Nemesis
In our October issue, Anatol Lieven wrote about the lessons the west must learn following its exit from Afghanistan
There is much that one can say about the conduct of the long western intervention in Afghanistan that is critical. Anatol Lieven certainly doesn’t pull his punches. He makes powerful points which need to be considered in the inevitable public inquiry.
But his mocking tone about the contribution made by European nations grated on me, in light of the real courage and sacrifice shown not just by British forces but for example the Danes, who suffered the most combat deaths of any Nato country per capita. Nor is he right to say that the “chief motive for the British effort was essentially to put on a performance for an American audience.” Tony Blair had an intense conviction that 9/11 changed the risk calculus, and that far more needed to be done to stop Islamist terrorists carrying out even more deadly attacks from ungoverned spaces in Afghanistan and elsewhere. This may have been a questionable judgment (though I think he was right), but it was not a cynical one.
Having excoriated western military intervention aimed at changing countries with very different cultures, it was then surprising to find Lieven pivoting at the end of his article to advocating that the west “prop up countries in Africa with military support.” Surely the main lesson of Afghanistan is that the west needs to rethink its whole approach to the use of military force for political effect, not simply apply an improved version of the old recipe in Africa?
Peter Ricketts was head of the Foreign Office
Can Herat survive the Taliban?
Herat once challenged Florence for splendour, wrote CPW Gammell in our October issue. Now, it's citizens are trying to keep the spirit alive in defiance of the Taliban
CPW Gammell’s moving commentary on Herat and its cultural wealth put me in mind of a plane journey I took in 2009: Kabul-Kandahar-Herat-Bamiyan. We flew over Helmand, and between Herat and Bamiyan we tracked the spine of the Hindu Kush: I looked hard for the Minaret of Jam, but didn’t spot it.
One thing that flight brought home to me was the size of Afghanistan, and its ethnic and cultural complexity. In Kandahar Air Base everyone was speaking Pashtu, while in Herat and Bamiyan it was Persian. Bamiyan, furthermore, is the spiritual home of a long-persecuted ethnic minority, the Hazaras, who have used the peace and freedoms of the last two decades to assert their civil rights, gaining a prominence especially in education and the media.
The return of the Taliban to power amounts, among many other things, to the reestablishment of Pashtun dominance in a country that can only hope to function if its diversity is acknowledged—if Herat and Bamiyan feel as represented as Kandahar. I thus regret to say that I share Gammell’s pessimism regarding Afghanistan’s future.
Llewelyn Morgan, classicist
How northern is the northern novel?
The north has always spoken in different voices, argues Richard Smyth
Two words remain with me after reading Richard Smyth’s wide-ranging thoughts on “the northern novel”. The words, so often used by the writers Smyth cites, and so revealing, are: “Up Here.”
Up from what? Edinburgh is much further “up” the British map than Wakefield. And yet Scottish writers, almost without exception, locate themselves simply as “here.” Do creative people in Northern Ireland report from “over here”? This resentful submission to London’s cultural superiority is the deepest crevasse across Englishness, and it wasn’t always present. Smyth should tell us who dug it, and when.
Neal Ascherson, journalist and author
Something new, something blue
Ben Houchen, the mayor of Teesside, is developing a new kind of Conservatism—no wonder Boris Johnson is obsessed, wrote Sebastian Payne in the October issue
Ben Houchen’s success in Tees Valley tells us much. First, as mayor he has looked beyond the narrow constraints of his own party’s increasingly tangled ideological make-up, to develop a locally coherent and appealing version of Conservatism. Sub-national leaders of all parties can increasingly see the wisdom of escaping traditional ways of thinking.
Second, his success shows the benefits to local electorates of not allowing themselves to be typecast. If you are, political parties will ignore you. The formerly rock-solid Conservative electorate of Chesham and Amersham voted Liberal Democrat in June’s by-election and, as a result, have almost certainly changed forthcoming planning legislation to be more responsive to their needs. Though undesirable in terms of good government, electorally unpredictable constituencies and regions get ministerial attention—and cash.
Third, the Cabinet and their opposition shadows might wonder how much better the country could be governed if devolution allowed more local free-thinking of the kind on display in Tees Valley. However well-intentioned, Whitehall doesn’t always know best.
Tony Travers, professor of government, LSE
Is the cabinet a lost cause?
In the October issue, Tim Bale argues that Boris Johnson's cabinet was more heavyweight than you might have thought
Evidently even Boris Johnson did not agree with Tim Bale’s assessment that history might judge his cabinet more kindly, as he got rid of the two most obviously hopeless ministers, Robert Jenrick and Gavin Williamson, and demoted Dominic Raab.
As Bale pointed out, every cabinet has its weak members, and at the time the “wets” in Margaret Thatcher’s cabinet were mocked as “vegetables.” But, as I remember from hours spent in the lobby in those days, her cabinet included big beasts like Michael Heseltine and Geoffrey Howe, who could ultimately bring her down.
The September reshuffle proved a squandered opportunity, as Johnson—rather than promoting on grounds of talent and bringing in independent-minded backbenchers such as Tom Tugendhat—kept those who could make trouble for him, like Priti Patel, inside the tent, and promoted Nadine Dorries for no obvious reason other than that she shares his ideological position.
Bale argued that because Johnson is so hopeless at detail, his ministers have more power than many of their predecessors within their departments. But that autonomy is only of use if they know what to do with it. The challenge for the new cabinet is to show that even if Johnson has nothing like the clarity of vision of Thatcher, there are some big brains between them.
Elinor Goodman, former political editor of Channel 4 News
Is China the new enemy?
Cold War paranoia or a new apex predator? Jonthan Eyal and Anatol Lieven argued their views in the October issue
I enjoyed the lively debate on whether China is an enemy of the west, in which both Jonathan Eyal and Anatol Lieven made some excellent points.
One thought occurred: the issue of how far a reversed version of the question makes sense in China today. It makes sense, but not as something that detains most ordinary people for long.
There is of course an increasing level of nationalism in China that makes the west its key target. However, if you ask middle-class Chinese people what their most pressing concerns are, they might include the difficulty of paying for mortgages (China has a very high property ownership rate); the high cost, financial and psychological, of intense educational aspiration for their children; and the economic damage caused by the pandemic. All these will sound very familiar to any westerner.
Other problem areas are more China-specific: a still-huge shadow banking sector where people’s savings regularly disappear without trace or compensation, and a pension system that has no overall national coordination but varies from province to province, and which one major think tank warns may be bankrupt in little more than a decade.
For women, there is a growing social pressure to sacrifice their career for traditional family values, one of the themes behind the recent hit coming-of-age series Nothing But Thirty, which glued many millions to their TV sets.
These fears may not all be equally justified. But they have something in common: they are driven by China’s debate with itself, rather than with the west.
Rana Mitter, professor of Chinese history and politics, Oxford
Your exchange between Eyal and Lieven was fascinating. Whether one talks of an “enemy” or simply a “rival,” the probability is, human nature being human nature, that if the Chinese achieve military equivalence on top of economic and technological superiority, they will seek to exploit it to win dominance.
To resist, the west needs first to do a better job of developing its own model, summarised as liberal democracy, and importantly to do a better job of explaining the merits of that model both to its own people and to the wider world. Second, targeted policies need to be worked out to handle the more immediate danger points, namely the Spratly Islands and Taiwan. Third, the west should engage with China to establish where co-operative effort is possible, for example over climate change and world health, and where each side considers that it must warn the other of red lines.
Harold Walker, former British ambassador to the UAE, Ethiopia and Iraq
The dynamite at the heart of the British constitution
Popular sovereignty is fundamental, but our politicians forgot it until Brexit. If they forget again, they will blow apart the country, wrote Helen Thompson in the July issue.
Helen Thompson maintains that a telegram that Edward Heath sent to his chancellor in March 1973, in which he “quietly noted” that his government’s “goal” was “economic and monetary union,” shows that he was “outright dishonest with the electorate about how he envisaged the Community’s authority developing.”
At a much-publicised meeting in October 1972, the leaders of the six existing members of the European Community and of the three nations who were about to join it openly committed themselves to achieving full economic and monetary union by 1980. Against this background, it is hard to see how a telegram sent five months later, in which the British prime minister stated that this remained his government’s objective, can justify a charge of dishonesty.
Dermot Gleeson worked for the European Commision in the 1970s and is a former trustee of the BBC
The three worst words
Can the Imperial War Museum overcome its baggage and appeal to an increasingly divided nation? asked Antonia Cundy
As Antonia Cundy relays, in recent years military museums have shifted from exhibiting hardware to voices, individual experience, and the disruption war causes to everyday lives.
The famous hardware in the Imperial War Museum spoke to how Britain—as an empire—fought the world wars. Exhibitions of planes, tanks, weaponry, uniforms, unit diaries and maps of terrain revealed feats of engineering, ingenuity, discipline, courage, and organisation: all things that helped Britain develop its world power in the first place.
Now the world wars have faded from living recollection, exhibits should be not so much aide-memoires as ways to show that terrible things happened to real people, and that those people had emotions like us. This diverse and human focus makes the new approach interesting. It also suggests a shift from presenting “what we did” to trying to uncover who we are today.
Helen Parr is the author of “Our Boys: The Story of a Paratrooper”
Gender fluid
The ferocity of the trans rights debate reflects a faith in the biological classes “male” and “female.” But when stripped of their cultural context, these physical categories are clouded in haze, wrote Angela Saini in the August/September issue.
Angela Saini writes that “the biological meaning of sex has not been exhaustively settled… Until it is… whatever meaning it has is whatever meaning we have chosen to give it. It remains up to us.”
The extraordinary nature of this statement becomes clear as soon as it is applied to any other area of science: “The precise nature of dark matter is still a mystery, so we can define it however we like!”
A bizarre non sequitur, unlikely to advance understanding—in any discipline.
Ruth Davis, Basingstoke
In fact:
In 2020, the number of UK adults aged 100 and above rose sharply to 15,120, the highest level yet; as people born in the baby boom after the end of the First World War turned 100.
Times, 24th September 2021
In the US, at the end of the last academic year, 59.5 per cent of college students were women.
Wall Street Journal, 6th September 2021
When its current stay-at-home order ends on 26th October, Melbourne will have spent 267 days in lockdown, more than any other city in the world (Buenos Aires is second, at 245).
Herald Sun, 24th September 2021
As James Bond, Daniel Craig kills an average of 18.8 people per film, beating the other Bonds.
“An Answer for Everything” (Bloomsbury)
There are over two million wild boars in Italy.
Associated Press, 25th September 2021
The human brain runs on 20 watts of electricity —enough to power a dim lightbulb.
@Qikipedia, 11th September 2021
Nearly one in three Britons (32 per cent) say they drink plant-based “milk.”
Guardian, 17th September 2021
Car usage peaked in the UK in 2002, when the average motorist drove 9,200 miles; by 2018, that figure had dropped to 7,600 miles.
“A Brief History of Motion,” Tom Standage
San Francisco has spent $427,500 on developing a new kind of rubbish bin because existing models are not aesthetically pleasing enough.
Mission Local, 8th September 2021
Despite rising sea levels, Micronesia has increased its land area by roughly 3 per cent since the 1940s, through natural processes.
Hakai Magazine, 22nd September 2021
In Irish myth, a man named Stingy Jack tricked the Devil; as punishment, Jack had to roam the Earth for eternity. People carved turnips with demonic faces to scare away his soul; Irish immigrants to the US used pumpkins and these became jack-o-lanterns.
Good To Know, 15th September 2021
