John Mackinlay smartly points out that the escalating violence in southern Afghanistan has been met only with chaotic, un-comforting responses from the British government:
As a friend of the regiment and a former British Gurkha, I am cast down by the death of James Bowman , Neal Turkington and Arjun Pun. And this black mood is not dispelled by the vacuous statements of sundry officials including the Prime Minister that this was a “despicable” act by Talib Hussain, the renegade ANA soldier who murdered them at night in the patrol base…
Crying despicable fails to emphasise that the mentor-mentored relationship is a critical point in the operational concept for both sides. Using words like “despicable” makes it seem like a surprising and egregious act, whereas in truth it is an obvious thing to do. Instead of crying despicable, generals and politicians need a more robust narrative or explanation for what is happening. Rather than exuding baffled surprise, they should be saying firmly : look, the key to success is the establishment of an effective Afghan security force so we must expect that the Taliban will desperately try to sabotage this effort. And they will try to do this by attacking the trust between our mentoring cadres and the Afghan forces with whom they are embedded. That is a critical point of our campaign plan and they are bound to go for it again and again. This means that because of the Taliban desperation, the task is both crucially important and very dangerous and from time to time there are terrible costs involved.
Yes, agreed, it would be helpful to explain the escalation in that way. This is, of course, a problem across the pond, too, but here we’ve got two wars for which there’s just no good framing or explaining going on.
Why is that? American presidents are uniquely well set-up to create public narratives to describe, couch, and even conceal their plans. Bush, for all his many military faults and lack of foresight, was quite good at creating the story that took us into Iraq. Once we were there, though, despite some real attempts to paint every violent act as simply a side effect of Democracy on the March, he never regained the upper hand.
Mackinlay actually has the answer to this:
In addition, it would help enormously if our political leaders were able to show, in a completely lucid fashion, how this sacrifice translates directly to achieving a safer and more harmoniously integrated UK population.
There’s the rub. There is, perhaps, a way to show that some trickle-down effect of both current U.S. wars is the further safety and security of the United States, but it’s a long flow chart with many twists and ifs and buts. Without that end goal, any created narratives, even if they’re true, will be lost on citizens. We seem to care most only when we’re directly involved — which is why the psychological toll of this war weighs so heavily on military families, who exist in a peerless world. Their reality of sacrifice and danger doesn’t exist for most of the rest of us.
