Recently I reviewed here the Memoirs of the UKs former Ambassador in Kabul, Sherard Cowper-Coles (Cables from Kabul) who came to the conclusion that the only way forward (read: out of the mess)in Afghanistan would involve engaging in a political dialogue with the Taliban, whose Islamic Emirate government the Americans overthrew in the aftermath of 9 / 11.
This position is based on Cowper-Coles' "close to conclusive" belief that the Taliban and Al Qaeda were and are quite different orgnisations, with different aspirations and goals. The Taliban want Afghanistan for the (Islamic) Afghans. Al Qaeda wanted global jihad and simply used Afghanistan as a base for its global adventures.
Abdul Salam Zaeff was a senior member of the 'old' Taliban who was the Islamic Emirate's Ambasador to Pakistan at 9 / 11. He became the international face of the Taliban as it resisted demands to hand over Osama bin Laden to the USA.
Now he is living back in Kabul after several years as a prisoner of the Americans in Bagram, Kandahar and Guantanamo - a protracted experience which he recounts in harrowing detail. The detail suggests to me that he is telling the truth and more than fully explains his current desire to be left alone in Kabul and not drawn into the "dialogue" now being proposed. The US would like to see him as "Moderate Taliban", a label he resists strenuously: "The thought of dividing them into moderates and hardliners is a useless and reckless aim" (p 153)
He comes across as a man who has experienced too much: born in 1968, orphaned as a young boy, exiled in Pakistani refugee camps, a fifteen-year old jihadi against the Russian Occupation, a founder member of the Taliban opposition to the war lords and mobsters who moved into the vacuum left by the retreating Russians, a minister in the Taliban government, a much-abused prisoner of the Americans.
I have a sense of someone brave and defiant but also as someone struggling with depression, seeking support in religion and wanting nothing more than to pursue his Islamic studies. He comes across as both humane and flawed. He gives very little ground.
For example, on the destruction of the Buddhist statues at Bamyan, he observes "While I agreed that the destruction was within the boundaries of shari'a law, I considered the issue of the statues to be more than just a religious matter, and that the destruction was unnecessary and a case of bad timing" (p. 128). That is the sum total effect on him of entreaties [he was Ambassador in Pakistan at the time]from China, Iran and Japan.
Again, when he has to deal with US demands for the extradition of Osama bin Laden, he takes the diplomatic high-ground - we don't have an extradition treaty with you, if he is guilty of any offence then we will try him if you give us the evidence or even allow an Islamic tribunal in another country to do so, and so on - when probably he could have said, we don't know where he is and we cannot control him.
At the same time, Zaeff cries when he is summoned by a neighbour to watch on TV the destruction of the Twin Towers since he immediately realises that it is a disaster for Afghanistan (pp 141 - 143). That did not lead him to conclude that maybe Afghan hospitality extended to bin Laden was at an end.
There are surprising themes in this book, notably his hatred of the Pakistani authorities who he sees as tools of the Americans, and nasty ones at that. He also sees the British presence as motivated by a desire to revenge ninety year old defeats - not so laughable when you realise that we back it up by seeing Afghanistan as a suitable theatre of war for our spare princes.
There are also big ommisions - next to nothing about drugs, no attempt to defend the Taliban's exclusion of women from education and public life, or its taste for public executions (though the USA has never made Saudi Arabia justify those). Nor does he confront the fact that some Afghans may want a different future to the one he imagines for them, though it is true the Taliban did try to come to some agreement with the Northern Alliance before assasinating its leader (Massoud).
Zaeff often comes across as a likeable man, but at other moments I am not sure if I am dealing with religous conviction or just with priggishness and narrow-mindedness - the same kind of feeling I might well have reading Catholic theologians. There is a general problem with those who come at the world from a theologically-schooled world-view, that they cannot always see the wood for the trees. They don't prioritise. Zaeff's remarks on the Bamyan statues is as close as he gets to doing so.
This is a very readable book, once you realise that you do not have to remember the names of the Tolstoyanly long list of characters. A great deal of credit is undoubtedly due to Zaeff's editors, Alix Strick van Linschoten and Felix Kuehn.
_______________________
Originally published on my Blog, The Best I can Do
Saturday 9 June 2012
Review: Liaquat Ahamed, Lords of Finance
In the UK, the department of Business, Innovation and Skills (Proprietor: Vince Cable) issues a list of dates on which it advises employers to lock out their workers. These are what are commonly known as Bank Holidays and are designed nowadays to boost imports (people go abroad) and kill off any "green shoots" of growth in GDP.
It felt appropriate to read Liaquat Ahamed's splendid book over the long August Bank Holiday weekend. It's another of those books by someone who isn't an academic which makes one wonder why we bother with academics. It's true that he has degrees from Harvard and Cambridge; but he has written this beautifully crafted and researched 500 page book in his spare time away from being a "professional investment manager".
Though the cover blurb makes you think it is going to be about the Great Crash and the Great Depression, it is actually a much bigger study of central banking between 1914 and the mid-1930s focussing on the relations between four key players - Benjmain Strong at the New York Fed, Montagu Norman at the Bank of England, Hjalmar Scacht at the Reichsbank and Emile Moreau at La Banque de France. These institutions were still, for all or much of this period, privately owned and foolishly organised but responsibility devolved upon them to maintain financial stability at both domestic and international levels - the four main characters spend much of their time travelling, by train and boat, to meet each other.
They deal with bank reserves, international loans, interest rate setting, money supply, price inflation (or deflation), employment levels, war debts, war reparations and exchange rates. For much of the time, they are committed to mantaining the Gold Standard. Some of them do and some of them don't know what they are doing and the same is true of the politicians with whom they are uneasily involved. Britain's Labour Party comes out of the story as clueless and deferential to every orthodoxy around.
Some of the most interesting cameos in the book concern the moments when the politicians and the bankers collide: for example, Winston Churchill fatefully returning the UK to the Gold Standard in 1925 - a decision he later acknowledged as the worst in his life. Or, more importantly, Franklin Roosevelt tearing up the rule book, taking America off gold, encouraging price inflation, and thus in a very short period, turning around the US economy. This narative comes at the tail end of Ahamed's book and feels less than generous towards Roosevelt's huge achievement. In contrast, Keynes gets full credit for the perspicacity of the running critique he offers for the entire period and mostly from the sidelines.
Many other episodes have - and are designed to have - a contemporary resonance, right down to the rogue trader who busts an investment bank. And when in 1928 a British treasury official snootily remarks that "The French have always had a sure instinct for investing in bankrupt countries" it is impossible not to think of BNP Paribas' current exposure to Greek debt.
The really sobering thing about this very readable book is that though it gestures to the post-war achievements of the IMF, the World Bank and Keynesian economics in avoiding anything like the turmoils of the 1920s and 1930s it still leaves me with the thought that plus ca change, plus c'est la meme chose. It also leaves a clear message that big players never pay their debts.
_________________________
Originally published on my Blog, The Best I can Do
It felt appropriate to read Liaquat Ahamed's splendid book over the long August Bank Holiday weekend. It's another of those books by someone who isn't an academic which makes one wonder why we bother with academics. It's true that he has degrees from Harvard and Cambridge; but he has written this beautifully crafted and researched 500 page book in his spare time away from being a "professional investment manager".
Though the cover blurb makes you think it is going to be about the Great Crash and the Great Depression, it is actually a much bigger study of central banking between 1914 and the mid-1930s focussing on the relations between four key players - Benjmain Strong at the New York Fed, Montagu Norman at the Bank of England, Hjalmar Scacht at the Reichsbank and Emile Moreau at La Banque de France. These institutions were still, for all or much of this period, privately owned and foolishly organised but responsibility devolved upon them to maintain financial stability at both domestic and international levels - the four main characters spend much of their time travelling, by train and boat, to meet each other.
They deal with bank reserves, international loans, interest rate setting, money supply, price inflation (or deflation), employment levels, war debts, war reparations and exchange rates. For much of the time, they are committed to mantaining the Gold Standard. Some of them do and some of them don't know what they are doing and the same is true of the politicians with whom they are uneasily involved. Britain's Labour Party comes out of the story as clueless and deferential to every orthodoxy around.
Some of the most interesting cameos in the book concern the moments when the politicians and the bankers collide: for example, Winston Churchill fatefully returning the UK to the Gold Standard in 1925 - a decision he later acknowledged as the worst in his life. Or, more importantly, Franklin Roosevelt tearing up the rule book, taking America off gold, encouraging price inflation, and thus in a very short period, turning around the US economy. This narative comes at the tail end of Ahamed's book and feels less than generous towards Roosevelt's huge achievement. In contrast, Keynes gets full credit for the perspicacity of the running critique he offers for the entire period and mostly from the sidelines.
Many other episodes have - and are designed to have - a contemporary resonance, right down to the rogue trader who busts an investment bank. And when in 1928 a British treasury official snootily remarks that "The French have always had a sure instinct for investing in bankrupt countries" it is impossible not to think of BNP Paribas' current exposure to Greek debt.
The really sobering thing about this very readable book is that though it gestures to the post-war achievements of the IMF, the World Bank and Keynesian economics in avoiding anything like the turmoils of the 1920s and 1930s it still leaves me with the thought that plus ca change, plus c'est la meme chose. It also leaves a clear message that big players never pay their debts.
_________________________
Originally published on my Blog, The Best I can Do
Review: Matthew Sweet, The West End Front
London is the whole world in one city - if it chose to become a country, it would be a rich and powerful one. Within its boundaries, a thousand and one narratives of great political, economic, cultural and social significance are constantly played out.
Matthew Sweet's The West End Front (Faber and Faber 2011) picks up some World War Two narratives the threads of which pass through London's grand hotels - the Savoy, The Ritz, the Dorchester, Claridge's. Each thread provides a chapter heading: Sweet has ten stories about - among others - spies, homosexuals, agitators, con men and women, abortionists and exiles.
It is thoroughly researched, carefully crafted and often moving. Sweet is not an academic, which appears to me increasingly a condition of writing a good book - I kept comparing Sweet favourably with an academic work in the same genre but without a heart: Frank Mort's deadly Capital Affairs which I tried to read a while back.
There is a moving chapter which details the death of just one young woman, Mary Pickwoad, following a botched abortion in a London hotel, the Mount Royal. Sweet has gone after every document which might still exist and every person still alive who might have something to tell about the story. It is a beautiful Memorial.
More shocking and often surprising are the details which show England's class system functioning at all levels, in government, in the military, the police and among the spooks who were denizens of all the big hotels. In the early stages of the war, at least, Hitler was not unambiguously everyone's enemy; Jews and Communists were more menacing enemies for some of Sweet's upper-class and institutionally powerful characters. In my previous Blog, I noted the extraordinary way in which at the beginning of the War, whilst the big hotels had deep bomb-proof shelters, the London Underground was initially closed as a place of refuge from the Blitz. How many of us knew that before, I wonder?
If you like reading about World War Two or about London, this is a very good book to go after
__________________________
Originally published on my Blog, The Best I can Do
Matthew Sweet's The West End Front (Faber and Faber 2011) picks up some World War Two narratives the threads of which pass through London's grand hotels - the Savoy, The Ritz, the Dorchester, Claridge's. Each thread provides a chapter heading: Sweet has ten stories about - among others - spies, homosexuals, agitators, con men and women, abortionists and exiles.
It is thoroughly researched, carefully crafted and often moving. Sweet is not an academic, which appears to me increasingly a condition of writing a good book - I kept comparing Sweet favourably with an academic work in the same genre but without a heart: Frank Mort's deadly Capital Affairs which I tried to read a while back.
There is a moving chapter which details the death of just one young woman, Mary Pickwoad, following a botched abortion in a London hotel, the Mount Royal. Sweet has gone after every document which might still exist and every person still alive who might have something to tell about the story. It is a beautiful Memorial.
More shocking and often surprising are the details which show England's class system functioning at all levels, in government, in the military, the police and among the spooks who were denizens of all the big hotels. In the early stages of the war, at least, Hitler was not unambiguously everyone's enemy; Jews and Communists were more menacing enemies for some of Sweet's upper-class and institutionally powerful characters. In my previous Blog, I noted the extraordinary way in which at the beginning of the War, whilst the big hotels had deep bomb-proof shelters, the London Underground was initially closed as a place of refuge from the Blitz. How many of us knew that before, I wonder?
If you like reading about World War Two or about London, this is a very good book to go after
__________________________
Originally published on my Blog, The Best I can Do
Review: Stephen Gundle, Death and the Dolce Vita
If you wondered how Berlusconi survived for so long, this well-written book will provide many clues.
Stephen Gundle is Professor of Film and Television Studies at the University of Warwick. In the 1950s, Rome was a major film production centre for both Italian and American films. Producers like Fellini, Rossellini and da Sica had international reputations. Italian actors and American actors who worked in Rome were front page material for movie magazines and popular newspapers. Think of Gina Lollobrigida, Sophia Loren, Marcello Mastroiani just for the Italian side.
But rather than write a straightforward history of Italian cinema in the 1950s, Gundle has come at the story from another angle. He structures his book around the never-explained death of a young woman, Wilma Montesi, in April 1953 and provides a crime-detective narrative which, as it unfolds, provides a social history of post-war Rome.
Wilma Montesi was a lower middle-class girl from Rome whose family home was just a short walk from the bright lights of the city. Looking for a life less dull than that favoured by her family and her wooden fiancé, she got mixed up with the wrong crowd and within months died in mysterious circumstances.
The wrong crowd included a career criminal, Ugo Montagna, a man who did not file tax-returns and who had navigated his way to a success which grew through successive regimes - Fascist, American Occupation, Christian Democracy - and the wayward son, Piero Piccioni, of a top Christian Democrat politician. They had a taste for drugs and for sex. Wilma Montesi probably worked as a local drugs courier within Rome and she may have been groomed for sex. One night, something went wrong and she ended up dead on a beach near Rome.
Together Montagna and Piccioni could call in favours and call on connections. Montagna was buddy with the national commissioner for police and the elderly police commissioner for Rome was not going to argue with his boss. The investigation into Wilma Montesi's death was very rapidly closed after a perfunctory autopsy. It was an accident, a verdict her family were happy to embrace since it left their daughter's public reputation - and their own - intact.
The case was only re-opened because Italy's newly-free press would not let go of it. It had all ingredients of a circulation-boosting story: the mysterious death of a pretty young woman, the debauched lives of the rich and powerful (or sons of the powerful) and - not least - cover-up and corruption in high places continuing as if democracy had not yet come to Italy. Silvano Muto, on the journalistic right, led the way and the left followed.
The Vatican also had its own interests. Anything that served to weaken the strength of the Communists in post-war Italy was Good, anything which weakened the strength of the Christian Democrats was Bad. Here the Vatican and the USA, still heavily involved in Italian affairs, shared identical positions.
Gundle develops all this in a carefully-crafted, readable book. He avoids heavy-handed theoretical analysis, but there is an underlying structure: the opposition of high and low life and their proximity to each other in capital cities; the role of mass circulation magazines and newspapers in both sustaining a public sphere of debate but also in structuring the aspirations of young women; the hostility of the Vatican to anything which threatened sexual repression or the subordination of women; the spill-over of film culture into everyday life and the reverse.
If you want to understand the context out of which came Fellini's La Dolce Vita , then read this book. If you want to understand the long-term context in which a regime as corrupt and bacchanalian as Berlusconi's was possible, then this book also provides a remarkable amount of insight.
____________________
Originally published on my Blog, The Best I can Do
Stephen Gundle is Professor of Film and Television Studies at the University of Warwick. In the 1950s, Rome was a major film production centre for both Italian and American films. Producers like Fellini, Rossellini and da Sica had international reputations. Italian actors and American actors who worked in Rome were front page material for movie magazines and popular newspapers. Think of Gina Lollobrigida, Sophia Loren, Marcello Mastroiani just for the Italian side.
But rather than write a straightforward history of Italian cinema in the 1950s, Gundle has come at the story from another angle. He structures his book around the never-explained death of a young woman, Wilma Montesi, in April 1953 and provides a crime-detective narrative which, as it unfolds, provides a social history of post-war Rome.
Wilma Montesi was a lower middle-class girl from Rome whose family home was just a short walk from the bright lights of the city. Looking for a life less dull than that favoured by her family and her wooden fiancé, she got mixed up with the wrong crowd and within months died in mysterious circumstances.
The wrong crowd included a career criminal, Ugo Montagna, a man who did not file tax-returns and who had navigated his way to a success which grew through successive regimes - Fascist, American Occupation, Christian Democracy - and the wayward son, Piero Piccioni, of a top Christian Democrat politician. They had a taste for drugs and for sex. Wilma Montesi probably worked as a local drugs courier within Rome and she may have been groomed for sex. One night, something went wrong and she ended up dead on a beach near Rome.
Together Montagna and Piccioni could call in favours and call on connections. Montagna was buddy with the national commissioner for police and the elderly police commissioner for Rome was not going to argue with his boss. The investigation into Wilma Montesi's death was very rapidly closed after a perfunctory autopsy. It was an accident, a verdict her family were happy to embrace since it left their daughter's public reputation - and their own - intact.
The case was only re-opened because Italy's newly-free press would not let go of it. It had all ingredients of a circulation-boosting story: the mysterious death of a pretty young woman, the debauched lives of the rich and powerful (or sons of the powerful) and - not least - cover-up and corruption in high places continuing as if democracy had not yet come to Italy. Silvano Muto, on the journalistic right, led the way and the left followed.
The Vatican also had its own interests. Anything that served to weaken the strength of the Communists in post-war Italy was Good, anything which weakened the strength of the Christian Democrats was Bad. Here the Vatican and the USA, still heavily involved in Italian affairs, shared identical positions.
Gundle develops all this in a carefully-crafted, readable book. He avoids heavy-handed theoretical analysis, but there is an underlying structure: the opposition of high and low life and their proximity to each other in capital cities; the role of mass circulation magazines and newspapers in both sustaining a public sphere of debate but also in structuring the aspirations of young women; the hostility of the Vatican to anything which threatened sexual repression or the subordination of women; the spill-over of film culture into everyday life and the reverse.
If you want to understand the context out of which came Fellini's La Dolce Vita , then read this book. If you want to understand the long-term context in which a regime as corrupt and bacchanalian as Berlusconi's was possible, then this book also provides a remarkable amount of insight.
____________________
Originally published on my Blog, The Best I can Do
Review: Anthony Summers & Robbyn Swan, The Eleventh Day
After reading this book, you may well wonder why President Bush was never impeached.
Under President Clinton, Al Qaeda was regarded as the Number One threat to US security, at home and abroad, and efforts were made to neutralise it. Clinton even travelled to Pakistan (regarded as off limits for his personal safety) in order to try to get Pakistan's co-operation.
In 2000, everything changed. The incoming Bush administration was briefed about the Al Qaeda threat. They did not want to know, in some cases ostentatiously so. Both the general analysis and specific warnings were ignored - by Bush, by Rice, by Rumsfeld, by Ashcroft. The Republican administration was interested in other things - tax cuts, the projected Europe-based Missile Shield, in the background, Iraq. In many ways, it wasn't interested in very much at all - Bush went on holiday for all of August 2001.
Though the CIA briefed at top level, lower down it functioned poorly. So did the FBI. So did the Federal Aviation Authority, responsible for keeping the skies safe. And the turf war between them meant that crucial information was never exchanged. Even with poor exchange of information, quite a few people (including people in foreign intelligence services) had good reason to suspect an imminent terrorist attack from within the United States - and some of them could even give you the date, within a day or two, 9/11 - and the method, planes. But they were ignored.
To all intents and purposes, America's leaders and America's security organisations allowed 9/11 to happen.
In the immediate aftermath of the attack on the Twin Towers, Bush showed no qualities of leadership. The authors of this book carefully build up the case for saying that it was Cheney, not Bush, who was responsible for the Shoot Down order in respect of planes continuing to fly despite the FAA order grounding all aircraft. Rumsfeld is documented behaving idiotically. But Cheney had no authority to issue the order; Bush and Rumsfeld did.
Very quickly - within hours even - the Bush administration sought to turn 9 / 11 to the advantage of one of their pet projects, the toppling of Saddam Hussein. Richard Clarke (Bush's counter-terrorism co-ordinator) has documented this in his book Against All Enemies (2004).
At the same time, Buash & Co did not want to know about Saudi involvement in financing and supporting not only Al Qaeda in general but the 19 hijackers of 9/11 in particular. Summers and Swan go into detail to demonstrate this involvement, up to and including members of the Saudi Royal Family and government administration. The "Don't Want to Know" approach of the Bush administration began within hours of the attacks: Saudi royals and members of the Bin Laden family were allowed to leave the USA on special flights, with little or no questioning.
Much of the evidence for Saudi involvement has been redacted from material the US government has published, including the 9 / 11 Commission report. Fifteen of the nineteen hijackers on 9 /11 were Saudi; half of the American public - of whom the world should be more terrified than it is - ended up believing that some or most of the hijackers were Iraqi. None were.
Bob Graham, joint Chair of the Congressional Inquiry into 9 / 11, concluded "It was as if the President's loyalty lay more with Saudi Arabia than with America's safety" - and as a result, Graham concluded he should have been impeached (page 420)
Summers and Swan are caustically dismissive of the conspiracy theories around 9 / 11: the Bush administration did not set the hijackers to work, it did not bring down the Twin Towers by controlled demolition, a plane did hit the Pentagon ... But the tale they have to tell is at least as scary as any of those conspiracy theories.
And this year, America may once again be stupid enough to elect another dumb Republican President.
_________________
Originally published on my Blog, The Best I can Do
Under President Clinton, Al Qaeda was regarded as the Number One threat to US security, at home and abroad, and efforts were made to neutralise it. Clinton even travelled to Pakistan (regarded as off limits for his personal safety) in order to try to get Pakistan's co-operation.
In 2000, everything changed. The incoming Bush administration was briefed about the Al Qaeda threat. They did not want to know, in some cases ostentatiously so. Both the general analysis and specific warnings were ignored - by Bush, by Rice, by Rumsfeld, by Ashcroft. The Republican administration was interested in other things - tax cuts, the projected Europe-based Missile Shield, in the background, Iraq. In many ways, it wasn't interested in very much at all - Bush went on holiday for all of August 2001.
Though the CIA briefed at top level, lower down it functioned poorly. So did the FBI. So did the Federal Aviation Authority, responsible for keeping the skies safe. And the turf war between them meant that crucial information was never exchanged. Even with poor exchange of information, quite a few people (including people in foreign intelligence services) had good reason to suspect an imminent terrorist attack from within the United States - and some of them could even give you the date, within a day or two, 9/11 - and the method, planes. But they were ignored.
To all intents and purposes, America's leaders and America's security organisations allowed 9/11 to happen.
In the immediate aftermath of the attack on the Twin Towers, Bush showed no qualities of leadership. The authors of this book carefully build up the case for saying that it was Cheney, not Bush, who was responsible for the Shoot Down order in respect of planes continuing to fly despite the FAA order grounding all aircraft. Rumsfeld is documented behaving idiotically. But Cheney had no authority to issue the order; Bush and Rumsfeld did.
Very quickly - within hours even - the Bush administration sought to turn 9 / 11 to the advantage of one of their pet projects, the toppling of Saddam Hussein. Richard Clarke (Bush's counter-terrorism co-ordinator) has documented this in his book Against All Enemies (2004).
At the same time, Buash & Co did not want to know about Saudi involvement in financing and supporting not only Al Qaeda in general but the 19 hijackers of 9/11 in particular. Summers and Swan go into detail to demonstrate this involvement, up to and including members of the Saudi Royal Family and government administration. The "Don't Want to Know" approach of the Bush administration began within hours of the attacks: Saudi royals and members of the Bin Laden family were allowed to leave the USA on special flights, with little or no questioning.
Much of the evidence for Saudi involvement has been redacted from material the US government has published, including the 9 / 11 Commission report. Fifteen of the nineteen hijackers on 9 /11 were Saudi; half of the American public - of whom the world should be more terrified than it is - ended up believing that some or most of the hijackers were Iraqi. None were.
Bob Graham, joint Chair of the Congressional Inquiry into 9 / 11, concluded "It was as if the President's loyalty lay more with Saudi Arabia than with America's safety" - and as a result, Graham concluded he should have been impeached (page 420)
Summers and Swan are caustically dismissive of the conspiracy theories around 9 / 11: the Bush administration did not set the hijackers to work, it did not bring down the Twin Towers by controlled demolition, a plane did hit the Pentagon ... But the tale they have to tell is at least as scary as any of those conspiracy theories.
And this year, America may once again be stupid enough to elect another dumb Republican President.
_________________
Originally published on my Blog, The Best I can Do
Review: Frank Ledwidge, Losing Small Wars. British Military Failure in Iraq and Afghanistan
Read this book and you will likely want immediately to confine British forces to barracks and base. It's not safe to let them go anywhere or do anything.
Lieutenant Commander Ledwidge spent fifteen years as a Naval Reserve military intelligence officer and served in Bosnia, Kosovo, Iraq and Afghanistan. He is now retired. He begins rather uncertainly, as if unsure that he should be writing this kind of book at all, but as he gets into his stride, he delivers page after page of understated, but to an outsider like me, seemingly withering critique.
His book is not about the politicians who, out of weakness or ignorance or vainglory, despatched British forces to Iraq and Afghanistan. He is concerned with how the armed forces - and principally the army - handled the missions they were assigned or, in default of proper political direction, invented for themselves.
At the very top, Ledwidge rebukes the top brass for having failed to "speak truth to power": "generals, ill-trained and inadequately educated in the basic elements of strategy, failed in their role as speakers of truth to power" (p 262). In thrall to bluff and hearty notions - Can Do, Cracking On - they failed to demand a clear mission brief, failed to say that - as they understood the brief - it could not be delivered with the resources available, failed to raises issues about what might be legitimate in the circumstances, and so on.
In both Iraq and Afghanistan, the invading and occupying British forces actually did very little - except kill and antagonise local civilians.
In southern Iraq (Basra), they were initially welcomed but squandered goodwill by aligning themselves with militias and gangsters posing as the local administration. They simply lacked the on-the-ground intelligence to realise that this is what they were doing. In the end, they ended up largely confined to base. When they did venture out, in very small numbers, local civilians were quite often terrorised and occasionally tortured and killed.
Ledwidge makes some scathing remarks around this subject. We are frequently told that problems arise when we don't understand the local culture. Nonsense, says Ledwidge, culture is the same in Basra as in Basingstoke: in neither place do people want their doors kicked in at night by heavily armed soldiers speaking a foreign language and uncertain about their reasons for being in your living room.
In Afghanistan, it was insane for the top brass to agree to deployment in Helmand - a province where the British have been hated ever since they were last there.
It was insane to suppose that you could separate the "people" from the "insurgents" (Taliban) when you actually had less to offer the people by way of provision of security and available justice than did the insurgents and when your orders were to ally yourselves with prime sources of local unhappiness - a criminal police and judiciary.
As in Basra, the Brits ended up confined to base with occasional adventures into the occupied territory. Tragically, in Afghanistan, such adventures were often enough backed up with heavy weaponry and missile attacks. Many civilians dead, many more "hearts and minds" lost. What makes us think that it is even legitimate to be firing these missiles, as if Helmand is some kind of battlefield in which we face an enemy threatening our very existence?
Ledwidge goes after these failures with chilling anecdotes, sharp thumbnail analyses, detailed critique of the Army's military culture, and occasionally open exasperation. He rejects the notion that it was all the American's fault, or NATO's fault. These were British mistakes.This is how he sums up:
"The defeats - let us not mince words - in the civil wars - the "counter-insurgencies" - in Helmand and Basra need not have been so comprehensive; indeed, they need not have happened at all... in Basra, the British started with a "winning hand" and played it poorly. In Helmand, they managed to ignore several factors to which any Afghan could (and would) have drawn their attention (and to which several soldeirs did) - this was the single worst possible province into which the British could crash" (p 259)
Lt Cdr Ledwidge is too polite to add, the politicians and the top brass even thought that Helmand would be a good place to deploy one of our spare princelings, Prince Harry.
There is one topic which Ledwidge does not address but which complicates the picture. The wars he discusses have been fought for domestic political consumption. That is why there are so many VIPs on the ground (see Cowper-Coles' Cables from Kabul for examples). That is why there have to be Photo Ops involving bullets and missiles, when really - as Ledwidge several times observes in a discussion of "courageous restraint" - the real military challenge is to manage things so that you don't fire many bullets - and certainly don't fire any missiles.
I can't see the PR man installed as Prime Minister in Downing Street reading this book - which is one reason why I say: Read This Book!
Lieutenant Commander Ledwidge spent fifteen years as a Naval Reserve military intelligence officer and served in Bosnia, Kosovo, Iraq and Afghanistan. He is now retired. He begins rather uncertainly, as if unsure that he should be writing this kind of book at all, but as he gets into his stride, he delivers page after page of understated, but to an outsider like me, seemingly withering critique.
His book is not about the politicians who, out of weakness or ignorance or vainglory, despatched British forces to Iraq and Afghanistan. He is concerned with how the armed forces - and principally the army - handled the missions they were assigned or, in default of proper political direction, invented for themselves.
At the very top, Ledwidge rebukes the top brass for having failed to "speak truth to power": "generals, ill-trained and inadequately educated in the basic elements of strategy, failed in their role as speakers of truth to power" (p 262). In thrall to bluff and hearty notions - Can Do, Cracking On - they failed to demand a clear mission brief, failed to say that - as they understood the brief - it could not be delivered with the resources available, failed to raises issues about what might be legitimate in the circumstances, and so on.
In both Iraq and Afghanistan, the invading and occupying British forces actually did very little - except kill and antagonise local civilians.
In southern Iraq (Basra), they were initially welcomed but squandered goodwill by aligning themselves with militias and gangsters posing as the local administration. They simply lacked the on-the-ground intelligence to realise that this is what they were doing. In the end, they ended up largely confined to base. When they did venture out, in very small numbers, local civilians were quite often terrorised and occasionally tortured and killed.
Ledwidge makes some scathing remarks around this subject. We are frequently told that problems arise when we don't understand the local culture. Nonsense, says Ledwidge, culture is the same in Basra as in Basingstoke: in neither place do people want their doors kicked in at night by heavily armed soldiers speaking a foreign language and uncertain about their reasons for being in your living room.
In Afghanistan, it was insane for the top brass to agree to deployment in Helmand - a province where the British have been hated ever since they were last there.
It was insane to suppose that you could separate the "people" from the "insurgents" (Taliban) when you actually had less to offer the people by way of provision of security and available justice than did the insurgents and when your orders were to ally yourselves with prime sources of local unhappiness - a criminal police and judiciary.
As in Basra, the Brits ended up confined to base with occasional adventures into the occupied territory. Tragically, in Afghanistan, such adventures were often enough backed up with heavy weaponry and missile attacks. Many civilians dead, many more "hearts and minds" lost. What makes us think that it is even legitimate to be firing these missiles, as if Helmand is some kind of battlefield in which we face an enemy threatening our very existence?
Ledwidge goes after these failures with chilling anecdotes, sharp thumbnail analyses, detailed critique of the Army's military culture, and occasionally open exasperation. He rejects the notion that it was all the American's fault, or NATO's fault. These were British mistakes.This is how he sums up:
"The defeats - let us not mince words - in the civil wars - the "counter-insurgencies" - in Helmand and Basra need not have been so comprehensive; indeed, they need not have happened at all... in Basra, the British started with a "winning hand" and played it poorly. In Helmand, they managed to ignore several factors to which any Afghan could (and would) have drawn their attention (and to which several soldeirs did) - this was the single worst possible province into which the British could crash" (p 259)
Lt Cdr Ledwidge is too polite to add, the politicians and the top brass even thought that Helmand would be a good place to deploy one of our spare princelings, Prince Harry.
There is one topic which Ledwidge does not address but which complicates the picture. The wars he discusses have been fought for domestic political consumption. That is why there are so many VIPs on the ground (see Cowper-Coles' Cables from Kabul for examples). That is why there have to be Photo Ops involving bullets and missiles, when really - as Ledwidge several times observes in a discussion of "courageous restraint" - the real military challenge is to manage things so that you don't fire many bullets - and certainly don't fire any missiles.
I can't see the PR man installed as Prime Minister in Downing Street reading this book - which is one reason why I say: Read This Book!
Review: Anthony Summers, Official and Confidential: the Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover
We need to talk about America.
Reading this very carefully researched book, I began to understand how 9 / 11 conspiracy theories could hold such appeal.As well as delivering the dirt on Hoover, who spent a lifetime delivering the dirt on anyone who aroused his dislike, it chronicles conspiracy after conspiracy, cover up upon cover up, negligence and downright corruption extraordinary at the highest levels of American executive and political life. Very few people emerge with much credit left (President Harry Truman appears an exception and, in some respects, Robert Kennedy). To a greater or lesser degree, all the others are crooks.
As a teenager, I was much affected by the death of President Kennedy: I can still remember hearing the news on the old valve wireless in our living room (there wasn't a television) and I recall it as the last time in my life that I prayed in any conventional sense.
There was a conspiracy to assassinate John Kennedy, almost certainly involving senior Mafia figures feeling betrayed by Kennedy and his brother,who as Attorney General had made the FBI tackle the problem of organised crime. The Mafia (with whom the Kennedys' father had a long association) had given campaign money and other help to the younger Kennedys and they did not like being kicked in the teeth.
Almost certainly, FBI reports brought in enough prior intelligence to indicate that something was about to happen to Kennedy. The Secret Service should have been alerted - the FBI was tasked with doing just that. But Hoover as Director of the FBI sat on the information. In effect, he let the assassination happen - rather as the FBI in a later incarnation let 9 / 11 happen.
After the event, the FBI ( = Hoover) sought to close the file as rapidly as possible: Lee Harvey Oswald did it and he did it alone. They had ample evidence to lead to the conclusion that this wasn't the case, but Hoover was compromised by his own links (extensive) to the Mafia and he had no inclination to dig dirt on his cronies.
When President Johnson set up the Warren Commission to produce a definitive account of the assassination, the FBI obstructed and misled it. The Commission's report was a British-style whitewash.
When Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King were assassinated, the FBI ( = Hoover) did not want to know. Hoover had only been interested in their marital infidelities, on which he kept bulging files.
Summers focusses on Hoover's vulnerability as a gay-hating closet homosexual who converted the FBI into a witch-hunting and blackmailing right wing organisation with files on everybody of importance. Congress could never touch him - he died in office, back in 1972, at the age of 77 - because he had files on all of them and knew how to use them when it suited him.
What Summers does not try to do is place this corrupt work in the context of the other activities of the FBI. He occasionally indicates the proportion of FBI time devoted to witch-hunting rather than criminal hunting, but I end up with no real sense of how the FBI functioned day to day and whether there was a routine and effective side to its work alongside the corrupt practices directed by Hoover.
Reading this book, I smiled at the thought that the America Summers describes, starting back in the 1920s, is the America with which British politicians insist on having a "Special Relationship". Maybe they would like to be as corrupt as the Big Boys in America.
_________________
Previously published on my Blog, The Best I can Do
Reading this very carefully researched book, I began to understand how 9 / 11 conspiracy theories could hold such appeal.As well as delivering the dirt on Hoover, who spent a lifetime delivering the dirt on anyone who aroused his dislike, it chronicles conspiracy after conspiracy, cover up upon cover up, negligence and downright corruption extraordinary at the highest levels of American executive and political life. Very few people emerge with much credit left (President Harry Truman appears an exception and, in some respects, Robert Kennedy). To a greater or lesser degree, all the others are crooks.
As a teenager, I was much affected by the death of President Kennedy: I can still remember hearing the news on the old valve wireless in our living room (there wasn't a television) and I recall it as the last time in my life that I prayed in any conventional sense.
There was a conspiracy to assassinate John Kennedy, almost certainly involving senior Mafia figures feeling betrayed by Kennedy and his brother,who as Attorney General had made the FBI tackle the problem of organised crime. The Mafia (with whom the Kennedys' father had a long association) had given campaign money and other help to the younger Kennedys and they did not like being kicked in the teeth.
Almost certainly, FBI reports brought in enough prior intelligence to indicate that something was about to happen to Kennedy. The Secret Service should have been alerted - the FBI was tasked with doing just that. But Hoover as Director of the FBI sat on the information. In effect, he let the assassination happen - rather as the FBI in a later incarnation let 9 / 11 happen.
After the event, the FBI ( = Hoover) sought to close the file as rapidly as possible: Lee Harvey Oswald did it and he did it alone. They had ample evidence to lead to the conclusion that this wasn't the case, but Hoover was compromised by his own links (extensive) to the Mafia and he had no inclination to dig dirt on his cronies.
When President Johnson set up the Warren Commission to produce a definitive account of the assassination, the FBI obstructed and misled it. The Commission's report was a British-style whitewash.
When Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King were assassinated, the FBI ( = Hoover) did not want to know. Hoover had only been interested in their marital infidelities, on which he kept bulging files.
Summers focusses on Hoover's vulnerability as a gay-hating closet homosexual who converted the FBI into a witch-hunting and blackmailing right wing organisation with files on everybody of importance. Congress could never touch him - he died in office, back in 1972, at the age of 77 - because he had files on all of them and knew how to use them when it suited him.
What Summers does not try to do is place this corrupt work in the context of the other activities of the FBI. He occasionally indicates the proportion of FBI time devoted to witch-hunting rather than criminal hunting, but I end up with no real sense of how the FBI functioned day to day and whether there was a routine and effective side to its work alongside the corrupt practices directed by Hoover.
Reading this book, I smiled at the thought that the America Summers describes, starting back in the 1920s, is the America with which British politicians insist on having a "Special Relationship". Maybe they would like to be as corrupt as the Big Boys in America.
_________________
Previously published on my Blog, The Best I can Do
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