Simon Diggins

When he came to write of 1942-3 in his magisterial, if idiosyncratic, ‘History of the Second World War’, Winston Churchill called that period, ‘The Hinge of Fate’: it was the turning of the tide, when from El Alamein, to Stalingrad, and to Midway in the Pacific, the Axis Alliance ground to a halt. There was much hard fighting to be done and the contours of victory were still unclear but as Churchill declared, in November ’42, “…this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.” So too in Ukraine. Ukrainians have been able to reach-out beyond this extended ‘No-Mans Land’ The much vaunted Russian Spring Offensive has achieved nothing except thousands more Russian dead.

In a telling exchange on Radio 4 last week, during the furore following John Healey’s resignation, Debbie Abrahams, the Labour MP and chair of the work and pensions committee, was asked about funding for defence. She said that she supported the target of spending 3.5 per cent of GDP by 2035, but was unconvinced of the need to accelerate that rise and certainly not at the expense of what she later described, in a Facebook post, as ‘arbitrary cuts to social welfare’. She was, she told the BBC’s Evan Davis, an ‘evidenced-based politician’. Abrahams’s implication was that she did not accept that we needed to accelerate our spending on defence. This is a misunderstanding that could prove catastrophic for Britain.

The recent horrific attack in Golders Green has generated much anger and despair at this latest in a series of concerted, violent assaults currently aimed primarily at the Jewish community, but with a clear lineage to earlier Islamist outrages such as the murder of Fusilier Lee Rigby and the London Bridge attacks of 2017 and 2019. The UK terrorism threat level was raised to ‘severe’ following the attack on Thursday. But terrorism, ‘…an action or threat designed to influence the government or intimidate the public’, is an inadequate descriptor of what we face. Instead, I believe we face a different problem: a full-blown insurgency.

What happens when you boil a frog? It doesn’t notice the warming water until it is too late. According to Margus Tsahkna, Estonia’s foreign minister, Russia is boiling Nato like a frog. He fears that Vladimir Putin’s provocations of Nato (none of which on their own would necessitate a military response) will become increasingly and slowly severe, testing and ultimately undermining Nato’s defences. There is force to his argument. Two weeks ago, Polish air defences shot down Russian drones. Last Friday, Russian jets violated Estonian airspace and forced Nato planes to scramble. More drones, operated by a ‘capable actor’, according to a Danish Police spokesman, flew over Norwegian and Danish airports earlier this week, forcing their closure.

The Afghan data leak has generated a mass of lurid headlines and, no doubt, there is still much analysis, pointing of fingers and assigning of blame to come. But how did it happen that the UK ended up with such an obligation to so many thousands of Afghans and their families? I support the evacuation, but clarity of ends does not necessarily justify the means. My assessment is that between 2014 and 2021 – when we, along with other Isaf nations, had moved from a combat to a support and capacity-building role – we took our eye off the ball. We accumulated liabilities but had no real mechanism to understand or control them.

We lost. Whatever hope we had that we could help Afghanistan crawl out of its misery has been shattered. The dreams of the 14 million women in Afghanistan or the tens of thousands of Kabul university graduates, who had grown-up after the expulsion of the Taliban, are now in ruins. Afghanistan has been broken again, by the Afghans’ inability to bury their personal or ethnic differences; by the perfidy of the Pakistanis, who have harboured and nurtured the Taliban; and by the actions of a foolish old man who happens to be US President. Caught in this web of misery are those who supported the Allied forces and those who participated in the Afghan renewal and modernisation programme.

In July 2010, near the end of my two-year tour as defence attaché in Kabul, I was phoned by the commander of our field hospital in Camp Bastion. ‘Simon’, he said. ‘We’ve an interpreter here, a triple amputee, and we can’t do anything more for him – we’re a field hospital, and don’t do definitive care.’ I was puzzled. ‘Surely, you just evacuate him back to Selly Oak Hospital in Birmingham, like all our other badly wounded soldiers, and they can look after him there?’ He explained that he couldn’t – the Home Office was worried that the interpreter, or his companion, might claim asylum.