Editorial

Welcome to the summer holiday issue of Prospect. As well as enjoying what Nietzsche called the joy of short-term routines, holidays are meant to give you some perspective on your own life—and if you are abroad they sometimes even fuzzily reveal your own country glimpsed over a suntanned shoulder. As an army of British holidaymakers fans out across the map, one "who are we?" question worth thinking about is why we remain such eager interveners all over the world. Is it a generous, outgoing spirit of wanting to do our bit to make the world a better, less dangerous place—a sort of global welfare-ism? Or is it the last vestiges of an imperial spirit, wanting to plant the flag in as many places as possible, and clinging on to a place at the top table despite our relative decline over the past century? Perhaps it's a bit of both, but it has certainly been the background hum to the renewed debate about Afghanistan brought on by the recent run of casualties. Compared with previous eras, the engagement in Afghanistan is a very small operation. The scale of the mourning over the eight deaths in early July brought to mind scenes during the Falklands war, but 255 people died in the Falklands over just ten weeks, against 184 (as I write) over seven years in Afghanistan. The trouble is that, in contrast to the apparent simplicity of the Falklands, the case for us being in Afghanistan is complex and only indirectly related to national interest. Even the unmartial-looking young mourners in Wiltshire, with their spiky hair and nose studs, can back the cause, tugged by family ties and local comradeship. But sooner or later people will want clearer explanations than they are getting now, especially if casualties rise.

The difficulty is that since the end of the cold war when the kind of operations in Kosovo, Afghanistan, Iraq and elsewhere first became possible, we have not had a clear "interventionist" doctrine. Tony Blair tried to spell one out in his Chicago speech in 1999 but it never caught on and many people suspected he broke most of his own conditions over Iraq. The original reason for invading Afghanistan—to make it safe from global terror groups—has been largely achieved, and in any case most of our terror threats are homegrown. We no longer seem to believe in the liberal imperialist mission of turning the country into a democracy, so we are left with the circular argument that we have to stay because the political-military dynamic we have created would mean chaos (in Pakistan too) if we now left. If a deal with the Taliban is ruled out, then the question becomes: can we reach the hard-to-define goal of stability in Afghanistan before the spiky haired kids feel that too many of their mates have died? This in turn may depend on that nebulous question to consider on our holidays: what sort of people do we think we are?