OPED | Monday, October 26, 2009 | Email | Print | 
A tragic denouement
Premen Addy
While the US and the UK are considering more troops for counter-insurgency in Afghanistan, Nato’s Italian contingent offered the Taliban bags of money to be left alone. But all hell broke loose when jihadis turned their guns on the French, killing one and injuring others
Pakistan’s tryst with destiny — the apocalypse it had planned for its perceived foes, first and foremost of whom has been India — should be a lesson for students of history, for, nothing is so calculated to concentrate minds as a crisis — Pakistan’s in the present case.
Many moons ago, I was presented with a book for review, entitled Bear Trap, composed by one Brigadier (Retd) Mohammed Yousef, of Pakistan’s Inter Services Intelligence, and put into intelligible English by his likely British controller, whose name, writ large, shared the cover. It was an arresting account of the Pakistani military’s US-mentored capers against the USSR in Afghanistan, leading on occasion to ill-conceived forays across the River Oxus into Soviet territory, a game of chicken played out without serious consequence during the weak Gorbachev ascendancy in Moscow. This tale of derring-do, part of the ‘New Great Game’ as it were, was Islamic inebriation a cup too many, became my printed response. I argued that Pakistan’s political, social and institutional innards, having neither strength nor durability, would collapse under the strain. The Pakistani Army’s present travails in the forbidding terrain of south Waziristan against the locally reared Taliban promise to be the bleak endgame, whose universal parable of scene, dialogue and debilitating characterisation were brought to the stage by the genius of Samuel Beckett. Some may perceive the doomed victim withering in the unbearable blast of Dante’s Inferno. Time should reveal all.
Meanwhile, in Afghanistan, the situation remains fraught, whether in the Byzantine politics of Kabul or in vast swathes of a terrorist-infested hinterland. The US and the UK are caught on the horns of a proverbial dilemma — to despatch more troops for counter-insurgency operations, as their Generals demand, or keep things as they are and hope for the best.
Nato’s Italian contingent came up with an ingenious, if unsoldierly, solution. Preferring life and security to gloriously scripted death, the Italians offered the Taliban bags of money to be left alone. One knows not if this offer of mammon was accepted by the jihadis of god, but all hell broke loose as the Taliban turned their guns on the French, killing a number of their troops and injuring others. France’s call to to account has been met with an indignant Italian denial reminiscent of the best opera.
Rummaged through my files in search of a letter to The Spectator, a Tory weekly, from one George Bathurst (September 18, 2004), I read these remembered lines: “The Nato treaty,” proclaimed the sulphurous Bathurst, “isn’t worth the paper it’s written on ...” He went on to dismiss the possibility of France/Germany or Italy/Belgium coming to Britain’s aid except in base self-interest. Russia, witness the World War II, was the safer bet by far, he said.
Bathurst continued: “Arab extremists are using Islam to fight a war of imperial expansion against the rest of the world... Sudan, Nigeria, Palestine, Chechnya, Kashmir, etc, remain active, literal battlegrounds. We do not have the luxury of fighting alone... We must break the old habits of the Cold War and recognise new realities. We must combine our efforts with not only Russia but also India, and together we can avoid the genocide and human misery that invariably accompany any expansion of Arab extremism.” Well, what do you know? Undoubtedly, a turn up for the books.
And so to Geert Wilders, the controversial Dutch MP, who arrived in London to address a meeting in the House of Lords on why Islamic values and practices were inimical to those of the Judaeo-Christian Europe and hence undermined the well-being of the continent. He made it clear, however, that he had no quarrel with Muslims as a people; and he wasn’t demanding the deportation of Muslim communities from the territories of the European Union either.
Mr Wilders was denied entry into the country earlier this year by order of Home Secretary Jacqui Smith, who claimed, speciously, that his presence would be a threat to public order. She has since vacated office under the cloud of the parliamentary allowances scam; the courts reversed her decision on appeal.
The visitor was greeted by the usual media scrum, but on its fringes stood an assortment of Muslim radicals with lurid banners threatening Britain with doom and destruction, the country in which they choose to reside, whose freedom, unemployment doles, housing benefits and myriad welfare perks they endure with enviable lightness of touch.
Ms Smith and her predecessors were ever reluctant to move against imams and mullahs with their ritual hate messages, repeated ad nauseam in public places and circulated on tape for thousands of the faithful throughout the land. Laws banning incitement were blandly ignored, until matters came to a head in Parliament. Thus a Jamaican imam’s calls to attack Jews and Hindus, having been raised on the floor of the Commons, forced the authorities to issue a warrant for his arrest. He was found guilty in court, duly sentenced and deported to his native Jamaica on release.
Another case of double standards involved a Bangladeshi politician, who was invited to Britain by the Foreign Office to preach moderation to his community, but ended likening the Hindu minority back home to human excrement.
In this the bicentenary of Charles Darwin’s birth, natural selection, has led some scientists, Richard Dawkins being the most notable and eloquent, to expound atheism as the creed best suited to humanity’s search for enlightenment and salvation. No church or man (or woman) of the cloth has demanded that he be burned at the stake, as their forbears did centuries ago. Christian charity prevails today, where once hellfire dogmas held sway. Britain, Europe, and the world generally, are the better for it.
The West has indeed come a long way. The leader of the Opposition British Conservative Party, Mr David Cameron, addressing a Diwali gathering in London, spoke movingly of the Hindu values of “Family, community, country,” of the tolerance, work ethic and self-improvement that constitute a creative and enduring bond between host and Indian communities.
Prime Minister Gordon Brown threw open the doors of 10 Downing Street for a Diwali extravaganza of song and dance. “I want to thank you for everything that you do. It’s a privilege for us to have you here, I want to thank each one of you individually. And I look forward to having Diwali at Downing Street every year again,” said Labour’s welcoming Prime Minister to his Indian guests as they entered the door.
The Indo-British relationship has weathered its vicissitudes and a harvest of good things are in store, but the mistaken indulgences of empire and the Cold War have become Britain’s (and America’s) bed of nails in troubled, distant parts. The pity of it.
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