Afghanistan

The debate over British troop involvement in Afghanistan reminded me of nothing more than the bit in Woody Allen’s Hannah And Her Sisters where Max Von Sydow watches the TV show on the Holocaust.
“They can never answer the question ‘How could it all happen?’ because it’s the wrong question,” he says. Quite.
For several weeks we have had the chance to become experts in troop deployment and the necessity of helicopters as a way of limiting casualities on the ground. The question has been “Why are there not more helicopters in Afghanistan ?” It’s the wrong question.
The right question is “Why are we in Afghanistan in the first place?” Answers to that are not to the fore although, to be fair, people have had a go at supplying some in the past. Lord George Robertson’s is the most often trotted out. You may, or may not recall, his line about Afghanistan coming to us if we don’t go to it; in other words if we don’t nip the Taleban in the bud then they, and the disciples of Osama Bin Laden, will be on our doorstep trying to bomb us all into goodness-knows-where.
But does that line stand up ? So far, Britain has had the July 7th attacks on the London transport system and Smeato’s Big Day Out at Glasgow Airport. And that, pretty much, is that.
The Security services, who have had their budgets massively increased and have created an employment boom in the middle of a recession will say that’s because of their increased operations. Is that so ? Or is it just that carrying out widespread terrorist attacks in mainland Britain is beyond the resources of a few deluded Islamists ?
When you think of it the IRA was much more successful in creating a sustained reign of terror here than the Wahhabist lunatic fringe. Oh, and another thing, how many of them came directly from Afghanistan ? Leeds, yes, even Renfrew, but no-one’s caught a plane from Kabul to Britain to set off a bomb yet.
And is it just coincidence that this terror threat that has necessitated MI5 going on a huge recruitment drive started as soon as Britain sent its first troops into Afghanistan ?
Meanwhile, British soldiers are dying and more are ending up in field hospitals in Helmand than the army surgeons can cope with. And strangely, as we try to justify Britain’s current position, the security services are downgrading the threat of a terrorist attack here.
Of course, it can be easily argued that the combination of our troops valiant efforts in the desert and the increased work for the spooks is starting to show real benefits to the point where a response to a potential terror threat at home can be reduced.
Perhaps the Taleban are mad, bad and dangerous to know. Jaap De Hoop Schaefer alluded to that in his appearance at Chatham House. Yes they are the bad guys there and, yes, a resurgence internally will be bad news for some poor people in Afghanistan and Pakistan too.
But if we go is there a chance we will be safer, even if ordinary Afghans might not be ? It is a choice between staying and watching soldiers die and running a tiny risk of some explosions in Britain’s cities.
Terror attacks on Britain’s streets are few and far between. British military deaths in Helmand are almost an everyday happening. And to defeat the Islamists there will have to be many more soldiers killed and wounded in the months and years ahead.
General Dannatt is right; if Britain stays it’s not just about helicopters but about a massive increase in troop numbers as well. Thirty years ago the Soviet Union decided to send its troops to support its political proxies in Afghanistan. It took ten years of returning body bags to convince the leadership that it wasn’t worth it. Britain has been there eight years during which time 186 troops have been killed. How long before we start asking the right question ?

Man On The Moon ?

A quarter of Americans do not believe man landed on the moon. So what do they think NASA and the US Government spent $24 billion on ? Where did the money go ? Was it all spent on a massive deception, on TV mock-ups, on keeping politicians and the media quiet and complicit ?

Of course, it's not what they believe that's important, it's what they don't want to believe. Space travel and the further exploration of the universe asks important questions about the existence of God and many Americans simply don't want to have anything to do with doubting deity.

They are the same people who refuse to believe Darwin, reject theories of evolution and, not only that, think that their alternative explanation for dinosaurs deserves equal attention to the point where they should be taught in school.

It is interesting to note that one of the things Aldrin and Armstrong did on the surface of the Moon was conduct a religious ceremony of sorts, proving that science and reason are not always incompatible with faith and nor should they be.

But it will always be the case that people will not want to believe their own eyes because to do so would be to accept a truth that is so uncomfortable their whole belief system would be threatened and, perhaps, become unsustainable.

However, belief is important; we should all believe in something because to reject belief is to turn inward and reject society and humanity. A lack of belief is perhaps why so many people are greedy, self-absorbed, unhappy, alienated.

It doesn't help that as a social trend it has been growing, perhaps since the end of the Second World War when all the beliefs, all the -isms of the inter-war period, were crushed into ruins by bombs and guns and people en-masse seemed to decide it was better to retreat into a personal world whose bounds were one's own family. They left society to the politicians and instead rejected ideas ike mutual assistance and co-operation for a new car and a washing machine.

Thatcher's "There is no such thing as society" was the high water mark of such thinking but it has not left us despite outrage over MP's expenses and fat cat capitalist bonuses. Although at least now people say things like , "I wish I could believe in something" which may represent progress.

The lesson of the man on the moon is to look at what you see, think about what it represents, analyse the implications and form a view from there. But don't just reject, there are times when you have to believe and alter those beliefs as necessary.

The People's Policeman

Let's start the week with a bit of gentle irony.

Celebrity Stasi

“Hello, and welcome to another edition of Celebrity Stasi. On tonight’s show, we illegally bugged and tapped several celebrities, followed their every movement to show you what they are really like. See stars like Gwyneth Paltrow as you’ve never seen them before, and find out what Sir Alex Ferguson thinks of football’s top brass. All that, after this break.”

You can see Endemol coming up with a format already to turn the secret surveillance of the great and good, as practised by tabloid journalists, into a Saturday night TV ratings winner.
The shock of the Guardian revelations this week about the News of the World isn’t so much what the journalists and private eyes did, but the fact that the bosses paid out to keep the dirty tricks hush-hush.
They had to because they couldn’t have their tactics exposed again, especially after one of their number had already been sent down by M’Lud only a couple of years before.
But equally, because laying bare the techniques used would only alert the suspicions of their rich and famous targets and potentially cut off the source of all their exclusives, meaning less salacious title-tattle and, perhaps, a mini-slump in sales.
Well, it’s all too late for that now. But will it end ? Will it heck, and the strange and necessarily secretive world of monitoring other people will survive and continue.
We are all used to the idea of spies. But our main notion of them centres around espionage where states try to hold a competitive advantage over others in order to neutralise any potential threats.
Spying for the sake of finding out what people say and do belongs more to the world of control freaks like Erich Mielke, the now notorious head of East Germany’s secret police, the Stasi.
There is no real point to the News of the World’s spying other than to find out any information that might be worth publishing in its pages. It’s a feeling former citizens of the German Democratic Republic will be only to familiar; finding out things just so you know the thoughts and interests of people started out as a way of controlling a paternalistic state but ended up becoming a mania of its own.
The links between the two grow stronger the longer you look at them analytically. Especially when it comes to defending the tactic. The Stasi always claimed its spying on its own citizens was to defend the country and Socialism. The News of the World claims it’s all in the public interest. Both defences are quite spurious.
And the high ups denial that they knew anything about what was going on runs true whether it’s News International of the Politburo of the Socialist Unity Party of Germany.
“No, we never knew they were bugging people’s houses. We just told them to go out and get scoops/defend the values of our Socialist republic”, (delete as appropriate.)
The fact that it goes on underlines more than anything a rank hypocrisy about our supposed free society. There’s no doubt, come November, there will be plenty on TV about the twentieth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall and how that act delivered the repressed citizens of the GDR into a world of untrammelled freedoms.
There will be more reminders of what those bad Commies did. Spying on their own people, finding out what they ate for dinner, when they went to bed, and who they were having sex with. And the lengths they went to, as well; the smell jars will be brought out at this point. Look at that, they will say, and compare their lives then to our wonderful lives where we are free to do and say as we please just when we like.
You wonder whether Sir Alex and Gwyneth feel the same way. If they feel violated in much the same manner as those spied upon by the Stasi do they not have some justification ?
Their recourse will not come through the state either. Just as East Germans who were allowed to open their Stasi files in the 1990’s found out there was little they could do about seeking redress for the impact of all the spying, so the celebrities whose mobile phones were hacked are being told not enough evidence exists to suggest crimes have been committed.
Perhaps it is because the intrusion is not by, or on behalf of, the state that such tactics are considered less serious. And maybe there is also a very strong feeling that public figures are “owned” by us and therefore this kind of thing, “goes with the territory.”
But maybe, just maybe, people will ask if it is right for the News of the World, and others, to use these tactics. And if those same people think about it long enough they might get down to asking, “Who might be watching me ?”

Nationalisation

The majority of people in a new poll think the railways should be fully nationalised. Great. Even 31% of Tory voters think it’s a good idea. By jings, we’ll reach a Socialist utopia yet at this rate, although you have to wonder about the value of opinion polls.
The last one out claimed people thought the Tories would make the best job of running the economy. The same party, it should be noted, that gave us rail privatisation in the first place.
There is little doubt, though, that putting private companies in charge of public services has been an expensive con. In Falkirk we had schools built under the tragic PFI scheme that will cost people an arm and a leg locally while delivering a profit for the construction firms involved.
These schools created luxurious facilities which should have been of enormous social benefit to the communities that surrounded them. Except that the profit-driven firms that owned them put them out of the reach of the people who should have been hiring them.
And then there’s energy. A whole industry has grown up around creating a market for gas and electricity supplies. And what has happened ? Instead of competition driving prices down we have seen companies put the cost to the consumer up. And they say they are simply at the liberty of the global price of the raw commodities.
Whereas, if we had a unified system of energy supply we could have a national policy giving the country a bigger say in the control of wholesale supplies. In theory, that could have kept the cost in check and people would not have faced quite so hard a time paying to heat and light their homes.
Oh, and while we’re at it, banks. Yes, banks in Britain have never been state-owned, but hell, they are now. Capitalist greed once again, paying billions for assets that turned out to be worth hee-haw and putting the savings of ordinary people very close to the bottom of the toilet bowl. But for the intervention of the state.
And now the state’s got cold feet about the whole thing. It wants to hive off Northern Rock to Tesco and has been very un-interventionist with the Royal Bank of Scotland by meekly agreeing Stephen Hester can have a £10 million salary.
People are queueing up to tell ministers to be more hands on. Get more involved in the running of our services, not for private gain, but public benefit. And the best we might end up with is The Postbank.
It’s a farce. While we demand certain functions returned to their proper place, the state, politicians worry about the effect on public borrowing and national debt. Spending has to be cut, all they argue about is by how much and where the axe will fall.
And it looks increasingly like mainstream politics will not be shaken from its mantra of low taxation and minimal, light-touch, intervention despite those calls.
Surely if a majority of Tory voters think rail nationalisation is OK now is the time to be getting more stateist. Maybe not East Germany, but perhaps Sweden circa 1975 ? Listen to Gordon Brown, Peter Mandelson and Alastair Darling and weep. Not a chance.