The sole survivor of Britain's first invasion of Afghanistan

Sunny Hundal, in a piece for The Guardian yesterday, made the case that we cannot give up on Afghanistan. It was, he says, unreasonable to expect the overthrow of the Taliban might come without British casualties or that we could secure positive social change in Afghanistan overnight. In and of themselves, these points are very true. Thus far 212 British soldiers have died in Afghanistan. These are, of course, 212 too many, but despite the public’s lack of tolerance for rising fatalities in a war being fought so far away for reasons so few people seem to understand, Britain’s casualties have been light. Almost as many soldiers were lost every day during World War 2. Neither should we expect immediate social change. As Sunny rightly points out, “Afghanistan’s patriarchal culture has been entrenched for centuries. Did anyone really believe that installing a new government would suddenly bring feminist enlightenment?” But whilst both points are valid, the point Sunny misses is that Afghanistan’s problems, rooted in violence and social conservatism, are never going to find a solution in continued Western occupation.

Like Sunny, I have always supported the overthrow of the Taliban. Unlike Sunny, I never supported an invasion of Afghanistan. Whilst in some senses the war might have forced Pakistan to tackle head on the dangers of terrorism and Islamic fundamentalism, it has had far from a stabilising influence on the subcontinent. Afghanistan is a failed state propped up only by Western military power, some of the most beautiful areas of Pakistan that were once a magnet for tourists now attract only militants, and India is far from free of the threat of terrorism, as November’s attacks on Mumbai reminded a stunned world.

The problem is that Western occupation will never provide an answer, to the security of the subcontinent or to the suffering of the Afghan people. “The radical Taliban groups are grossly outnumbered militarily and financially,” Sunny argues. And yet here we are still, in a war that’s already lasted two years longer than WW2, fighting an implacable foe in a country that has never been successfully occupied. All the while, the civilian casualties rise and with each missile gone awry we ferment further hatred, breeding the next generation of militants who’ll fight the good fight, stay the course and keep the faith even as our own wavers. The gloomiest of predictions, by General Sir David Richards, former commander of international forces in southern Afghanistan, see a British presence in the country for the next 40 years.

In an interview with The Third Estate earlier this year, I put the problem to Tony Benn. “It’s an unwinnable war,” he said. “Every country has to work out its own internal problems. You can’t solve them with an invasion.” It might seem a little callous to step back like this in the face of such blatant human rights abuses, but Benn’s point is a convincing one. A Western occupation will never successfully bring about the social change that is urgently required in Afghanistan to reject the religious fundamentalism of the Taliban, to enable democratic participation and the emancipation of women. All it will do is further entrench the hegemony of ultra-conservatism by setting the Taliban up as liberators fighting the latest in a long line of foreign aggressors. Islamism itself – emerging after the perceived failures of socialism and nationalism in the Muslim world – is a product of colonialism and imperialism, an internally developed tool of resistance which speaks to the very core of the oppressed identity.

The solutions to the problems of Afghanistan, to the subcontinent and to the wider Muslim world, have to be developed internally. A Western ideal can never be imposed down the barrel of a gun. For many human rights activists, myself included, watching the scenes on the streets of Tehran in June from the comfort of our armchairs and knowing the only thing we could do to help was change the time zone on our Twitter accounts, was a painful thing to face. But the movement for democratic change in Iran had to come from within. And when the Ayatollah finally falls, like the Shah, it has to be at the hands of the Iranian people, not the British or American military. The same is true for Afghanistan. No matter how uncomfortable that admission is, no matter how long and arduous the road to change for the Afghan people, the impetus has to be their own. Just as Pakistan must settle accounts with its own militants. Withrdrawal isn’t giving up. It’s trusting the people of those strange foreign lands, to whom we can no longer play policeman, to find their own answers. “If we’d invaded South Africa to end Apartheid, there’d be bloodshed from that day to this,” Tony Benn – who counts Nelson Mandela amongst his greatest heroes – told me.

I don’t have any easy answers. All I know is that propping up a failed government in Afghanistan for the next 40 years of bloodshed is not one of them.

To many of my generation, who were born in Thatcher’s Britain and whose politics were shaped by the stark reminder one morning in September 2001 that history was far from over, Tony Benn is a hero. It was another left-wing icon, Bob Dylan, who described a hero as “someone who understands the degree of responsibility that comes with his freedom.” And whether he’s speaking to two million people in Hyde Park on the largest demonstration in British history, to a packed out Left Field every year at Glastonbury, or to one interviewer for The Third Estate, Tony Benn – a former cabinet minister under Wilson and Callaghan who retired from Parliament to “spend more time involved in politics” – has always known what that responsibility is. To inspire. Perhaps that’s too strong a term for a man of Benn’s unassuming humility. But to encourage? “If anybody asked me what I want on my gravestone, I would like ‘Tony Benn, he encouraged us’,” he once said. And in this dark climate, amidst war and recession, occupation, terrorism and environmental destruction, Tony Benn was kind enough to talk to me about the future of the Labour Party, about Afghanistan and Iraq, and to give me a few words of encouragement.

Benn has the distinction of being the second longest serving Member of Parliament in the history of the Labour Party. When he left Parliament in 2001, Labour had never been more popular. Last month, at the European Elections, the party suffered its worst defeat in almost a century. I ask Benn why he thinks it has lost so much of its support. “Well, the economic circumstances are very difficult,” he says. “A lot of people have lost their jobs and lost their homes, and they’re very, very worried and that always affects the government of the day.” But for Benn, it cannot simply be a factor of the accident of economics. “I think the policies that New Labour followed under Blair and Brown have made the situation worse, not better. We’ve had the Iraq war going on for years, now we have the Afghan war going on. Huge commitments to nuclear weapons that nobody wants, and ID cards and privatisation and so on. I think the policies of the government are very unpopular and I think for the first time in my life, the public is to the left of what is called the ‘Labour’ government.”

It comes as no surprise that Tony Benn is amongst the staunchest critics of New Labour’s move to the right. But even as Blair abandoned Clause IV and accepted the Bush doctrine, did Benn ever feel tempted to resign from the party? “No,” he says without a second’s hesitation. “I’ve lived so long, I’ve seen it happen before. In 1931, Ramsay MacDonald, one of the founders of the Labour Party, Prime Minister of a minority government, joined with the Tories and the Liberals, formed a national government and described the Labour Party as Bolshevism gone mad, there were only around 50 Labour MPs left, and 14 years later there was a landslide. So I think you have to take an historical perspective on it.” Benn describes the policies of New Labour as essentially Tory policies. “If Labour does badly in the General Election, it will be a verdict on Blair and Thatcher together because those policies have been the same.”

Does that mean Benn thinks a defeat for Labour could bring the party back to the left? “I don’t think it’s a sort of ideological test,” he says. At this point he reels off the names of myriad micro socialist parties that would be straight from satire if they did not exist. “It’s a sort of theological splintering where everybody seems to be more concerned to destroy each other than deal with the real problems. People look at politics to see if it actually helps meet their needs. They don’t want some ideological test. They want to know have we got jobs, have we got homes, good schools, health, medicines. That’s the way people see it.” Benn has always been a rebel. From campaigning to be permitted to renounce his inherited peerage in 1963 to calling for the abolition of the monarchy in 1991 and for a mass campaign of civil disobedience on the outbreak of the Iraq war, if there’s a parapet, Tony Benn’s head is above it. It’s hardly surprising then, that as most young radicals find themselves growing more conservative with age, Benn has bucked that trend. “I’ve gone more to the left as I’ve got older,” he says. “And socialism explains the world. That doesn’t mean I’m trying to convert you or anybody else to my particular view of what socialism means. I think that’s the mistake that sectarians make.”

Benn does not know whether or not Labour will find a way to reconnect with its socialist roots. “I can’t forecast the future because it’s not my business,” he says. “My job is to try and influence the future.” Benn pauses after this wonderful soundbite as his mobile rings. “I go round the country,” he continues when the phone stops ringing, “I did eight public meetings last week, one yesterday, one today, another one tomorrow, another one on Sunday, and as I go round I’m pretty persuaded that the public is to the left of the Labour government. They don’t want the war, they don’t want the bomb, they don’t want ID cards, they don’t want privatisation, they do want civil liberties and so on. I think the system will have a chance of correcting itself provided we take up these causes and fight for them.”

The first time I heard Tony Benn speak, I was a sixteen-year-old A Level student taking up a cause and fighting for it. It was 2001, the twin towers had been reduced to rubble, Britain and America were bombing Afghanistan, the Northern Alliance had just forced the Taliban from Kabul and Tony Benn was speaking to 100,000 people in Trafalgar Square who saw the way things were going and wanted to make a difference. I remain convinced that, although we could not stop either of the Bush-Blair wars, opposing them was the right thing to do. But whilst I have always advocated the immediate withdrawal of British and American troops from Iraq, the situation in Afghanistan seems to me more complex. I ask Benn if withdrawal is the right thing to do if it means leaving the Afghan people, after all they’ve been through since 1979, to the mercy of the Taliban?

“We didn’t go into Afghanistan because of the Taliban, we went in, we were told, because they wouldn’t hand over Osama bin Laden to the Americans after the Americans asserted that he was responsible for 9/11.” Once again, Benn is keen to take an historical perspective. “There’s a long history – we invaded Afghanistan in 1839, eighty years before I was born, and then we were driven out. We went in again in 1879 and had to withdraw. And we went in in 1919 after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. The Russians went into Afghanistan and I led a delegation to see the Soviet ambassador in London and he said there were terrorists there. Who was he referring to? Osama bin Laden. And who was funding Osama bin Laden? President Bush’s father, the other President Bush.”

After one of the bloodiest weeks for British forces in Afghanistan, Gordon Brown argued that the campaign is a ‘patriotic duty’ to keep the streets of Britain safe. “I think it’s a complete fraud,” says Tony Benn and there’s no doubt from the tone of his voice that he means it. “There weren’t any terrorist attacks in Britain until we invaded Afghanistan. None of the arguments are valid. It’s an unwinnable war. Every country has to work out its own internal problems. You can’t solve them with an invasion.” It’s a position to which he has remained consistent, despite his own political sympathies. “If we’d invaded South Africa to end Apartheid, there’d be bloodshed from that day to this.” But Benn is not a pacifist in the strictest sense of the word. “Everyone has the right to defend themselves. That is why the Afghans are absolutely entitled to defend themselves as their country is being invaded.”

Tony Benn once said that “all war represents a failure of diplomacy.” His own diplomacy saw him flying to Baghdad in February 2003, one month before the invasion of Iraq, to interview Saddam Hussein in an effort to prevent the war. But was the war ever Saddam’s to prevent? “No,” he says. “Bush had decided to invade Iraq and topple Saddam before 9/11. That came out quite clearly. And he told Blair that was his intention. And I think Blair said to him, ‘I could not persuade the British Parliament to support an invasion on those grounds, so let’s pretend it’s about weapons of mass destruction’. And Bush said ‘well it will take me months to get my troops there, so if you want to have a few months on the weapons inspection, then good luck to you.’ Hans Blix was sent in, totally ignored and frustrated. And I went to see Saddam; I said ‘do you have weapons of mass destruction?’ He said ‘no’. I didn’t know whether to believe him or not, but he was actually speaking the truth. He said he didn’t have links with al Qaeda, and I knew he didn’t, because Osama bin Laden called on the Iraqis to overthrow Saddam because he was a secularist.”

In that sense, the Iraq war was not a failure of diplomacy because there never was any diplomatic option. It’s an argument Tony Benn has made time and again from speaker’s podiums across the country. But with his son Hilary as a member of the Cabinet, who supported the invasion of Iraq, does he ever find himself having those arguments closer to home? “He has his position and I understand it. He knows my position.” Benn’s understandable reticence on the subject reminds me – just as the many Conservatives and Zionists I met at Cambridge whom I now count amongst my closest friends remind me, like his own friendship with Enoch Powell – that although the personal is so often the political, the political is not always the personal. And there is nothing that leads me to believe that he is anything other than deeply proud of his son’s achievements as Secretary of State for International Development under Tony Blair and Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs under Gordon Brown.

At 84, Tony Benn is a man who has been at the heart of many of the great political challenges of the last century. What does he consider to be the greatest challenge we face as we enter the next decade? “I think the economic crisis is a big one and it’s very linked to war because depression in the 1930s played a part in bringing the Second World War about. And there’s all the nonsense of religion being the cause of conflict, it’s not true at all, but they use it. There’s the threat of nuclear weapons, very, very dangerous. There’s the whole question of civil liberties, world population, environment. There’s a huge list of problems to tackle.”

Against such a huge list of problems, against all the odds, against all the setbacks the Left has faced, the wars, the privatisations, Thatcher and Blair, what keeps Benn fighting? “I’ve been interested in politics since I was a child. I campaigned when I ten years old in the 1935 elections and I’ve still got some of the lists I pushed through the letterbox. I’m interested in it genuinely and I engage amongst communities, which is why I left Parliament. I’ve got ten grandchildren and I worry about their future. I’ve written thirty-six letters to them and I’ve got a book being published in October called Letters to My Grandchildren.”

Tony Benn was elected President of Stop the War Coalition in 2004. Through his writing and his activism, through his speeches and his television appearances, and through the many thousands of people he has encouraged, he has undoubtedly accomplished much since leaving Parliament. A 2007 poll by BBC2’s The Daily Politics declared him the UK’s ‘political hero’, narrowly beating Thatcher into second place. I ask him why, then, in the same year, he expressed an interest in standing again for Labour in Kensington at the next General Election. “That’s not quite true,” he says. “After Brown became leader there was a rumour that we’d have an immediate election. We didn’t have a candidate here and I foolishly said to the local party, if you’re looking for somebody, I’m available. Thank God it never happened, the last thing I wanted to do was to go back into Parliament.”

The reason for this is that Benn finds it easier to encourage an audience when he’s not asking them to vote for him. That’s the responsibility he has realised in his freedom from Parliament. That’s what makes him, in Dylan’s terms, a hero. But who are Benn’s political heroes? “The three greatest moral leaders of my lifetime, all of whom I have met personally, not one of whom was white or European, were Gandhi, Mandela and Desmond Tutu. Gandhi against war, Mandela for civil resistance, Tutu, Truth and Reconciliation. Things that have been very, very relevant to our needs. Meeting them has been a special pleasure.”

And speaking to Tony Benn has been a special pleasure for me. It’s hard not to be impressed by his sincerity, by his integrity and by his passion. In a world where the star that burns brightest so often burns shortest, it is reassuring to see that Benn’s has never dimmed. Not because he is a hero. But because, with his encouragement, we can all be heroes for more than just one day.

A minor coup this week, in a world were power is money and money is time and time is quickly running out.

Are you trying to run a national campaign on a shoestring?  Looking to change the minds of just about ever single person in Houses of Parliament, including the catering staff?  And do you need to get all this done by Monday afternoon, at the very, very latest?  Then look no further, my friend.  I think I’ve got the answer for you.

TFL, it transpires, will actually allow pretty much any old Tom, Dick or Harry to – for a modest fee – plaster their message across ticket barriers at any London Underground station you care to specify.

“Which station would you like to advertise at, sir?” 

“Erm…Westminster, please.”

And so, for the rock bottom price of just about £1,000 for the month running up to next Monday’s demo, just about every stubbornly racist MP – whose butt cheeks clench and 2^nd home payments scream any time they so much as think of looking at the immigration debate rationally – are now forced to read our message first thing in the morning and last thing every night.  (Even if they do then proceed to ignore it for ever hour inbetween.)   

The integration of minority communities, particularly Muslim minorities, into majority British society has been a hotly contested subject in recent years. For all the attention it has received in the press since 7/7, however, the role of faith schools in hindering integration in multicultural societies has been overlooked too long. Last year, the NUT finally took note of this in arguing for multi-faith religious instruction in schools. They could, however, have gone much further. They could have made the case for removing religious instruction from schools entirely, followed the French ends, if not their means, of having schools as secular public spaces free from overt religious influence beyond the neutral study of world religions and cultural traditions. What is most significant about the French case, however, is that France recognised decades before Britain the importance of the state in social integration.

France has long held a very different philosophy to Britain in regards to the integration of the diverse immigrant communities it inherited as a former colonial power. Historically, the British model has been the more decentralised of the two (Layton-Henry & Joly, 2001). Under this market-orientated philosophy, the social integration of immigrant communities has been, until recently, a secondary concern. The emphasis has instead been on leaving immigrants to their own devices provided they come to do ‘good business’, integrating vertically and economically rather than horizontally and socially. The decline of manufacturing industry and an organised, homogenous working class has been mirrored, however, by the rise of Generation X, second generation immigrants cut off from the homeland of their parents and alienated from British society where integration of communities has taken a back seat. Where this has been a causal factor widely attributed to the development of religious extremism, which has served to fill the identity-vacuum of some young Muslims, authorities have increasingly, since 7/7, come to recognise the importance of social integration and France’s more centralised model.

France’s approach to religion in schools came under the spotlight of the international media through the decision in 2004 to ban the wearing of conspicuous symbols of religious affiliation, particularly the Muslim hijab, in schools. This ostensibly heavy-handed measure – falsely justified in the name of women’s rights and using the language of secularism – stemmed not merely from a commitment to laïcité, but from a recognition of a need to better integrate France’s five million-strong Muslim community for whom religion had long been intrinsic to personal identity in a way that it was not amongst the majority non-Muslim population.  As such, the assimilation of Muslims represents a challenge to the secular state operating under the idea of laïcité. The question of how to integrate this minority and to ensure their identity as citizens of the Republic first and Muslims second has plagued French governments for decades. Where up until the mid-1980s the state’s policy towards immigrant communities was a socio-economic approach to assimilating the marginalised into the national society through welfare, unionisation and anti-poverty measures, this has been replaced by a more rigid idea of political integration as interventionist social democratic policies lost favour to the rise of a global neo-liberal consensus. The rise and electoral success of Le Pen’s Front National forced mainstream politicians to take on board some of the concerns of the far-right over immigration. As a result, the assimilation of the Muslim community into citizens of the Republic was placed squarely at the centre of the agenda.

The new philosophy that emerged emphasised the need for citizens to identify and engage with French nationality above individual cultural origins. Taking schools as neutral public spaces in which people learn citizenship, the removal of religion from these spaces was seen to be a key method of integration that went hand in hand with other methods to incorporate Muslims into national politics, such as the French Council for the Muslim Religion, established in 2003. The headscarf was not only treated as though it were a viral form of proselytising, encouraging others to identify themselves as Muslims before citizens of the Republic, but as a crucial symbol of difference undermining the unity of citizens.
The French approach, in banning the hijab, has been, of course, too rigid, too inflexible to the demands of multiculturalism and too insistent on stamping a seal of national identity on its citizens. Within reason, the sphere of state intervention into society should probably not include what is permissible for the individual to wear. Moreover, the beauty of multiculturalism is precisely in difference. Diversity without division. However, despite the controversial means it has employed, the ends recognised by the French state, and largely ignored by the British until recent years, are crucial here. How do you successfully integrate significant minority communities holding a distinct, powerful, totalising, self-defining belief system into wider society? Combined with growing radicalism, the Generation X factor, alienation and anger amongst Muslims over British foreign policy, and the war in Iraq in particular, the question of social integration has never been more significant. It can no longer simply be about doing good business.

Faith schools, by their very nature, are antithetical to the integration of communities. And whilst there are those on the left who will, quite fairly, argue in favour of faith schools on the basis of parity with Church of England state schools, I would make the case for their abolition. Individual faith cannot take priority over the pursuit of the very laudable aim of a diverse, but cohesive multicultural society. Schools, primary sites of early socialisation, should, as in the French case, be neutral public spaces in which people of all faiths and none can learn together without directed religious instruction. This is not an argument for the assimilation of minority communities into a hegemonic body or an attack on privately held or even publicly expressed belief. Rather it is an argument for public spaces where people from diverse backgrounds can come together from an early age without certain sections of the community being bracketed from the rest of society. The NUT’s case for multi-faith instruction in state schools is, perhaps, a step in the right direction. But the ideal, serving the causes of religious parity and integration, would be a disestablished church, a liberal form of laïcité in Britain and the abolition of faith schools.

Reference:

Layton-Henry, Z & Joly, D (2001) Philosophies of integration Basingstoke: Palgrave