15.11.2001

War comes home

Alan Simpson is Labour MP for Nottingham South . As a leading member of the Campaign Group of Labour MPs has been a consistent critic of the government?s war on Afghanistan and will address the mass anti-war demonstration on November 18. He spoke to Mark Fischer

The seeming collapse of the Taliban does nothing to legitimise Blair?s approach or to discredit those of us The Sun newspaper has called the ?wobblers?.

The Taliban headed a despicable regime. But we need to be very careful about joining in the gung-ho celebrations we see in sections of the press. The collapse of the regime was inevitable from the day the bombing started. That is not the same as the end of the war. It was not a war between two remotely comparable powers. The Taliban?s loss of Kabul and other cities was the inevitable result of this particular phase of the conflict. How could it have been anything different? The richest and most powerful nation on the planet was always going to be able to flatten what passed for a government in one of the poorest countries on earth. That is no surprise.

We need to understand that what we are now entering is potentially a more unstable and more uncertain stage of an ongoing military engagement. We are now faced with some very clear options. Firstly, if the objective was to remove the Taliban, now that has been achieved the bombing should stop. Second, if between them the Northern Alliance and the allied forces today control the route that runs from the north straight through to Kabul, then there are no excuses left. Those roads must now be jammed with food aid convoys.

The World Food Programme has no more than a week left before the onset of the winter snows. They will need to be delivering something in the region of 10,000 tonnes a day during this final week. If the west does not understand its most compelling imperative now is to deliver food, to avert human tragedy on an unimaginable scale, then international condemnation will follow. We will be seen to have placed the pursuit of a war - with very ambiguous and hazy strategic aims - above the welfare and very survival of the Afghan people. People around the world will see through the ?humanitarian? rhetoric of the allies. And they will be very angry.

Victory in Afghanistan could turn out to be Pyrrhic. When the chauvinist celebrations die down, some hard facts need to be faced. Bin Laden is still at liberty. The al Qa?eda network remains intact and operationally functional as far as we can tell. Thus the temptation may be stay in ?war mode?.

This folly could see attacks on Iraq, Syria and others. This could destabilise the whole region. The Arab and muslim world could explode. It would be seen as a war on a faith. We can all imagine the nightmare scenarios that could unfold in places like Saudi Arabia and Pakistan.

What would this mean? At the moment the international coalition includes countries whose regimes are not much more open or progressive than the Taliban or the Northern Alliance. They are tolerated because they are on our side. If destabilised, those regimes will be rocked by the fundamentalist right. Potentially, they will change from undemocratic, secular regimes to anti-democratic, fundamentalist regimes. Domestically and in terms of such countries? relationship with the rest of the world, the implications would be just horrendous.

Then, there are the ramifications of this hollow ?victory? for what happens in some western countries. Almost certainly, the war zone will come home. You can see that being anticipated in the emergency legislation that is being brought before the House of Commons and is being pushed through in the US. We are drifting into the presumption that we need emergency powers because we live in a state of terror.

So why is there a state of emergency in Britain when there is not one in France, Belgium, Germany, Italy or most other parts of Europe? Psychologically, the government is already preparing us to be a war zone. That war will now be fought by the government against its own people.

Draconian powers are being introduced. Arrest without charge, detention without evidence or trial, and sentencing in camera. These are fundamental breaches of human rights. In the name of a war to defend democracy, we will cease to practice it.

Faced with this, the unease in the Labour Party grows by the day. Part of our election platform was the delivery of a freedom of information act, the creation of a more open, less secretive society. A government genuinely accountable to the people. Yet, we are now rolling back the frontiers of openness. We are re-running repressive policies that many Labour MPs know failed when they were in place to deal with Irish terrorism.

Diplock courts, internment without trial, the presumption of guilt and the other restrictions on democracy in that war proved to be disastrously counterproductive from the government?s point of view. The same powers are now being reintroduced, even without the excuse of clear and immediate terrorist threats in this country.

All of this has very dangerous implications. The credibility of the government will be undermined - the public are not thinking along the same lines as the government at all. While the situation remains tense, they may acquiesce to these new measures. But when they start to reflect, a gap will open up between what the public feels and the repressive agenda of the government.

In the US, misgivings about the nature of the war are for the moment smothered by the same sort of government-sponsored panic. The Bush government is now proposing trying people in front of military courts, with no access to substantive evidence to verify safe convictions. Incredibly, the use of torture to obtain evidence is being openly mooted and approved of. This is a lurch back towards the irrationality of the McCarthyite era. That madness did huge damage to the character and fabric of the whole society. It is a very slippery slope towards a form of social authoritarianism.

And there is an important connection with the growth of globalisation here. The inequalities that this process creates can only be sustained if the advanced western states become more and more authoritarian in character. They need to impose adherence to the corporate requirements that globalisation demands. At the same time, domestic populations have to be constrained to deliver freedoms to the corporations. The rights of these global institutions are now replacing civic democracy.

The peace movement is having an effect, but it will not be seen immediately. The anti-war meetings I have attended around the country have been very different from anything I have seen in a decade. The breadth of the meetings is remarkable. We have people of very different political persuasions, of different faiths, different generations. There is a huge social base to this peace movement. The government simply does not understand this.

But then the nature of what is being discussed is very different. People are starting to engage with this much-touted notion of ?security? - what is it exactly that makes us ?safe? as a society? The people?s ?security agenda? is very different to the government?s. They are concerned about the security of work, of the social cohesion in their own communities, of the food they eat.

All the ?security? issues that the public are beginning to claim as their own have non-military solutions. They are social questions and require us having progressive answers for our society as a whole.