Blair’s ‘military humanism’

Active UK military engagement in the US-led war in Afghanistan, which ended on Oct. 26 after 13 years, was said by the British media to have divided opinion.
This was that British specialty known as "fudging the issue." It is true that there was public support for the intervention in the aftermath of 9/11, when Britain’s then prime minister, Tony Blair, argued that the Taleban, who gave sanctuary to Al-Qaeda training camps, posed a threat to Western security, and that the UK had compelling reasons to go into Afghanistan with the US under NATO auspices.
Yet British people increasingly struggled to discern the purpose of the mission. Claims by successive prime ministers that the servicemen who lost their lives in Afghanistan had helped to make Britain safe met with mounting skepticism. Opinion polls indicate that the great majority of Britons believe that the intervention — to which the UK’s military contribution, chiefly in Helmand province, proved both modest and ill-fated — was futile.
It remains to be seen whether the US and UK have conferred any enduring benefits on Afghanistan — in matters such as the building of schools and unprecedented educational opportunities for Afghan girls. What is certain is that, notwithstanding a deployment of resources that has cost the US a trillion dollars, they are leaving a country where security remains precarious. It hardly bodes well that already this year the Afghan security services trained by the US and UK have sustained some 4,000 fatalities.
British and American public opinion might have been a lot more doubtful about the whole enterprise — had they had a clearer picture of what was going on. Collating a cornucopia of research, the new book by Anand Gopal, "No Good Men among the Living: America, the Taleban and the War through Afghan Eyes" documents, amid much else, how the US spurned early Taleban offers to surrender, blew up the offices of district governors who were on their side and dispatched enemies of the Taleban to Guantanamo Bay. The British politician, Rory Stewart, who knows Afghanistan well, writes that even those most cynical about the Afghan war will be shocked by Gopal’s revelations.
It is extraordinary to recall the moral fervor of US President George W. Bush and Tony Blair as, in the wake of 9/11, they projected what has been termed ‘military humanism,’ war in the service of a better world. Vastly exacerbating existing geo-political strife, their overweening foreign policy has wrought incalculable harm. While not the whole explanation for the current convulsions of Syria and Iraq, only the most obsequious Washington apologist would maintain that it had nothing to do with them. On top of their destabilizing consequences in Afghanistan and Iraq, the wars launched by Bush and Blair can also be said to have immeasurably deepened Western security problems, especially for the UK with its sizable Muslim population.
Some may say all this is now academic. But it is not academic that, unlike George W. Bush, Tony Blair persists in crossing continents, portraying himself as a man of peace — apparently blind to his toxic image throughout the Muslim world as a pro-US, pro-Israel war-monger. Perhaps Blair is so ethnocentric as to be incapable of viewing the world through Muslim eyes. It may also be that he simply does not care what people think about him. Certainly, there is an impression of bone-headed insensitivity about the efforts of the Tony Blair Faith Foundation to counter ‘extremism’, to ‘deradicalize’ British Muslims who have been to Syria, or who might be thinking of going there, to enlist as jihadists.
To be fair, at least one prominent British Muslim, Ed Husain, appears happy to endorse Blair’s good intentions. A former radical now operating as a ‘senior adviser’ to Blair’s foundation, Husain seeks to co-opt fellow Muslims in the task of tackling the ‘absolutist mindset’ of the jihadi. The objective is admirable, thought one might wonder what use an organization bearing the name of Tony Blair could possibly be in expunging the menace of extremism.
Many are bound to feel that the deradicalizing endeavors of this latter-day British crusader, this unrepentant instigator of bloody interventions in Muslim lands, cannot be other than counterproductive.
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