FOR THE PAST decade or so, whenever there has been any substantial British military deployment, a moment comes when pundits and former generals are invited to worry about the danger of something called “mission creep”. To me the words suggest a well-intentioned incompetence combined with mild indecency — a bit like a man who has left his flies undone on the same day that he has neglected to put on underwear. And there is always the suggestion that the result is not entirely accidental.
So it is following the latest British Army deaths in the Helmand province of Afghanistan. There is speculation that British forces, sent there to protect the process of reconstruction (or more properly — given what was there before — construction) are confronting an enemy far stronger than expected and that thus their role is in some way altered drastically. There is a shaking of heads.
Well, if this is mission creep then the phrase is meaningless. The American military historian Charles E. White pointed out recently that some of the greatest missions in modern history have crept spectacularly. His own favourite example was the Lewis and Clark Expedition, sent out overland by President Thomas Jefferson from his cramped seaboard United States in 1804, and charged with taking ten chaps to discover the Northwest Passage. Ten became fifty and the expedition opened up the whole of Trans-Rockie North America. Dr White’s conclusion from this, and other examples, was that “mission creep is a phenomenon that should be fully recognised within the planning process for any operation”. History creeps. Supporting Poland becomes defending Crete. Attacking secession becomes emancipating the slaves. We don’t have complete wisdom, we are always guessing. Maybe there are thousands of highly effective Taleban fighters in Helmand province who will fight to the bloody end. And maybe they won’t.
The stuff about mission creep, then, probably means something else. For example, the BBC’s correspondent in Kabul, Alastair Leithead, commenting on the latest casualties, described them as a “severe blow to the deployment and to (the British Army’s) mission in Afghanistan”. By this he could have meant either one, or both, of two things. The first was that commanders would have to rethink their entire plan for engagement in southern Afghanistan. The second was that political and public support for their efforts might be compromised by a continuing loss of British life.
To write that the mission is a good one and is worth the risk to others’ lives that it entails, always means being accused of armchair soldiering. That’s both right and a challenge that should be accepted. And to try to be concrete about it, lets just examine one way in which our presence (and thus the risk) is worthwhile. We all know that the Taleban, in their weird mixture of fundamentalist Islam and tribalism, conceived that education for half the population — the female half — was a sin, to be prevented by physical force and punishment.
Nearly five years after they were ousted by the coalition in late 2001 half of all eligible children attend school, and a third of girls (even in the Taleban-ridden south 15 per cent of girls go to school). This means something like 1.8 million Afghan girls are receiving an education that was previously denied to them.
Now those schools have become a primary target of Taleban “militants” (as school-burners and women-beaters are known here in the West). In the past few months hundreds of schools have been burnt down. Just before Christmas in Helmand a teacher of girls was taken to the school gate and shot. Two days later, in the same province, a teenage student and a watchman were murdered. Earlier this year it was estimated that 66 of Helmand’s 224 schools had been closed down as a result of intimidation or arson.
One result of this campaign has been to undermine the Karzai Government in the eyes of Afghans. Ahmad Nader Nadery, of the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission, said the Taleban wanted “to show the people that the Government and the international community cannot keep their promises”. Sardar Muhammad, who works for the relief agency the Mercy Corps in Helmand added that the Taleban were “against all education. Ignorant people are easier to control”.
Since arriving in May the protection of schools in Helmand has been one of the tasks of British paratroopers. It is their job, among others things, to reverse the local perception that by day the Government’s writ may run — albeit tenuously — but by night the Taleban are the bosses. Other tasks have included the construction of bridges, water plants and other facilities that could help farmers to make money from crops other than opium poppies.
Despite this work there is a powerful series of arguments, both from Left and Right, that it would be best if our soldiers were to get out of Afghanistan pretty much immediately. And, though it isn’t stated, it is hard to imagine that such advocates would want American and other Nato troops to remain whence we had departed.
Who are we, after all, to try to force upon a reluctant culture our own superficial norms, such as the right to an education if you are born female. I well remember one — albeit unrepresentative — columnist arguing in The Guardian in the autumn of 2001 that “while the Taleban were imposing their beliefs and reducing freedom on one side, the same can be said of the male-dominated and often misogynistic fashion industry on the other. The question of which is the more ruthless form of persuasion, the lashes of the Taleban or the multimillion-pound advertising flashes of the fashion industry remains a moot point.” It takes real commitment to the anti-imperialist cause to equate being flogged to with being flogged.
Don’t these exotic peoples, in any case, prefer to be flogged by their own kind? And isn’t it only us international do-gooders and meddlers who cause trouble by imagining that we can re-order the world with a Chinook flightful of Pomeranian Grenadiers? Short-term self-interest, these critics argue, is what should motivate foreign policy. Leave it alone. Give it up.
As I read Christina Lamb’s extraordinary account in The Sunday Times of being ambushed in Helmand my thought was not “too much”, but “not enough”. More helicopters, if they’re needed. More of everything, if that’s required. We should be doing it for Nooria, the 12-year-old girl interviewed by Newsweek in February. A dozen or so gunmen had entered her school, beaten the watchman and then burnt the place down. Then the written threats started.
So classes took place under the trees in the courtyard and other schools lent some of their own books. Nooria, whose ambition is to teach, told the magazine’s reporter that she wasn’t afraid of being beaten or mutilated. “I want to keep studying,” she said.
That’s mission creep, I suppose. You go in to get rid of the Taleban and you end up risking lives just to educate women. And — both for itself, and in terms of what it means about the world we want, I think it’s worth it.
Read David Aaronovitch’s blog here
