Afghanistan: the obligatory post, the inevitable defeat.

I suppose I have to say something about the fall of Kabul if only because it’s a contractual condition that I have to write about topical affairs from time to time. So let’s just make a couple of simple points.,

This is not an intelligence failure, but rather what I call a failure to be intelligent. Western estimates of how long the Kabul regime would last were based on the calculation that the Taliban would launch major conventional attacks on cities, and the Afghan Security Forces would resist. If that’s the question, the the answer – months – was reasonable enough. But the Taliban didn’t do that. They opted for a political strategy involving bribery and intimidation, and they had everything prepared well in advance. The strategy actually succeeded even better than the Taliban had expected, since they seemed to have assumed at least some resistance. The “failure,” if you like, was to understand what the tactics of the Taliban would actually be.

Second, this is a religious regime. It’s made up of people who believe in the literal truth of their religion, and think that people who don’t agree with them are heretics or apostates. They do what they think their religion commands them to do. To say they are “savage” or “mediaeval” or “misogynist” or whatever is to apply 21st century liberal standards to people who probably are unaware of them and wouldn’t take any notice anyway if you explained such things. Their God tells them otherwise. Who are you to argue with God?

America, dreaming.

Some years ago I finally decided that there was no point on trying to understand America, and specifically American politics. There was nothing really to grasp, nothing to understand, no logic, no coherence, nothing, really, of that much interest. There was nothing there.

And yet, even I couldn’t help noticing the hysterical outbursts of sheer unadulterated joy and relief at Biden’s election, and the saturation coverage of his inauguration in much of the world’s media yesterday. Such bizarre behaviour would be a little more understandable if Biden were a young, dynamic, crusading, inspirational figure full of ideas for change, or, for that matter, if he had tried to pretend to be one, as Obama did. But why has a part of America and much of the world gone nuts over a geriatric hologram who campaigned under the slogan that Nothing was Going to Change? For most countries, that kind of slogan would be pretty inappropriate: for the United States, riven with appalling financial, economic , political and health crises, and with a population deeply alienated from the political system and in many cases actively hostile to it, it should have been a form of electoral suicide.

The answer, I think (making the dangerous assumption that logic applies here), is that, after four years of Trump forcing the American people to wake up and face their weakness and the true desperation of their predicament, a kindly, bumbling uncle has come along to tell Americans that it was all a bad dream, that everybody loves them, that their economy is fine, their political system is great, and so there’s no need to change anything. Go back to sleep, murmur the forces behind Biden, as they steal the money, destroy the jobs, undermine the economy, and find more wars to start. Go back to sleep, everything is fine, nothing to worry about. And this, in the end, is what just enough of the American people wanted, to be lulled back to sleep and not required to make hard choices or difficult decisions. I wonder how many of them know WH Auden’s lyrics for Stravinsky’s Rake’s Progress?

“Sweet dreams, my master.
Dreams may lie/ but dream.
For when you wake, you die.”

The obligatory new year post.

OK, when I started this blog years ago I vaguely remember signing up to Terms of Service which demanded, among other things, a post at the start of the year with good wishes, optimism, hope etc. incorporated.

I frankly couldn’t motivate myself to write something over the last few weeks (what’s the point?) but here is the obligatory New Year’s post anyway.

First, the obvious. The world is changing. There is no going back. There is no back to go back to. It was changing anyway, but the virus had massively accelerated the process. The dying days of the neoliberal order, already few, have become even fewer. It is effectively dead but it doesn’t realise it yet.

Then the less obvious.The virus is not a traditional challenge to be overcome. We are going forward, not back, but we don’ t know where to. The world of (say) 2025 will be unlike the world of today in ways that we cannot yet imagine. Some parts of the economy (mass tourism, international airline travel) will never come back. But what about concerts, bars, clubs, libraries, museums? How may of them will still be solvent? How many will still be open in a year’s time. If you shut restaurants on and off for several years, where will the staff come from if you re-open them? Would you want to train as a chef in the current climate? What kind of life will we lead as a result?

Then the speculative. This marks the return of government. the countries that do best over the next few years will have the strongest and most capable governments. Those countries that have spent decades destroying government will have to endure the consequences. Some countries (the US?) won’t survive at all. It’s not the disease as such, for all that it is destructive, it’s the capacity to change and modify, to innovate and plan for the longer term. Some countries can do that and others can’t. We are at a turning point in history, although it’s hard to know where we are turning to.

I hope you have the New Year you merit.

Covid: Back to what normal?

It’s fairly standard rule in history that the effects of crises are both less and more serious than expected. In general, the things you expected to happen are not as bad as you though they would bet, whereas the things that you didn’t expect to happen are worse.

So with the virus, it’s clear that there will be fewer deaths than once feared. This isn’t because the virus is kind and gentle, it’s because the draconian steps taken so far have managed to limit its spread, at least for the time being. Assuming a reliable vaccine is produced some time next year, then we may, a year or two after that, be able to get the number of deaths down to a figure which is regarded as “acceptable”, whatever that is.

It’s the things we didn’t expect that worry me. The first is mental illness. At the beginning, people were worried that the sight of dying relatives shut away behind barriers would seriously disturb people. No doubt it has. But I’m more worried about the people who don’t get – physically – ill. Neoliberalism has already produced record levels of stress and mental illness, and, just as the right time, along comes a virus which causes even more stress, virtually requires social isolation, breaks up families and stops people socialising. If you actually wanted to destroy our fragile, unstable, tottering society, if you wanted to push it over the edge, you couldn’t really find anything better. Already suicides are right up, and of course many of the resources that could be used to fight mental illness are being redeployed to fight the virus. And that’s just one obvious, simple and much reported example. It’s the consequences we haven’t even thought of yet that frighten me.

Covid: A massacre of snowflakes

Humorists have log had fun with real (or maybe not real) quotations from history about how this or that generation of young people knows nothing, is impolite, is arrogant or won’t listen to advice. Sometimes, it’s even true.

But for someone born in the post-war era, what is striking about today’s young people, especially those between 20 and 30, is how frighteningly immature they are. It’s not entirely, or perhaps even mostly, their fault. For the last thirty-odd years, parents and administrations have treated adolescents as children, and people in their 20s as adolescents. Young people have been encouraged to grow up with this idea that Mummy and Daddy are always there, and that as a result nothing bad should ever happen to them. If it does, Mummy and Daddy, or the University authorities, will punish those responsible. And of course the more you are protected, the more you need to be protected because the more fragile you become.

When shocks and traumas suffered by young people are restricted to naughty words, overly challenging books, or insufficiently respectful behaviour, then this protection can be made to work, just about. But Covid is changing this, as it’s changing everything else. At its simplest, some young people will die, many more will need medical care for life, and even more will see friends and family die. Nothing can be done to stop or cancel this, no matter how many sensible precautions are taken. Young people will have their freedom drastically curtailed, will not be able to socialise and even conceivably grow up, as they now do. For students especially, there will be months, even years, of living at home and starting into screen trying to learn something. Mummy and Daddy can’t help, and, with the best will in the world, may find them something of a burden.

It’s unsurprising then that depression and mental illness are exploding among a generation who aren’t even prepared for the kind of routine stress that earlier generations had to put up with. In different countries we read that anything from one in ten to one in four young people have actively considered suicide. Once more, Covid the heat-seeking missile is unerringly targeting all the weakest parts of our society. Once more it’s not clear what, if anything, can be done about it.

Covid: No way out

So it’s Lockdown 2.0 then, in half of Europe, and probably all of it before too long. It was expected, and it was probably inevitable. Why?

Well, the Covid problem can be very simply expressed. It’s a disease which can only be conquered by methods which are actually impossible to enforce for any length of time, and which, one lifted, simply invite the disease back again. Put even more briefly, There Is No Answer. The disease can be suppressed for a period, but will come back as soon as life starts to return to anything like normal.

A vaccine of some kind will probably arrive before too long: at best, maybe next year. It may or may not be effective, it may or may not be widely available. It certainly won’t be available to everyone in the world, and for the foreseeable future, everyone who arrives from a country where vaccination isn’t universal (the United States, say) is likely to be treated with suspicion, if they are even let in at all.

Maybe we’ll just have to get used to dying with it.

Covid: You can’t always get what you want

Many years ago, I was at a seminar with a lady from a Famous Financial Publication, whose one topic of conversation was the need to leave everything to the private sector and the Market. These were the days when it was still just about possible to preserve a childlike faith of this kind. We were discussing security and resilience and she intervened to say, eyes shining with true belief, that “real security comes from being able to buy what you need in the market.”

Well, possibly, but in that case we don’t enjoy much security now. In those days, it’s true the process of rampant de-industrialisation hadn’t gone as far as it has now, jigsaw puzzles, hand soap and plastic spoons, for example, were still made in Europe, in some cases at least. And it must have seemed to national leaders that if you ever needed a few million surgical masks in a hurry, there would be a number to ring in China. I suppose it never occurred to them that one day we might need millions of surgical masks. Every day. In every country in the world. At the same time.

But whilst the shock and horror of elites on discovering that we had to ho begging to China for testing kits is all very grimly amusing, it’s only part of the story. Like a lot of other things, outsourcing production requires a nearly frictionless international system for it to work. And that, to put it mildly, cannot be guaranteed with Covid. Already deliveries of some products are starting to dry up. Electronics is the highest-profile example, but of course there are others: indeed, it’s the “others” that in the long run will be the most significant, as daily life’s interrupted for want of some gizmo produced in Bangladesh, shipped to Taiwan to be combined with another gizmo made in Vietnam to be wind up in a cheap supermarket somewhere in Portugal or Poland.

Perhaps real security comes from being able to produce what you need when you need it. There’s a thought.

Covid: What do you mean, together?

If you were born just after the end of World War 2, you grew up with one simple message from your parents and everyone of that generation. We were all in it together. And largely, this was true. Yes, there were defeatists; yes there were some inequalities, yes some were in more danger than others. But the last time Britain had confront a major, major crisis, we were all in it together.

Probably, no set of rhetorical tropes has ever been so misused and so soiled with mindless repetition as those from the year 1940. The sophisticated now mock, the unsophisticated are cynical, the ignorant are just ignorant. But guess what, for the first time in almost a century, it’s true again. We really all are in it together: not just in the UK, but, at least, in the whole of Europe.

There’s a small problem, though. We are a long way into the Age of Me. (I hope we’re coming out the other side, but that’s another issue). For decades now, the unofficial motto of the western world has been, It’s all about me. Hardly anyone now alive now remembers national leaders appealing for sacrifices. Hardly any national leaders would know how to do so without inwardly smirking, and asking if it will play well with focus groups. In the end, if this crisis deals a fatal blow to our current economic and social system (which not everyone would regret) it will be less because of technical, political or managerial failures, grave as they may be, but because of a failure of rhetoric. We no longer know how to talk about what need to be done. We struggle and make noises, but no coherent words come out. Think about that.

Covid: A new earth?

It’s hard to exaggerate how fundamental travel is to modern international politics. Today, for example, comes news of an agreement between the two main sides in the Libyan conflict, which may or may not hold, and this agreement resulted not from talks in Libya, but talks in Geneva. Behind the agreements, I’m sure, was a great deal of shuttling around, not just, or even mostly, by Libyans, but by internationals of various sorts from many countries.

In the current situation, the necessary travel must have seemed like an acceptable risk. Masked negotiators, often travelling in official transport and meeting in carefully controlled environments, are probably as safe as any of us at the moment. But the larger the meeting, the wider the geographical spread, the greater the risk. So far, there have been no outbreaks I’m aware of as a result of such meetings, but it can only be a question of time.

But as always, behind the things you hear about are the things you don’t hear about. To keep the world as it is requires a herculean effort of control and communication, supported by movements around the world on a scale most people can’t imagine. A new crisis in Lebanon, the DRC, Afghanistan or Nepal, and representatives of dozens of states and international organisations can be there the next day. Ambassadors shuttle back and forth, NGOs send people on mission financed by donors. Journalists jet off to cover the latest developments.

Not all of this will stop. But much of it will have to. A First Secretary attending a meeting in The Hague, passing through Amsterdam, being infected by some arriving From Brazil, infecting someone returning to Athens who has to travel via Rome and infecting someone travelling to Addis Ababa … well you get the picture. We will increasingly be moving back to the old model of delegation to players on the ground, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Local representatives will stay in post longer, more will be done in writing, missions abroad will be fewer and longer. Large-scale summits will be rare: the last UN General Assembly was virtual, and the next few are likely to be as well.

The results are hard to predict, but will include a reshuffling of the cards. Th reach of even major international actors is going to reduce, as will the degree of control and influence they can exercise. Regonalism will increase, and nations are likely have more freedom to act. The current plethora of consultants and NGO activists will reduce sharply, and states will have a greater freedom to manage their own affairs.

It’s not all good news, of course, but a lot of it is, and I think we’re going to see a new and disruptive fashion of managing the affairs of Planet Earth.

France: Macron grows up

Young Emanuel Macron, the teenage French President since 2017, has been presented this year with two career-defining problems – first the virus, then Friday’s terrible murder – which will make (or probably break) his presidency. A bland technocrat with an Excel spreadsheet under his pillow, Macron is the last person you would want to trust with the destiny of France in the present difficult situation.

And yet. Tonight’s speech at the Sorbonne , no matter how carefully written by his image consultants, did come over reasonably well. Something like emotion traversed his juvenile features from time to time; something like genuine feeling seemed to creep into some of the words he used. Something like a sick appreciation of the mess the country is in could be inferred from his body language. He may at last have begun to realise the nature of the job he conned his way into in 2017.

In the end, Macron may turn out to be a mildly tragic figure. Someone who realises now what need to be done but cannot do it. Someone who thought he was after the CEO position in a startup, but would up the President of a state in crisis. Cometh the hour, cometh not always the man. He still has some growing up to do.