clint Moore was killed on April 23rd 2007 in Baquba Iraq, while serving with the 5-73 Cavalry (82nd Airborne Division), when his patrol base was came under attack. He was posthumously awarded a Silver Star for his courage under fire and for rescuing his fellow paratroopers even when mortally wounded. (The citation is here).

Memorial Day is different for me now. It’s a day on which I cannot help but think of those two men and mourn them.

And inevitably I think of all the other people out there who are remembering and mourning – many of them remembering the sacrifice of close friends and comrades, of brothers, or fathers or sons. There are thousands of them, spread out across the country and the world, but all linked by memory and loss. 

The grief is painful, but I am sure that it is a good thing that we have this day when we deliberately, formally, collectively bring to mind and honor the men and women we lost in war. 

A cynic might point out that remembering the fallen cannot do them any good, or do anything for the families they left behind, that it is just sentimentality. I don’t agree. Remembrance may not be much. It may be the very least we could do for a fallen soldier and his family, but it does count for something. It is part of a wider, bigger social force that gives their lives – and deaths – meaning. Yes the dead may not know that they are remembered, they may not even have cared in life about being remembered after death, though most people do. But surely we all want to live in a world in which sacrifices for the common good are valued. As a society and as individuals we have a profound emotional need to remember the fallen, and not only is there nothing wrong with that, it is one of the things that makes us human in the best sense. You could even argue that it is an act that makes us better citizens and better people.  

In any case, they deserve it and their families deserve it – whether or not they know about it. And though it makes me sad I am glad to do it. 

Matt Deckard

Matt Deckard

 

Clint Moore

Clint Moore

Posted by jforeman at 2:04 pm

Labour's Defence Opportunity (Demos Quarterly, April 2014)

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The Coalition’s mishandling of Britain’s defences presents the opposition with a political opportunity, argues Jonathan Foreman.

The Conservatives were once seen as the party especially supportive of defence priorities; this should no longer be the case. The Cameron Coalition’s apparent indifference to such priorities and its willingness to diminish the armed forces capabilities and capacity offer Labour an opportunity to demonstrate that it is the party of responsible, adult, forward-thinking government.

If you compare Labour’s 1998 Strategic Defence Review (SDR) with the Tories’ 2010 Strategic Defence and Security Review (SDSR), the former was ‘strategy driven’, with a clear vision of what the UK’s armed forces were expected to be able to do and what they would need to perform their tasks. The latter, on the other hand, seems to have been almost entirely ‘deficit-driven’—a hodgepodge of rushed cuts that avoided serious thought about either the UK’s expectations of its forces or serious consideration of potential threats and tasks over the coming decades.

Moreover, the Coalition’s 2010 SDSR and subsequent decisions, including the controversial Army 2020 plan are increasingly said to be hollowing out and demoralising the UK’s armed forces. They have led to cuts and forced redundancies that will strip the services of capacities that would be extremely difficult to restore in the case of a military emergency. As Professor Gwyn Prins has written, with reference to the scrapping of the Ark Royal aircraft carrier and the fire sale of the UK’s Harrier jets:

For the sake of relatively small savings the SDSR has ground to dust most of the key enablers for the sovereign projection of British power.

The Coalition’s cuts also mean that even by the appalling standards of British military procurement, the public is getting poor value for money. Meanwhile, the government’s attempts to depict the cuts as ‘reforms’ that will give Britain greater military flexibility for less money have been contradicted by the Commons defence select committee and more significantly by worried US officials, including then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and former Defence SecretaryRobert Gates, who have indicated that the cuts imperil the ‘special relationship’.

Yet the short-sighted destructiveness of the SDSR turns out to be in a Tory tradition. After all, few governments in British history have done as much damage to the armed forces as the Conservatives did with the ‘Options for Change’ review in 1990: the British forces taking part in the 1991 Gulf War were so underequipped that allied forces nicknamed them ‘the Borrowers.’ That was followed in 1994 by the swingeing cuts of ‘Front Line First’. And it is often forgotten that naval cuts by the Thatcher government played a role in causing and then almost losing the Falklands war.

Although Labour has rarely trumpeted its own quiet tradition of responsibility about defence matters, including its commitment to decent wages and conditions for service people, it is actually hard to imagine a Labour government doing as the Coalition has done and leaving Britain without a carrier strike capability for at least a decade. Certainly Labour’s defence ministers have often been better informed and better liked by the forces than their Conservative equivalents.

Moreover the most damaging defence policy and defence procurement choices of the past three or four decades have been made by Tory governments, such as the decisions to build the Nimrod MRA4 (finally cancelled in 2010 after a loss of £3 billion – the price of a new aircraft carrier), and to buy the Eurofighter Typhoon instead of the less expensive, combat proven F-16.

Some of the Government’s dubious defence decisions appear to be determined by a belief that the forces are a politically cost-free area of state activity from which to make cuts. Others are apparently prompted by unthinking commitment to privatisation, and still others by the excessive and unhealthy long-term influence over procurement policy of BAE, the London-headquartered multinational that has become Britain’s quasi-monopoly arms supplier, most of whose employees are now based abroad.

Among other errors, the Coalition has left this island nation without maritime patrol aircraft. Such aircraft, though designed for anti-submarine warfare, are also essential, especially given our shrunken Navy, to protect offshore infrastructure like oil rigs, detect pollution, interdict smugglers, patrol the sea lanes on which our prosperity and food supplies depend, escort our nuclear submarines and to carry out the kind of search and rescue operations that Asian nations have carried out in search of the missing MH370 plane.

Then there was the decision in 2012 to reverse one of the few wise recommendations of the 2010 SDSR, namely to fit catapults and arresters on the two Queen Elizabeth class aircraft carriers. This renders both vessels a colossal waste of money, even if you accept the argument for two super-carriers rather than several smaller, cheaper ones. The accompanying decision to sell all of Britain’s Harrier jets to a baffled but grateful US Marine Corps for just £180m and leave the Navy with no ship-borne jets until at least 2020 was an unqualified disaster.

The most controversial of the Coalition’s measures is the proposed shrinking of the British Army from 102,000 to 82,000 regulars. Although this would leave it at a smaller size than at any time since the early nineteenth century, and although experts worried that 82,000 is too small a number from which to recruit the elite special forces operators on which the government proposes to place greater reliance, the Coalition argued that the cuts would be compensated for by the doubling of the reserve force to 30,000. However the army was already struggling to fill the ranks of the 15,000-strong Territorial Army even before the demoralising effect of redundancies and cuts. Furthermore the privatisation and outsourcing of recruitment has so far proved a tragicomic failure and seems unlikely to find enough recruits even to fill the shrunken requirements of the regular army.

The UK needs armed forces whose abilities are commensurate not just with the size of our economy or population, but with our current global influence, our alliances, our permanent seat on the UN Security Council, our democratic ideals, and the sacrifices we have already made for those ideals.

Properly equipped armed forces enable the UK to uphold the rule of law to which we are committed, to enforce no-fly zones, to prevent or end mass atrocities as in Sierra Leone and Kosovo, and to take part in large scale humanitarian operations. During the recent Philippines disaster, the US Navy with its carriers and helicopters turned out to be, once again, the world’s most effective emergency aid organisation, bringing vital food, water and medical assistance to villages cut off from road transport.

Maintaining armed forces at this level is theoretically achievable if the UK keeps to its NATO requirement of spending a minimum of 2 per cent of GDP on defence. But not if billions are repeatedly wasted on projects that represent a short-termist and half-baked industrial policy, and that support remarkably few sustainable jobs while subsidising the appetite of Britain’s monopoly arms supplier for making acquisitions abroad.

It certainly would not be hard for the opposition to cut through some of the rhetoric surrounding coalition defence policies: for example the dubious claim that despite current and future cuts the UK will still have ‘the fourth largest military defence budget in the world.’ Even if this were true all it would really illustrate is the UK defence establishment’s ability to get minimum bang from maximum bucks. Countries with smaller defence budgets—such as France and Israel—manage to field larger numbers of advanced aircraft, armoured vehicles and trained servicemen. The great and perverse achievement of Britain’s political-military-industrial complex is that despite funding the fourth or fifth largest defence budget in the world the UK fields the 9th or 10th strongest armed forces.

The military analyst who blogs under the name William Forbes likes to use the term ‘Bullingdon Defences’ to describe the misguided priorities of Coalition defence policy. In his words:

Bullingdonism… involves dressing the Royal Navy, the Royal Marines, the Army and the Royal Air Force in new expensive, embroidered, exquisite equipment (e.g. F-35B strike aircraft)…whose alternatives would be much more economical and useful, then trashing perfectly good assets (e.g. the Harriers and HMS Ark Royal), then looking for small opponents to bully or even to fight (eg. Libya and perhaps Syria), demoralising the staff (in all the services but especially in the Marines and the Army) and then leaving the chaos and damage for others to repair and recompense.

Some of the Coalition’s actions may be attributable to the influence of the Liberal Democrats, but the current Conservative leadership has a profoundly different approach to defence than that of its predecessors. It has little apparent affinity for or interest in the armed forces; it believes that there are no votes to be won or lost in defence, and it seems to assume that the military vote is anyway in its pocket.

Moreover, the Tory modernisers’ obsession with the good opinion of the metropolitan media and their need to portray themselves as ‘cooler’ and less tradition-bound than previous versions of the Conservative party, evidently makes them allergic to too much association with the forces (except of course for ritualistic expressions of sympathy for casualties and praise for the fantastic job they do).

Certainly George Osborne, in his dual capacity as Chancellor and chief party strategist, has felt little hesitation to push for ever deeper cuts in the defence budget. Like many British leaders in the 1920s and early 1930s he seems to see defence spending as an expensive frippery, a form of insurance that has become unnecessary in the modern world.

All of this may reflect a lack of military experience in the cabinet that is unique in the history of modern conservatism. However, that in itself would not explain the fact that the Coalition’s National Security Council, the body that produced the SDSR (and which will carry out the next review in 2015 if the Government is re-elected) does not actually include the Chief of Defence Staff, or anyone from the armed forces, or for that matter anyone who has ever served in the military. (The CDS and other military officers only attend ‘as required.’)

Of course there is much less military experience in the Commons in general than there was 30 years ago thanks to the end of national service. But such experience or the lack of it are no guarantee of good or bad decision making: George Robertson who had no military experience was one of the best defence secretaries of recent times, while Denis Healey who had been a beachmaster at Anzio and finished the war a Major, was responsible for the disastrous Defence White Paper of 1966.

There is a strong argument that the Chancellor’s complacency about military as opposed to financial dangers to national security is a naïve, historically ill-informed attitude, akin to previous governments’ incorrect assumptions that peace is and will continue to be the norm in human affairs. (It is no surprise that we no longer hear much talk of the End of the History or the Peace Dividend, those mythical beasts whose arrival was supposedly portended by the collapse of the Soviet Empire.) Since the invasion of the Crimea by Russian forces its callowness has become more apparent.

To be fair, over the past two decades there has been considerable continuity in defence policy, with successive Tory and Labour leaders ordering cuts that presume an ever-less threatening international environment, and both parties making procurement decisions that expensively subordinated the requirements and desires of the armed forces to other government interests such as industrial policy, pork barrel politics and European integration.

Neither party has been willing or able to challenge the unhealthy influence over defence policy of BAE, or its ability to extract contracts that disadvantage the forces, the Exchequer and British national interest. The defence procurement process that was criticised so devastatingly by the Commons’ Public Administration Select Committee in 2013 has long been spectacularly inefficient, taking 50 per cent longer than that in France or Germany.

Nor has either party been willing or able to reform a top-heavy Ministry of Defence that is manifestly unfit for purpose—an organisation choked by a toxic stew of incompetence, careerist box-ticking and managerial jargon, and in which generalist civil servants vastly outnumber and dominate those with military and technical expertise. Both parties have blindly pursued privatisation and outsourcing: it was a Labour government that saw the sell-off of the Defence Research Agency (DERA) to Qinetiq; it is the current Conservative-dominated government that has privatised army recruitment with awful results.

Finally, neither Labour nor the Conservatives have understood the need to reform military establishments which are absurdly top-heavy, with far too many officers of “OF-4” rank (Wing Commander, Lieutenant Colonel, Commander) and above, and which seem unable or unwilling to perform the self examination that ought to follow what were arguably strategic defeats in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Of course, politicians of both parties can be excused for getting so much wrong on defence, given that media coverage of the subject is so limited and inadequate. In general the defence establishment undergoes much less independent public scrutiny than other government activities (as Lewis Page pointed out in his important critique Lions, Donkeys and Dinosaurs, there are no weekly defence supplements in the newspapers as there are supplements for education and healthcare).

So what should politicians – or more specifically, the next Government – do to repair this damage? One way would be for Labour to cancel the proposed mothballing of the UK’s second aircraft carrier and instead upgrade it with a carrier and arrester wires so it can do the job it was designed to do. The first carrier, on the other hand, without ‘cats and traps’ could be fitted out as the world’s first carrier-sized emergency/humanitarian aid vessel. It would be convertible to a warship if necessary and be available for loan to the UN and other organisations.

Labour should simply cancel the F35B and weather the upset that will cause in Washington. With the money saved from that ruinous purchase the RAF could buy maritime patrol aircraft off the peg from Bombardier, Airbus or Boeing. It could also purchase unglamourous but genuinely useful second-hand A-10 and AC-130 ground attack planes that the USAF is mothballing. Further savings could be gained by cancelling the purchase of the troubled, long-overdue and massively over-budget Airbus A400M transport plane and, like the Australian Air Force, buying more of the C-17 and C-130 transport aircraft that have been among the RAF’s more successful purchases.

It would also make sense given the diminished state of the forces after so many years of cuts, and given the UK’s unique military skill sets, for future British humanitarian and peace support operations to be paid for out of the UK’s increasing, uniquely generous but often poorly-utilised international aid budget.

In general there is plenty of room for thoughtful, considered reform by an incoming government, and the 2015 Defence Review could and should be a radical one. After all, as countries as small as Spain, South Korea and even Denmark and Norway have shown, it is possible to maintain some defence industrial capacity without spending billions on white elephants as per recent tradition.

This requires some common sense and a willingness to learn from the history of recent projects. For example, building a modern ‘air warfare destroyer’ from scratch as in the case of the Type 45 Daring class, rather than taking the path of buying a proven design from abroad, not only turned out to be spectacularly expensive but also landed the Royal Navy with less capable ships in smaller numbers than was hoped. In the field of procurement, government relations with suppliers must undergo a sea-change. If future British governments are ever going to buy British again, it should not be under coercive conditions.

Even the current chief of general staff, a political general par excellence who is not known for challenging the assumptions of his masters, has called for change, and remarked pointedly in a December 2013 RUSI lecture that ‘the defence budget does not exist primarily to subsidise the defence industry or promote defence exports. It exists to maximise defence capability’. It is worth noting that in the US, defence contractors and Defense Department procurement officials have been forced to testify before Congress about cost overruns and delayed deliveries, and the former face financial penalties for failing to meet contractual obligations. A new government should introduce such democratic accountability and an effective penalty regime into the procurement system.

It might also be useful for the next government to point out that British arms suppliers have been nationalised before and the outcome was arguably no worse for the public purse and for military effectiveness than the current system under which the forces, the defence budget and the British public have been repeatedly taken for a ride, and British arms manufacturing jobs moved offshore. The often morally if not legally corrupt role of senior officers who leave the services to become executives at contractors needs to be closely examined and monitored.

Any government intending to reform defence spending and procurement must also face the fact that almost without exception efforts at EU collaboration on big arms projects have been financially disastrous and led to UK purchases of overpriced and/or inferior aircraft and equipment (see the A400M transport aircraft, the Eurofighter Typhoon etc.) It clearly no longer makes sense to give each of the forces an even third of the defence budget, or to share cuts equally between them regardless of need or operational tempo. No government has yet had the foresight or political courage to end this practice.

Finally the armed forces have been so irresponsible in their battles against each other—the RAF’s successful campaign to destroy the Fleet Air Arm being a case in point—that it may be time to consider root and branch reorganisation, such as the re-absorption of the RAF into the Army and Royal Navy, or the establishment of a single UK Defence Force.

Government’s first duty is defence of the realm. It is not clear that the Coalition understands that. Its apparent failure to take seriously the requirements of defending the realm offers a golden opportunity to opposition leaders to present themselves as adult statesmen looking out for the long-term interests of the British people.

http://quarterly.demos.co.uk/article/issue-2/labours-defence-opportunity/ 
Posted by jforeman at 10:44 pm Tagged with: , , , , , , , , ,

On 12 Years A Slave, the Oscars, Slavery in the Movies, Reparations and the Anglosphere

Film/History Comments Off on On 12 Years A Slave, the Oscars, Slavery in the Movies, Reparations and the Anglosphere

            There is little question that “12 Years A Slave” which last week won the Best Picture Oscar, as well as Academy Awards for Best Adapted Screenplay and Best Supporting Actress, is a well-made, powerful and important film that deserves the plaudits it has won.

            Since that triumph in LA, media gossips have pondered, in between musings about Kim Novak’s and John Travolta’s plastic surgeries, an apparent rift between the film’s director Steve McQueen and its screenwriter John Ridley, both of whom declined to acknowledge the other while receiving their respective awards.

            But the success of the film and the sometimes disingenuous ways in which it was marketed raises more interesting questions: questions about Hollywood and slavery, about film and historical accuracy, about the supposed moral superiority of British filmmakers, about why Oscar voters behave the way they do, and the different forms that political correctness takes on both sides of the Atlantic.

            It was always a good bet that ‘12 Years a Slave’ would win Best Picture regardless of the films it would be up against, and this year that included superb movies like ‘American Hustle’. Academy voters as a group care very much about the image of their community. They like to reward serious, socially conscious, safely “brave,” conventionally-liberal-minded movies that prove the industry cares about social issues. And, if they can comfortably hand major awards to ethnic minority or women filmmakers they will, because that too makes the industry look politically progressive, unprejudiced, diverse etc. ‘12 Years A Slave’ was a “two-fer” in that regard, and it also happened to be a genuinely first-rate film, unlike, say, “The Butler”.

Some Oscar-watchers have therefore wondered why the film won the Oscar for Best Picture but not Best Director.

            The answer could well have something to do with prejudice. Not racial prejudice but genre prejudice. “Gravity” was long a favourite to sweep the Oscars. But no matter how much Academy voters may have admired and enjoyed that film, it is science fiction, and there is an enduring sense that SF films are not entirely serious or worthy.

Only a handful of scifi films have ever been nominated for Best Picture. Even “2001: A Space Odyssey” only won Best Special Effects and was nominated for Best Director but not Best Picture. Incidentally, the same goes for light comedies (“It Happened One Night” and “Annie Hall” are the main exceptions), horror films (the only exception being “Silence of the Lambs”), animated films, and westerns (only three best picture Oscars in the history of Hollywood).

So while the Academy was willing, indeed happy to award Best Director to Alfonso Cuaron for “Gravity” because making that film arguably required tremendous skill and vision, Best Picture might have been a step too far. It’s also worth remembering that Cuaron is Mexican (the first Latin American to win Best Director) and therefore ticks the minority box as well as being unquestionably brilliant.

A cynic might point out that by splitting Best Picture and Best Director between McQueen and Cuaron, the Academy was able to show twice as much affection for top minority filmmakers.]

The extent to which diversity of that kind is a concern for Hollywood may have  bypassed British pundits, but it was in evidence on Oscar night in rather admirable ways. The host was the openly lesbian Ellen DeGeneres (who also happened to be the best host in decades). The Academy outdid itself in the number of African-American presenters, culminating in the presentation of Best Picture by Will Smith, but notably including Sidney Poitier who shattered racial barriers 50 years ago when he won Best Actor for “Lilies in the Field”. And the evening included a speech by the Academy’s widely admired president Cheryl Boone Isaacs, who happens to be black. It’s hard to imagine any British cultural event that could match that.

It wouldn’t be necessary to make a big deal of this if the UK publicity for ‘12 Years A Slave’ hadn’t made so much of Hollywood’s supposed failures when it comes to race and slavery. Some of this merely manifested the usual cultural jingoism that accompanies the marketing of British films (though co-produced by Brad Pitt, “12 years” was directed by a Briton and starred a British actor in the lead role). But there was an extra edge this time.

Steve McQueen, the artist turned film director who was responsible for the visual beauty and marvelous restraint of ‘12 Years A Slave’ gave the impression in interviews that until he came along Hollywood had ‘ignored’ or sugarcoated slavery, and that he had discovered a lost masterpiece in the book that inspired the film. He added for good measure that “the Second World War lasted five years and there are hundreds and hundreds of films about the Second World War and the Holocaust.”

It is true that Hollywood has made few films that centre on slavery – especially if you don’t count films about American civil war like “Glory” and “Lincoln” – but it’s not really true that it has been a suppressed subject.

After all, this is not even the first time that Solomon Northup’s memoir has been adapted for the screen in Hollywood. The 1984 film  “Solomon Northup’s Odyssey” was directed for the PBS network by the pioneering African-American filmmaker Gordon Parks, best known for “Shaft”.  (The film starred as young Avery Brooks who is now famous for his lead role in “Star Trek – Deep Space Nine.) This rather undermines the idea that McQueen or his wife unearthed an unknown book.

And Britons who bought the line that “12 Years A Slave” would finally bring the horrors of slavery to the attention of a supposedly naïve American audience might consider that almost the entire adult population of the United States sawAlex Haley’s “Roots” in 1977, a miniseries which hardly soft-soaped the cruel realities of slavery. The same was true of Richard Fleischer’s lurid but compelling 1975 film “Mandingo”; its depiction of slavery is at least as brutal as that in “12 Years a Slave”. Spielberg’s “Amistad” makes no bones about the murderous brutality of the Middle Passage, and in Charles Burnett’s 1996 TV film “Nightjohn” you see a slave having his middle toes cut off for teaching another slave to read.

It is true that before the 1970s, Hollywood eschewed head-on confrontation with slavery, though its sinister afterglow is the context of any number of films like “To Kill A Mockingbird”, “The Defiant Ones”, “Home of the Brave,” and “In the Heat of the Night” in which Sidney Poiter famously demands to be called “Mister Tibbs”.  And even in the ‘90s it was common to deal with slavery in an oblique way. Jonathan Demme’s harrowing adaptation of Toni Morrison’s novel “Beloved”, for example is about the terrible psychological toll of slavery.

But the idea that floated around the early publicity of “12 Years of Slave” that Hollywood habitually depicts happy slaves on elegant plantations in the manner of ‘Gone with the Wind’ (1939) and Birth of a Nation (1915) is rubbish. The only modern film I can think of that depicts contented slaves is Mel Gibson’s “The Patriot”, which is what you might expect given that filmmaker’s unusual worldview.

As for McQueen’s other controversial point, it is of course true that that there have been many WWII films. This presumably reflects that it was an event in living memory that profoundly involved much of the world’s population, and also the way that war stories have stirred audiences since the first stories were told around cave dwellers’ campfires. But contrary to myth, there have not been many films about the Holocaust. The only major ones that come to mind are “Schindlers List”, “the Pianist”, “The Boy in Striped Pajamas” and “the Reader”. As with slavery, until the 1990s (and with the exception of the 1978 TV miniseries ‘Holocaust’) the subject was almost always dealt with at one remove as in films like “Judgment at Nuremberg” and “The Odessa File”. After all, feature films are primarily designed for entertainment (albeit sometimes of a serious nature), and it is hard to make the spectacle of mass suffering bearable, let alone entertaining.

This is why in both good and bad ways “12 Years a Slave” is the “Schindler’s List” of its time and its subject. Like “Schindler’s List” it makes the compromises necessary to represent a huge historical horror in a film that people are going to be willing to watch. One of those necessary compromises is basing the film on a character who is essentially untypical of the myriad victims of that horror.

“Schindler’s List” doesn’t view the Holocaust from the point of view of one its typical victims but instead from that of a German witness turned rescuer. He belongs to a category that in real life was extremely small and unrepresentative, but one with which audiences can identify more comfortably. Similarly, Solomon Northup is not a typical slave but one of a small number of free blacks kidnapped into slavery and the even tinier number of those kidnapped free blacks who were rescued from bondage before the Civil War. Both Northup and Schindler are outliers, and have stories that end in triumph. Their unrepresentativeness makes it possible to bear a representation of the unbearable.

And like “Schindlers List”, “12 Years A Slave” is horrifying while holding back from depicting the depth and extent of history’s real horrors.

Indeed, as the American critic John Podhoretz has pointed out, Northup’s book provides “a portrait of slave life far more brutal and grinding and unimaginably dehumanizing than the movie’s” and that if the movie had shown all the horrors that Northup recounts “it would be unendurable.”

Although people are shocked and horrified by the film’s one explicit piece of cruelty – the whipping of the slave woman Patsy – I would argue that McQueen’s movie is a work of remarkable restraint and reticence (especially compared to the indulgent voyeurism of his first two films) while remaining faithful to the book and scrupulously accurate historically. The rapes are implied; you don’t see any children being beaten; there are no mutilations and unlike in the book no-one is ripped to pieces by dogs trained for that purpose. Yet John Ridley’s screenplay brilliantly captures the drama and tone of the book while leaving stunned audiences in no doubt about slavery’s savagery.

Even so, the controversial African-American film critic Armond White says that McQueen’s film is “torture porn”. He sees it as being the most prominent of an Obama-era wave of films that portray blacks as victims – a wave that includes The Butler, The Help and Fruitvale Station. The implication is that solidly Democrat Hollywood is making movies that support the notion that opposition to the President is motivated by racism

None of this means that the film will prompt America to “come to terms with slavery” as some British commentators have hoped. Nor is it obvious that Americans need a film for that to happen. They did after all fight a vast civil war about slavery, one that cost at least 600,000 lives. As the historian Orlando Patterson has pointed out, the United States is one of two countries in all human history, the other being the United Kingdom, that battled and ended slavery by force of arms.

Which means that it is interesting that some commentators have used the film to call for more British apologies for this country’s role in the Atlantic slave trade. It’s a call that ignores Britain’s unique, costly efforts to stamp out slavery. It fails to consider that in comparison to other former slave-trading European nations like France, Spain, Portugal, Denmark and Holland, Britain is an exemplar. It takes no note at all of the lack of regret expressed by the Gulf Sultanates that ran East Africa’s slavery, or the successor states of West African kingdoms like Dahomey that grew rich on the slave trade. And of course, it is ignorant of the forms of slavery that have never been genuinely banned in South Asia and the Middle East.

Indeed Britons can take pride in the fact that Steve McQueen more than made up for his initial marketing strategies, when at both the Baftas and the Oscars he used his acceptance speech to make an appeal on behalf of the “21 million” people trapped in the modern-day slavery that continues in the Gulf, in Asia and even in Europe.

It is hard to imagine Spike Lee, were he to make a film about slavery and win an award for it, ever making such an appeal, or resisting the temptation to deliver an anti-white harangue with a statuette in his hand.

It is why there is perhaps some truth to Brad Pitt’s generous claim that 12 Years A Slave “could only have been made by a Brit”. Since the Blaxploitation era of the 1970s African-American filmmakers have concentrated on other aspects of the American experience and been keener to depict Black pride and success against the odds than the vast victimhood of slavery.

Of course an American might well ask why a Black Briton of Barbadian descent didn’t make a film about Caribbean slavery, which was arguably much crueler than that in the American South.

But perhaps the real lesson of the success of “12 Years a Slave” in particular and this year’s Oscars in general is that what people call “Hollywood” is more than ever a joint British-Australian-American industry, and all the better for it. Indeed you could go further and argue that filmmaking is one of two areas –the other being defence – in which the Anglosphere is real and flourishing and good for the world.

 (A shorter, slightly version of this piece appeared in the Spectator on March 17 2014 and is available here.

Posted by jforeman at 10:31 am

A GI Bill for the UK (Demos Quarterly January 2014)

Latest Articles, Military/Defence Comments Off on A GI Bill for the UK (Demos Quarterly January 2014)

The British welfare system is normally considered superior to the US’s, but in one respect – the treatment of those who have served in the armed forces – America leaves us way behind. Jonathan Foreman argues that the shoddy treatment of veterans is a political opportunity for Labour.

When US veterans come back from the war in Afghanistan and join the civilian population they face a less uncertain future than their British counterparts. This is thanks to what Americans have long referred to as the ‘GI Bill’ and the ‘VA’ – short for the Veterans Administration – which refer to a system of veterans benefits established after World War II.

US veterans make abundant use of this system’s offer of free higher education and vocational training. Those who are physically or mentally injured get treatment and rehabilitation in veterans’ hospitals and clinics. Though scandal-prone and far from perfect, these facilities specialise in the wounds inflicted by war and allow veterans to recover in the company of and with the help of other veterans of the country’s various conflicts. The hospitals, along with job training centres and the whole system of veterans’ benefits, are all administered by a Department of Veterans Affairs.

There is no equivalent in the UK, where the few benefits offered to veterans are piecemeal and where private charity has had to make up for the failures of the state to look after those who have served the nation in a military capacity. A comprehensive British Veterans Act would transform this to the benefit of both Britain’s veterans and the wider society.

Like its American inspiration, its primary purpose would be educational: the provision of subsidised education or vocational training for all veterans and free higher education for disabled veterans and for the widow(er)s and orphans of those killed in action.

But it should also include preference in public housing, preference in public sector hiring, home loan guarantees – low levels of pay while in service mean there is little chance of getting on the housing ladder without state help – and nationally discounted transportation.

Ideally, a UK GI Bill would also see the formation of a cabinet-level Department of Veterans Affairs and the re-establishment of dedicated medical centres and clinics for veterans. As well as arguments rooted in compassion and in the obligation any society owes to those who take extreme risks with their lives and bodies on its behalf, there are pragmatic reasons for the establishment here of both a US-style Department of Veterans Affairs, a national system of veterans’ benefits and the re-establishment of dedicated military hospitals.

Perhaps the most obvious of the latter is the unlikelihood that Great Britain will be able to find sufficient recruits for even a radically shrunken defence establishment if the poor treatment of British veterans continues. Given ongoing geopolitical developments, it is highly likely that British forces may have to be deployed in combat and/or humanitarian operations during the next twenty years, even if governments would prefer that this is not the case.

It will be difficult if not impossible to recruit adequate numbers of qualified individuals to serve in the armed forces if, on top of poor pay and conditions and inadequate equipment, potential recruits know that they face uncertain futures in civilian life after their service even if able-bodied, and miserable futures for themselves and their families if they are disabled. The GI Bill also applies to dependents of veterans who died on active duty or who are permanently and totally disabled as a result of their active service – an aspect of the Bill that is very reassuring to serving troops.

Thanks to cuts by the Major Government, there are no longer any dedicated military hospitals in the UK – merely a single military ward at the Selly Oaks hospital in Birmingham. However it has become clear since 2003 that military casualties require kinds of specialist emergency and long time care that only military hospitals can provide.

This is partly because of the nature of modern combat injuries. The ratio of dead to wounded for British troops in the Afghanistan theatre is approximately 1:30, as opposed to 1:4 during World War II. Thanks to radical improvements in battlefield medicine and body armour, many soldiers survive blasts that would have killed their predecessors. However, these survivors are often left with combinations of severe life-changing injuries, including amputations and traumatic brain injury or TBI. (The latter, little known in the UK, but much discussed in the United States, often has crippling physiological and psychological effects and is rarely encountered among the civilian population.) Doctors in the US call these combined injuries ‘polytrama’ and they present a unique set of challenges to both patients and medical practitioners.

Some seven out of thirty British casualties in Afghanistan have severe, crippling ‘tier 4’ polytrauma injuries. If there are 2,000-3,000 men who are extremely disabled thanks to their war wounds in Iraq and Afghanistan (and the Government does not seem to keep count), the cost of their 24-hour care over the next 15 years will be something between £2.5 and £4 billion. However, to the discredit of two British governments, neither the NHS nor the MOD have budgeted for this. The burden will therefore fall on already devastated, mostly working-class families that are ill-equipped to bear it. (The maximum MOD payout of £570,000 is hopelessly insufficient to pay for wheelchairs, widened doorways and long-term nursing care.)

The call for the re-establishment of military or dedicated veterans hospitals also reflects a growing understanding that military casualties are more likely to be treated with respect and understanding at such hospitals, and because overall recovery rates for military casualties are higher in these environments. Non-military medical institutions seem to be particularly ineffective at treating veterans suffering from the various psychological afflictions that come under the loose rubric of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.

Among other powerful arguments for a UK GI Bill is the potential benefit to British society as a whole of a reservoir of human capital that is currently under-used or wasted. This human potential could be cultivated, enriched and then contribute to the common good as it did in the United States after WWII when veterans were offered better opportunities for education, training and financial credit.

Veterans have unique skills and abilities that could be better made use of by both the private and public sectors. This is not just a matter of technical skills, though thousands of even the most junior soldiers, sailors and airmen operate cutting-edge technology on a daily basis. Military people are selected and trained for qualities that are often lacking among their generational equivalents. Many come from the most deprived and unpromising backgrounds but have been spotted for leadership abilities that are too often missed by civilian employers. Few in civilian life appreciate that combat veterans are young men and women who have exercised remarkable responsibility including life and death decision-making.

A third argument for a UK GI Bill is the strain on social welfare and criminal justice systems that is likely to deepen as thousands of veterans are discharged onto the streets as a result of government cuts, with the British Army being cut from 110,000 to 82,000. Despite their skills these man and women can suffer from certain disadvantages when confronting the demands of an individualistic market-based society.

This is mostly because military life is more communal and cooperative than most civilians realise (though one should not underestimate traditional cultural prejudice against veterans, who tend to be portrayed in popular culture as dangerous or damaged or both). Regiments and battalions function like families and clans. Small units, especially if they have experienced combat, offer even more intimate and powerful human relationships.

Discharged soldiers accustomed to depending on their fellow service people, on a paternalistic officer structure and on their regiment, often feel radically alone and adrift in civilian society. This is one of the factors than can result in homelessness, addiction and other social ills, especially when combined with the sudden loss of respect and status that often comes with discharge from the military.

Although there is more research to be done on this, there is evidence that some of the social and psychological problems that plague British veterans of the Iraq and Afghan conflicts (and also those of the Falklands war) are not solely due to combat trauma as such. Instead, the inability of the wider society to accord them both the respect and the economic opportunities that they might expect given their experience, training and collective sacrifice for the greater good could play a significant role. A UK GI Bill would be a demonstration of such respect by the wider society and therefore would by its mere existence contribute to the mental health of British veterans.

There are also tactical and strategic political reasons why the Labour Party and progressives in general might wish to advocate for a UK GI Bill. Increased support for veterans is a potential ‘wedge issue’. After all, properly looking after those who have risked or sacrificed their bodies for the nation is one aspect of the welfare state that consistently commands strong popular support; it is also one which Conservative governments can plausibly be accused of undermining or betraying. Calls for the state to improve the welfare of and opportunities for veterans would inevitably and rightly echo the original ‘land fit for heroes’ and ‘homes for heroes’ rhetoric used by the Lloyd George Coalition government in the aftermath of World War I in support of welfare reform.

There are various reasons why the UK has arguably failed its veterans over the past decades. And it is certainly one of the peculiarities of contemporary politics that the political class has revealed itself to be blind to both the plight and the potential of people in the armed services, even as the UK was taking part in major military interventions. A comprehensive new deal for Britain’s veterans would reverse that failure and do the right thing by a particularly deserving and vulnerable group. It would also manifest both a sense of national community and a respect for service, which could have a powerful effect on the UK’s political culture in general.

http://quarterly.demos.co.uk/article/issue-1/a-gi-bill-for-the-uk/

Posted by jforeman at 10:18 am Tagged with: , , , , , ,

Oscar and the Oppressors (Spectator Life 29 March 2014)

Culture/Manners, Film/History, Latest Articles Comments Off on Oscar and the Oppressors (Spectator Life 29 March 2014)

 Hollywood loves a social conscience picture, but its own culture is more conservative than it looks

 
As host Ellen DeGeneres joked at the Academy Awards, there were two outcomes that night: ‘Possibility number one: 12 Years a Slave wins Best Picture. And possibility two: you’re all racists.’ There is little question that 12 Years a Slave is a well-made, powerful and important film which deserves the plaudits it has won. But the sometimes disingenuous ways it was marketed raise questions about the different forms political correctness takes on both sides of the Atlantic.
 
Twelve Years A Slave
 

As someone who grew up in the film industry (my dad was Carl Foreman, screenwriter of films such as  High Noon, The Bridge on the River Kwai andThe Guns of Navarone), I’m a seasoned if often exasperated Oscar watcher. My first job was as a production assistant to Sidney Poitier, who this year presented Alfonso Cuaron with the award for Best Director, pointedly reminding viewers of the racial barrier that was smashed in 1963 when he won Best Actor for his role in Lilies of the Field. Less comforting is the fact that only three African-American actors have won Best Actor since then (Denzel Washington for Training Day in 2002, Jamie Foxx for Ray in 2005 and Forest Whitaker for The Last King of Scotland in 2007). Halle Berry remains the only African-American to have won Best Actress (Monster’s Ball, 2002). In winning Best Picture (though losing out on Best Director), 12 Years a Slave is the first film directed by a black man ever to have taken the Academy’s highest award in its 83-year history.

Academy voters care very much about the image of their community, and so like to reward conventionally liberal-minded movies which show the film world’s concern about social issues. Its 6,000-plus members (drawn from all the industry’s disciplines) may be politically liberal, but artistically they’re quite conservative. Certain subject matters invariably press their buttons. It was inevitable, for example, that the 1993 Aids film Philadelphia would win at least one major award (in the event it won two — Best Actor for Tom Hanks and Best Song for Bruce Springsteen). Similarly Paul Haggis’s Crash was one of those films that made Academy members feel noble for feeling bad about racism; it won three Oscars, including Best Picture.

An exhaustive 2012 study by the LA Times found that Oscar voters are 94 per cent Caucasian and 77 per cent male. Under-50s comprise only 14 per cent of the membership — arguably this limits the appeal of a film like The Social Network, which lost in 2011 to The King’s Speech. The median age is 62, which can perhaps explain the absence of votes for the brilliant but explicit The Wolf of Wall Street, as well as the total absence of nominations for Steve McQueen’s last film, Shame, a graphic depiction of the life of a sex addict (despite a concerted Oscars campaign by Fox Searchlight).

The publicity strategy for 12 Years a Slave made much of Hollywood’s supposed failures when it comes to race and slavery. Steve McQueen gave the impression in interviews that until he came along, Hollywood had ‘ignored’ or sugarcoated slavery. The slogan ‘It’s time …’ was used, implying not only ‘… to tell this story’ but also ‘… to rectify past Academy failures by making this movie Best Picture’. But is this fair? It’s true that Hollywood has made few films which centre on slavery (especially if you exclude films about the American Civil War like Glory and Lincoln) — but the subject hasn’t been suppressed. Richard Fleischer’s compelling Mandingo (1975) is at least as brutal as 12 Years a Slave in its depiction of slavery. Steven Spielberg’s Amistad (1997) makes no bones about the murderous brutality of the Middle Passage (the Africa-to-America leg of the triangular trade route). Even before the 1970s, slavery’s sinister afterglow was the context of any number of films: To Kill a Mockingbird, The Defiant Ones, Home of the Brave. And also, of course, In the Heat of the Night, in which Sidney Poitier famously demands to be called ‘Mister Tibbs’.

The idea which floated around the early publicity of 12 Years a Slave — that Hollywood habitually depicts happy slaves on elegant plantations in the manner of Gone with the Wind — is rubbish. The fact is that feature films are primarily designed for entertainment; it is hard to make the spectacle of mass suffering bearable, let alone entertaining. McQueen also alleged that Hollywood preferred to make films about the Holocaust, but this too is questionable. Until relatively recently, the list of Holocaust films was quite short (Life Is Beautiful and The Reader have added to the number). In both good and bad ways, 12 Years a Slave is the Schindler’s List of its time and its subject. It makes the compromises necessary to represent a huge historical horror in a film which people will be willing to watch — such as basing the film on a character who is essentially untypical of that horror’s myriad victims.

Schindler’s List views the Holocaust from the point of view of a German witness turned rescuer, a category that in real life was extremely small and unrepresentative, but one with which audiences can identify more comfortably. Similarly, Solomon Northup is not a typical slave but one of a tiny number of kidnapped free blacks who were rescued from bondage before the Civil War. Both characters are outliers, with stories that end in triumph. This makes it possible for viewers to bear the unbearable.

12 Years a Slave has given a boost to a slavery reparations drive that is largely a scam pushed by greedy lawyers and activists, predicated on a dishonest or ignorantly selective approach to history. Only this month 14 Caribbean countries announced plans to sue Britain. Why aren’t campaigners demanding apologies and money from the descendants of the West African kings and generals who sold their defeated enemies to slave traders? Their calls ignore Britain’s unique and costly efforts to stamp out slavery. Rather than reparations for the past, if 12 Years a Slave can have an impact beyond the confines of the cinema, surely it should be in thinking about slavery today. In fairness to McQueen, he more than made up for his initial marketing strategies when at both the Baftas and the Oscars he made appeals on behalf of the 21 million people trapped in modern-day slavery in the Gulf, in Asia and even in Europe.

Perhaps the real lesson of the success of 12 Years a Slave, and of this year’s Oscars more generally, is that what people call ‘Hollywood’ is more than ever a joint British-Australian-American industry, and is all the better for it. It’s diversification of a sort, if not quite the kind that the film industry still yearns for…

Jonathan Foreman has worked as everything from a production assistant to a foreign correspondent, film critic for the New York Post and chairman of the New York Film Critics Circle.

This article first appeared in the print edition of The Spectator magazine, dated 29 March 2014

http://www.spectator.co.uk/spectator-life/spectator-life-life/9166851/oscar-and-the-oppressors/

A fuller version of this article will shortly be available on the site.

Posted by jforeman at 10:13 am Tagged with: , , , , ,

BBC R4 "The Regimental Future" (or lack thereof)

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Rare (and well-done) BBC R4 programme on the shrinking British Army regimental system. Very much worth checking out. 

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b03y0l8w

Posted by jforeman at 12:18 pm

A Sinister Threat to the Kalasha of Chitral

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Pakistan’s Dawn newspaper today carries a disturbing report of a Pakistan Taliban video telling the Kalash people – the 3500-strong pagan tribe who live in three remote valleys of the North West Frontier (and about whom I wrote here ) that they must convert to Islam or face death. 

The survival of the Kalash — whose paganism is the reason why the area is called Kafiristan or “land of infidels” — thus far is a kind of miracle.

Their cousins across the mountains in Afghanistan were all converted by force at the end of the nineteenth century – which is why Afghan Kafiristan was renamed Nuristan, the “land of light”.

In more recent years the Kalasha culture was threatened by the arrival of roads into their remote valleys, then by tourism, and after the tourists stopped coming after 9/11 by missionaries, moneylenders, timber smugglers and migrants from the Punjab and other parts of Pakistan. Maureen Lines an originally British, now Pakistani author who has long lived in the Kalash valleys, and the Hindu Kush Conservation Association, have played a key role in protecting them, with the help of successive Pakistani governments keen to show that minorities can live safely in the country. 

It is to be hoped that the Pakistani authorities have the will and ability to protect the Kalash from this new threat. 

Convert or die.

Convert or die.

Posted by jforeman at 6:49 pm

Valete -- Those we lost in 2013

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Nelson Mandela, Margaret Thatcher, Seamas Heaney, Hugo Chavez, David Frost and James Gandolfini probably had the most obituaries this year.

Here’s my own goodbye list:

 

Richard Beeston – Foreign Editor of the London Times and the great foreign correspondent of his generation. Rick was only 50.

Roger Ebert – A great film critic, the first film reviewer to win a Pulitzer, and a very nice man. (my piece on him here)

Peter Kaplan – Great editor, lovely man. (obit)

Norman Geras – Professor, pioneer blogger and Eustonian. (tel obit)

 

Elmore Leonard – the Great.

Tom Clancy – the man who predicted the use of civilian airliners as a weapon

Vince Flynn – shocked by his early death.

James Herbert (his “The Rats” terrified me as a kid

Tom Sharpe (comic genius see Porterhouse Blue etc.)

Oscar Hijuelos (loved Mambo Kings….)

 

James Gandolfini

Patrice Chereau – director of La Reine Margot and Intimacy; Gen Montcalm in Last of the Mohicans

Tom “Billy Jack” Laughlin

Paul Walker – underrated actor

Dennis Farina – Chicago cop turned actor

Karen Black – cult actress

Michael Winner – director, amusing restaurant reviewer, philanthropist, bon viveur

Bryan Forbes – actor/writer/director

Mel Smith – Comedian, the heart of Not the Nine O’Clock News

Ken Norton – marine, boxer, actor

Lewis Collins – Bodie

 

Ray Manzarak – as he said, the piano in Riders of the Storm was ‘genius’

Lou Reed

 

Mikhail Kalashnikov – rifle inventor

Syd Field – screenwriting guru

Ray Dolby – Sound pioneer

Amar Bose – Sound pioneer

General Vo Nguyen Giap – North Vietnamese victor

Marcella Hazan – author of the famous Italian cookbook

Alan Whicker – TV journalism pioneer

Al Goldstein – New York in the 80s and 90s wouldn’t have been the same without him, Screw magazine and Channel 35

 

 

Posted by jforeman at 8:16 pm
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