Unaffordability is a myth

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One of the standard objections to allowing refugees access to the UK is that the UK is unable to look after ‘its own people’. It’s usually expressed in terms of questioning why refugees should have priority over homeless people / unemployed people / poor people / military veterans* (*select disfavoured group according to preference). Superficially, it’s not a wholly unreasonable question to ask. It is, though, completely the wrong question, and is based on a series of invalid premises. The invalid premises are that the UK is unable to support those living here who currently need support; that that inability is due to a lack of resources; and that using limited resources to help one group therefore necessarily means that other groups cannot be helped. Take away those premises, and the right question to ask is why, in one of the world’s richest countries, there is so much poverty and homelessness, whether amongst long-standing residents or new arrivals.

In global terms, the UK is a rich – very rich – country. Domestic poverty and hunger aren’t a result of any lack of resources, they’re a result of the way those resources are distributed. And that distribution is a result of a deliberate political choice – which means that it could be changed by making a different political choice. It does, though, suit the ruling classes in the UK to pretend that eliminating poverty, hunger, and homelessness are ‘unaffordable’, and it suits them even more to allow justifiable anger about those issues to be directed at immigrants and refugees rather than at themselves. ‘Divide and rule’ has long been the preferred approach of ruling classes everywhere, and the UK is no exception. Persuading the less well-off that the ‘problem’ is caused by those even poorer than themselves is just the current manifestation of that approach. The saddest part is seeing so many swept along by the big lie that ‘we can’t afford’ to help refugees fleeing a situation that our own government did so much to create.

Beyond hope or redemption

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In a manner which uses a rather curious definition of ‘honouring commitments made’, the UK Government has agreed to take an arbitrary number, bearing no relation to either need or the criteria on which it is claimed to be based, of refugees from the catastrophe which it has helped to create in Afghanistan. But not all at once; the numbers accepted will be spread over a five year period. To qualify for this largesse on the part of the UK, refugees need to find their own way out of their country, and travel to the UK without passing through any other country which the UK Government deems safe (because if they do, they will be regarded as having passed up on the chance to be accepted in that other country), and spend potentially 4 or 5 years in a refugee camp somewhere while the UK gets around to processing their applications. Whether by action of the new Afghan government, disease or taking risks in the process, a fair number of those who might otherwise qualify will clearly never make it.

Still, never let it be said that the UK government is unable to be imaginative or innovative in its approach: holding out the possibility of posthumous refugee status is a world first. It’s also a new low for the conscience-free regime currently running the UK. Apparently, according to the PM in his speech to parliament yesterday, instead of feeling an entirely natural degree of shame at what has been done in our name, we must all take great pride in the huge strides made for women’s rights in those parts of Afghanistan which were briefly occupied by Western forces, even while we watch those rights being stripped away as the country returns to fundamentalist misogyny. It’s delusional, of course; but the participation of the UK in the original invasion was born out of the same basic delusion, which is that the UK is some sort of great player righting the world’s wrongs across the globe rather than an increasingly insignificant offshore European island. It sometimes seems as if there is no event or circumstance sufficiently powerful to shatter the delusion. Even after the UK is split asunder, and the writ of Westminster is reduced to the English rump of the UK, I suspect that those ruling England will continue to cling to their strange notions of greatness and exceptionalism. There truly is no hope for them.

Learning lessons or ignoring them?

Tweet The terms used by Hamid Karzai to describe the effect which foreign troops have had on his country were never going to endear him to anyone in the UK.  The reaction of the families of the UK’s dead was entirely predictable and understandable.

There is a problem here though.  Hard though it is to do this in the light of so many deaths, there is a need for a rational and considered appraisal of the effect of the intervention.  Without that honest and thorough appraisal, no lessons will be learned, and mistakes will be repeated.  Every single death has been a tragedy for the families affected, but we simply cannot afford to allow sympathy for those losses to prevent us discussing sensibly whether the intervention has been worthwhile or not.  And we cannot allow those who query it to be simply condemned out of hand as being disrespectful to the dead. 

Cameron is clearly trapped by precisely this conundrum.  I find it hard to believe that he really does not understand the true position, but he feels constrained by the losses which have been sustained to insist that the whole campaign has been successful, and that the mission has been accomplished.  He knows full well, of course, that things are likely to unravel once foreign troops withdraw, and he’s probably simply hoping that a decent enough period will elapse after the withdrawal before that happens.

If it has been a failure, no fault or blame attaches to those troops killed or injured in the country – or to those who returned safely, come to that.  The question of responsibility is entirely a political one, and it’s a pity that Karzai seemed to be choosing to criticise the soldiers rather than those who sent them.

There are many lessons which need to be learned from recent Western intervention in a number of countries, but surely the prime lesson is that a country and its people cannot be forced to adopt a different way of doing things at the point of a gun.  The very worst thing about that particular lesson is that it isn’t a new one.  Whilst military force can appear to resolve issues in the short term, it is, almost invariably, really only hiding or deferring problems which will eventually surface again; ultimately, it is human, and particularly political, will which resolves issues, not military might.  History is littered with wars which support that view, but we never seem to learn from that history.

Karzai claimed that the intervention was leaving his country in a worse state than it had been before the intervention.  That’s an extreme way of putting it, and I doubt that it’s immediately true – but I rather suspect that it will turn out to be more true than false in the long term.  The fact that saying that is, apparently, unacceptable in the view of many only makes it harder to learn from mistakes.

"It'll be over by Christmas"?

Tweet David Cameron's statement to the troops in Afghanistan that they'll only be there until the Afghans are ready to take over responsibility for their own security sounds rational at first. It does, however, ignore a few pertinent facts.

Firstly, of course, Afghans actually were entirely responsible for the security of their own country until Bush and Blair decided that they were the wrong Afghans, and needed to be replaced.

And secondly, there seems little prospect that any particular group of the Afghans currently involved in running that country are likely to be greatly preferable, or to last long in power without the firepower of Western troops to back them up.

If no long-term solution has been negotiated and agreed, then whenever Western troops leave, the likeliest outcome is that there will be a central government, nominally in control of the whole country, but whose writ effectively runs over only a small part of the country. The rest will be in the hands of warlords and drugs barons.

The unwillingess of leaders in the US and UK in particular to accept that is prolonging the tragedy and leading to the continuing loss of UK troops on what seems to be virtually a daily basis.

If we have learned anything from recent history, it is surely that military might cannot impose a solution in situations like this, and that we must, eventually, sit down and negotiate with the various parties involved. Until Cameron and Obama recognise that, there is no end to the killing in sight, and upbeat messages are just sound bites.