The Russian Empire – otherwise known as the Soviet Union – was broken on the rugged mountains of Afghanistan. Many commentators, including Russian ones, have pointed to the eerie parallels between Britain’s and America’s engagement in military conflict against the Taliban, and the defeat of the mighty Red Army at the hands of the Taliban’s predecessors, the Mujahedeen. If we were to take heed of the lessons of history – not just the living memory of the Soviet Union’s traumatic humiliation, but the thousands of years of successful Afghan resistance to imperial invaders – then we would immediately reverse the build-up of Western troops in that country and accelerate our exit strategy, if we have one. Indeed, we would never have got ourselves embroiled in a conflict we cannot win.

But the question I wish to pose here is this: Gordon Brown has today spoken of his determination that Britain and its allies will indeed ‘win’ in Afghanistan, however victory is defined (which is part of the problem). However, he also conceded the possibility that Britain might lose: “We will succeed or fail together and we will succeed”. But will Britain stay together if we lose?

Clearly, while there are parallels, Britain’s situation is not exactly the same as the Soviet Union’s during the 1980s. However, I would argue that, like the USSR, Britain’s actions in Afghanistan betray an imperial mindset. Indeed, Britain itself is still an empire in certain fundamental respects: not in the, as it were, empirical (i.e. real-world) sense of possessing vast colonies, but in its view of itself – its identity, its status in the world and its systems of governance.

These all come down to Britain’s concept of ‘authority’ – political and moral authority combined: Britain’s ‘right to rule’ linked to the fact that it sees itself as inherently ‘in the right’. This then translates to our military interventions in places like Bosnia, Kosovo, Iraq and Afghanistan, which the British establishment would like to see not as examples of more or less arbitrary interference in other countries’ affairs for the sake of Britain’s strategic interests, but as illustrations of how our might is indeed right: military power allied to a moral mission, and applied to promote British-style governance and implant British values in some benighted corner of a foreign field.

As far as the governance of Britain itself is concerned, I would argue that this is also still conducted in the manner of an empire, albeit one whose boundaries are mainly those of the islands of Great Britain, and with limited concessions to democracy. I’ll probably return to this topic in more detail on another occasion. But my main proposition here is that one of the main reasons why the Westminster political class has become so disconnected from the people – indeed, the peoples – of Britain is that they still view the business of governance in the light of the imperial mindset. In particular, the insistence on the sovereignty of Parliament, and on the entitlement of Parliament and the executive to make all the important decisions that affect our lives without being fundamentally answerable to the people, and without having to take popular opinion into account, exemplifies the concept of British authority described above: those that possess British might see themselves as imbued with British right – the right to rule over us in imperial fashion linked to the fact that this rule in itself is seen as in the right and righteous.

So in Britain, we have an elected empire: a form of absolute rule, albeit moderated by a limited amount of democracy, whose sovereignty derives from a moral absolute: that of the Sovereign herself, who is the inheritor and embodiment of the medieval divine right of kings. Except, in our constitutional monarchy, it is our elected so-called representatives that re-assign that divine right to themselves in the form of the sovereignty of Parliament.

But to return to my point of departure, what could happen to the British establishment’s sense of its divine right to rule, both at home and abroad, if things go disastrously wrong in Afghanistan, as they did for the Soviet Union? By this, I mean not just hundreds of British dead, as now, but thousands, even tens of thousands. How far are we prepared to continue with this folly to prove to ourselves that we were in the right all along? And at what point do we realise that perhaps we didn’t get it right, indeed may not be in the right, and that history may not conclude that God was on our side this time?

Who knows what ramifications a truly disastrous defeat in Afghanistan would have for our already shattered faith in the authority that our elected rulers exercise in our name? It did for the Soviet Union; would it do the same for Britain?

Don’t get me wrong: I’m not wishing for such a catastrophe to occur in my wish for the United Kingdom as presently constituted to unravel. I’d rather we pulled out now while we still have a chance. But the omens are not good.

Gordon Brown says our brave British soldiers are fighting for our national security in Afghanistan. They may also be fighting for the survival of Britain in a sense that Brown does not intend.

Today, the sad milestone of the 200th, and indeed the 201st, death of a British soldier was reached in Afghanistan. Gordon Brown came out with the usual blandishments on such occasions, re-stating that while these deaths were “deeply tragic”, they were still necessary: “We owe it to you all [the families and communities of those killed] never to forget those who have died. But my commitment is clear: we must and will make Britain safer by making Afghanistan more stable”.

If those deaths were really, deeply ‘tragic’, Brown and all the others in the political establishment that support this war (but not to the extent of supplying our brave troops with adequate equipment to ensure their safety as much as possible) would not effectively write off the lives lost with such seamless ease under the ostensible justification that it is ensuring Britain’s safety.

I have written about this conflict extensively before (see here, here and here). Suffice it to say that it is far from obvious whether and how this conflict is really serving the security of the UK. In some respects, it has helped to make us more of a target for terrorism and has destabilised the whole region, including Pakistan, which is the real threat to our security, as it’s a nuclear power. Plus it’s highly unlikely that we could ever ‘win’ a war in Afghanistan or even stabilise the country through military means. Afghanistan has never been subdued by a foreign army in thousands of years of history; and the fierce and proud fighters that are resisting Western interference today, and all of their fanatical jihadist supporters from around the world, will never put down their arms until the Westerners leave Afghanistan.

Perhaps it’s this sort of reflection that led the incoming head of the British Army, General Sir David Richards, to state last week that Britain might need to maintain a presence in Afghanistan for the next 40 years; albeit that he – grossly naively, in my view – thinks it may be necessary to maintain the present level of military engagement only in the medium term (so ‘only’ 20 years, then?); while the main task will be nation building. I’ve speculated before where people come up with this arbitrary ‘40 years’ figure. I’m sure it’s some sort of subconscious echo of the nearly 40 years of the Cold War coupled with the biblical 40 years of exile that the people of Israel spent in the desert on their migration from slavery in Egypt to freedom in the Promised Land. Not a comfortable cultural reference to evoke in the Muslim world! But are we supposed to accept this figure with blind, biblical faith?

If you want to build a nation, there has to be the will among the people who live there to become a nation. But Afghanistan is a deeply divided land, ethnically, and it’s controlled by feudal warlords that aren’t going to sit back and let Westerners take over and transform their power base into a modern democracy. Unless we’re prepared to pour shed loads of dirty money into their pockets, that is.

Maybe I shouldn’t write off Afghanistan so cynically. Maybe ‘progressive’ forces in Afghanistan will win out. Maybe. But I think the odds are heavily stacked against them; and meanwhile our national security is being undermined, not strengthened. And our young men and women are being needlessly slaughtered – as are thousands of Afghan civilians.

And how many more grim milestones of hundreds and thousands of armed forces deaths must we expect if we do indeed stay in Afghanistan for 40 years?

After the death of Harry Patch – Britain’s last living World War I veteran – on Friday, Gordon Brown lost no time in coming forward to suggest that the country should hold a memorial service to honour the ’sacrifices’ that Harry Patch and his generation had made to safeguard Britain’s freedoms. It would seem churlish, if not downright disrespectful, to object to this proposal. But are we sure that this is something that Harry Patch himself would have wanted? In my own mind, I’m convinced he would not have wanted to be ‘remembered’ in this way. Here’s why.

To keep the record straight, I have nothing but the greatest admiration for Harry Patch and all those who suffered and died amid the horrors of trench warfare in the war to end all wars. Similarly, the stories of those young men and women who were so brave in fighting Hitler in the Second World War – and, indeed, the struggles of the whole British population at that time – often reduce me to tears. Therefore, I do think it is right and proper to remember what Harry Patch’s generation went through in our name, to give thanks and pray for them.

The problem is, were their sufferings a ’sacrifice’ as such and, if so, for whose sake and to what end? Calling soldiers’ deaths in war a ’sacrifice’ is a way of justifying the fighting by saying that the deaths in question are ‘worth it’: a willing gift of their own lives for the sake of the higher purpose the war is said to be serving. But were the deaths of all those millions of WW1 conscripts on all sides – British, French, German, etc. – really worth it? What purpose was ultimately served by them? And was the aim of repulsing the German invasion of Belgium and France really a sufficiently just cause to throw so many fine young men to the slaughter?

Harry Patch categorically thought it was not. In one of the TV interviews they showed at the weekend, Patch was asked whether he thought the deaths of his comrades were worth it, and he said they were not. Nor did he think the loss of young British men in today’s wars was worth it. He called war ‘organised murder’ and said that it had proved impossible for him to convey the full horrors of his wartime experiences to people today, who were just not capable of understanding. And he refused to attend the Act of Remembrance celebration, which he termed “just show business”.

Well, it seems that just such an act of remembrance is now going to be organised supposedly to honour the ’sacrifice’ made by Patch and his generation, with Patch even being held up by some as an “exemplar of a generation that sacrificed itself for the sake of the freedoms we enjoy today” [see above link]. That is precisely what Harry Patch is not and what he would have hated to see himself characterised as. For him, it was not a sacrifice but a meaningless, terrible slaughter. That is how Harry Patch remembered it. But it seems that, as soon as his authentic memory of World War I has been extinguished, we are intent on ‘remembering’ it as something it was not. We have already forgotten. Perhaps we feel it would have been indecent to ‘celebrate’ what the ‘lost generation’ went through while some of its representatives were still alive and could have stood up to accuse us of falsifying the past.

And it’s not only the past that we traduce in this way but also the present. Our celebration of the sacrifice of past generations is also a means to remember and affirm the ’sacrifices’ being made by British forces today in Afghanistan. No doubt, in the memorial service for the WW1 generation, fine words will also be uttered about today’s wars and the willingness of a new generation of brave young men to lay down their lives for our freedoms. The lustre of the lost generation, now that the sordid reality is past, will be used to once again justify our fighting in foreign fields and to proclaim that the accelerating pace of lost British lives in Afghanistan is ‘worth it’.

But is it? Harry Patch didn’t think so. Is the avowed purpose of the British presence in Afghanistan – to prevent Al Qaeda from being able to mount terrorist attacks against the UK and her allies – really best served by allowing the military conflict there to continue escalating with no obvious end in sight and with growing loss of life (military and civilian) on all sides? And when the conflict does come to an end, under whatever circumstances, will we feel that Afghanistan has been another of ‘our finest hours’; or will we rather just wonder why we ever went there?

Harry Patch’s experience was that of the sheer futility and mindlessness of war, and of the needless destruction of human life it brings. Ultimately, for him, nothing could make this ‘worth it’. Not even the loss of a single life was worth it, he also said. While we may not all follow such insights to their logical conclusion of total pacifism, they do at least stand as a testimony to the truth that war is so terrible, and yet so avoidable, that we should seek to avoid it at all costs and search for any alternative that we possibly can.

The fact that World War I was not ultimately the war to end all wars is the proof that we have not learnt this lesson.

Rest in peace, Harry Patch. We will remember you.

There was confusion last week when it was first thought that the government’s plans for a new national British bank holiday – a Britishness Day – had been dropped, and then it was revealed merely that there were no definite plans or ideas for such a holiday but that the concept was still on the table. I am one who has derided the proposal for a Britishness Day, although I’m far from averse to an extra day off! Two, preferably: the most important one being St. George’s Day (23 April); and then, if they want to give us another one on top, I’m not complaining about the principle. It’s just the attempt to exploit such a popular idea to marshal the general campaign to expunge Englishness in favour of a spurious monolithic Britishness that I object to.

Let’s place ourselves in dreamland for a minute and imagine the government concedes the idea of public holidays in each of the UK’s four (or five, including Cornwall) nations coinciding with their Patron Saint’s Day. Is the idea of an additional holiday for Britain as a whole worth considering when we set aside all the Britishness malarkey? Some people have said they think Remembrance Day would be a suitable occasion; others have advocated a day celebrating victory in the Battle of Britain or even older battles such as Trafalgar or Waterloo.

It’s funny how so many of these symbols of Britishness have a militaristic theme! I think the Remembrance Day idea is not wholly inappropriate, and other nations celebrate military victories and wars of liberation as national holidays. France, for instance, has a holiday for both 11 November (which they call Armistice Day) and 8 May: ‘VE Day’, as we would call it. But the fact that we in Britain associate 11 November with solemn civic acts of remembrance would make it a rather sombre day to have a public holiday; and, in a way, it is a more eloquent tribute to our war dead if Remembrance Day falls on a working day and everything stops for two minutes’ silence at 11 am.

In addition, the use of Remembrance Day to try and whip up British patriotic fervour and identification with all things British seems cynical and inappropriate to me. Is Remembrance Day really a time to make us feel proud to be British? Sure, we can and should feel proud of the sacrifices of so many brave, and often so very young, men and women to safeguard our liberty, security and independence. But Remembrance Day properly is also a day to call to mind the tragic losses and destruction of life suffered on all sides, and by civilians as well as the military, in the conflicts of which Britain has been a part. Just as we rightly say of our fallen heroes, “we shall remember them”; so, too, we should also repeat to ourselves the lesson that so often we have failed to learn from war: “never again”.

The idea of using great national occasions and symbols such as Remembrance Day or the Battle of Britain to reaffirm and celebrate Britishness is of one piece with the way present conflicts and their victims are also exploited. We’re all supposed to rally round our troops in Afghanistan and Iraq; to buy the X-Factor single to provide the support for their families that the government should be providing; and to laud our lads as the Best of British and applaud them as they march through our towns to remember their fallen comrades. All of this amounts to using military conflicts, and the terrible loss of life they result in, to whip up national pride: you can’t object to the generous support and affection shown to those who are prepared to risk their lives for their country, and to their families; and therefore, you have to embrace all the militaristic Britishness that goes with it.

Let me make one thing clear: I’m not saying we should not support or feel proud of those brave members of the British Armed Forces as they slug it out with the Taliban or come up against Iraqi insurgents. I have the greatest admiration for them; all the more so, in fact, given their skill, genuine bravery and (generally) integrity as they cope with what is frankly a bum hand that they’ve been dealt by their political masters: futile, unwinnable wars that have earned Britain many more enemies, and brought us much more disrespect, than they have eliminated.

And this is really my point: to celebrate such valour and self-sacrifice as illustrating the intrinsic nobility of the British, and the justness of the causes for which they are prepared to go to war, always crosses over into a celebration and justification of those wars themselves. It’s as if we can’t be proud of the amazing skill and endurance of British forces in Afghanistan without buying into the war itself as something that is genuinely in defence of our national security and way of life, as the politicians would have us believe; and the more we express support for our boys in Iraq, the more we’re supposed to accept that it’s right that they are there.

In actual fact, I think it’s disrespectful to the lives lost in such conflicts to manipulate those sacrifices to nationalistic political ends. Maybe some, perhaps most, of the families of the young men and women lost in these latest chapters of the history of the British Army take solace from all the affirmation of the meaning behind their loved-ones’ sacrifices. But, in reality, they will all have to struggle with the unbearable grief of private loss and the inevitable anguish from thinking that, perhaps, their losses were in vain: for a cause that wasn’t worth it and that will not prevail. Such thoughts will hardly heal over time, especially if – as seems to me inevitable – the British Army eventually leaves Iraq still in a state of great instability and insecurity, and the Taliban send the Western armies packing, because they don’t have the same absolute will to win at any cost: making the cost paid by those British familes who have lost their sons and daughters even more appalling.

Yes, of course, we should remember the names of the latest additions to the Army’s roll call of honour. But such ‘remembrance’ is usually synonymous with forgetting the suffering that goes on among families and traumatised comrades for the rest of their lives; and certainly also with justifying the ongoing pursuit of questionable wars, and the continuing inflicting of death on ‘enemy’ combatants and civilians alike. In reports of the return of some regiments to their Colchester barracks last week, I was struck by the way the commentary referred to the large number of British casualties on the tour from which they were coming home, with fatalities running into double figures. And then, probably in the very next sentence, they casually mentioned the fact that the same returning heroes had been responsible for thousands of enemy deaths – as if that was a good thing. But what of the mothers and the families that grieve for them? What of the innocent civilians that will inevitably be included in the ranks of those thousands? Is it any wonder that so many in Afghanistan and the Muslim world hate us, and back the Taliban as liberating heroes?

The real purpose of remembrance, as I said, is firstly to express genuine sorrow and remorse for the loss of life – all life – that war brings; and particularly to celebrate those who gave their lives genuinely in the cause of freedom and justice, from which we have all benefited. And secondly, it is in fact to reaffirm our commitment to peace, not to celebrate and glamourise war in a manner that glosses over the real pain, horror and needless destruction it involves. Because that really is what is at play when remembrance gets shrouded not in the pall of death but in the bright colours of the Union Flag. It becomes a celebration of British values and the British sense that we are always on the side of right, backed up by our military muscle and memories of our proud imperial past. All of which conveniently brushes under the carpet the moral ambiguities and personal agonies of war’s violence, bloodshed and disaster.

So, by all means, let’s remember the dauntingly large list of British military personnel and civilians whose lives have been lost to war, military conflict or terrorism over the years. But, at the same time, we should reaffirm what is paradoxically the ultimate and only true purpose of war: peace. The purpose of war is the end of war; and this can ultimately and lastingly be achieved only when peace comes to reign in the hearts of men and women, and not hatred, mistrust and aggression. Until such time, we will continue not to learn the lesson of war: that war begets war; and that we must be at all times – in war and out of war – mindful of our absolute duty to seek peace and reconciliation.

Now that would be the kind of Britain that even I could be proud of: one that, instead of disingenuously celebrating and justifying its war-like genius in public acts of partial remembrance, were to resolve itself to be a genuine force for peace and reconciliation throughout the world – not a fomenter of hatred and violence. And that would be a Britishness Day worthy of the name: ‘Peace Day’. After all, my goodness, we need a bit of that.

Suggested day: 25 June. Neatly parallels Christmas; can be combined with celebrating and enjoying the summer solstice / Midsummer, which is such a lovely time of year. We also don’t have any other public holidays in June, and most people haven’t gone on their summer holidays by then. And there are many Christians, myself included, that hope that this will one day be a recognised feast – for all peoples – to celebrate the true peace that is our hope.