“Politics will bring it to an end”: The Confusion of Miliband’s liberal vision for an end to the war in Afghanistan

British Foreign Secretary David Miliband has outlined his vision for ending the war in Afghanistan.  It is not a surprising vision, but it is clearly enough articulated as to be worthy of some analysis.

To Miliband, writing as he is on the cusp of both a national election and some kind of dignified exit from Afghanistan after eight costly years of Western–but particularly, British–military involvement, the Afghan conundrum can be summed up rather simply:

Violence of the most murderous, indiscriminate, and terrible kind started this Afghan war; politics will bring it to an end.

Fair enough. Violence, bad; politics, good.  Go fetch Squealer: it is certainly worthy of being written on the Wall of the Barn.

But hang on a tick.  Miliband’s classic liberal interpretation of events may be too simplistic to be effective.  It is enthymemic.  We might interrogate his strategy by looking a little deeper at the concept of politics.

Miliband’s formulation that violence is the problem and politics is the solution has a familiar ring to it.  For Western societies, it has become a sort of founding myth.  One spokesperson for this liberal view is Hannah Arendt, who claimed that violence could destroy, but could never create.  Politics, to her, was the absence of violence.  This is what Milliband seems to be implying here.

But to believe that is to forget much of the reality of Western political history.  As Charles Tilly reminds us:

In choosing political regimes, to some extent we also choose among varieties of violence…Contentious politics [and, seriously, what other kind of politics can we imagine for Afghanistan in the near to medium term?] consists of discontinuous, public, collective claim making in which one of the parties is a government. A government is a substantial, durable, bounded organization, that exercises control over the major concentrated means of coercion within some territory. (Charles Tilly, The Politics of Collective Violence, p. 9)

Of course, the degree and even the type of violence can vary.  Not many—but some—would prefer brutal Talib violence over, say, the restrained violence of a Western nation-state.  But we must acknowledge that politics does involve—indeed is based on—violence and its successful application.

Put another way, as Harold Lasswell reminded us in his 1935 book, politics is always and everywhere about determining “who gets what, when, and how.”  Making—and then enforcing—those determinations rests upon the skillful application of force: deliberate, discreet maybe, but ultimately and necessarily, devastating. 

Liberals would have us believe that there is some teleological arc to politics, though: even if these questions do underpin politics, we have mature and sophisticated means of determining the answers.  Who gets? Why, the majority, of course, plus whatever minorities are defined and enshrined by convention or law.  Who decides?  Why, the majority of course.

Liberalism suggests that Afghanistan ain’t quite there yet…but could be, with just a little help from us.  Of course, the Afghans should decide for themselves, but as Miliband points out, they must do so through

a new and more inclusive internal political arrangement in which enough Afghan citizens have a stake, and the central government has enough power and legitimacy to protect the country from threats within and without.

Progress, one of the sacred elements of Liberalism, is possible.  And what do the Afghans need to get there? Again, Miliband has the answer:

Britain’s experience in the nineteenth century, and the Soviet Union’s in the twentieth, showed that the best way, perhaps the only way, to stabilize Afghanistan in the long term is to empower the Afghans themselves in charge so that they can secure and govern their own villages and valleys. To achieve this, the Afghans need full political and military support, and generous economic subsidy, from outside. But the Afghan people neither need nor welcome our combat troops on their soil any longer than is necessary to guarantee security and set them on a course to regulating their own affairs. [emphasis added]

Enter the military. Well, not just any military, our military actually. Miliband cites General McChrystal approvingly:

the role of the military is to “try to shape conditions which allow people to come to a truly equitable solution to how the Afghan people are governed.”

And people dare say there isn’t complete unity of effort between the civil and military branches of this fight.  How much violence? Just enough to get the Afghans to make the right decisions.  And for how long? Not any longer than is necessary.

Tidy.

Beyond the inconvenience of violence that observers like Lasswell and Tilly allow, there are others, non-Liberals, like Carl Schmitt who go much further.  As Tracy Strange points out in the Foreword to Schmitt’s Concept of the Political, Schmitt believed that

Fighting and the possibility of death are necessary for there to be the political.

To Schmitt we do not have Tilly’s ‘politics of collective violence’ but rather a sort of ‘violence of collective politics’. He would think that, wouldn’t he, joining up as a Nazi and all.  But his logic was rooted in the very nature of liberalism itself and may be instructive as a critique of Miliband’s thinking, not if it were applied under normal circumstances, but rather, as he is suggesting it is applied, to the contigent extremes that mark the current Afghan political terrain. 

Strange explains that Schmitt felt liberal politics was a

 system which rests on compromise; hence, all of its solutions are in the end temporary, occasional and never decisive.

The idea that ‘one more Jirga’ or ‘a better election’ can get us there is, to Schmitt, inherently flawed because liberal politics “can never resolve the claims of equality inherent in democracy.”  There will always be—there always needs to be—friends and enemies in politics.

Schmitt has a point.  How can the Taliban and women’s rights groups come to a lasting political compromise?  How can we reconcile their (to put it mildly) competing claims?  It is just not going to happen.  Not without a shedload of violence behind one side or the other.  And that would not be reconciliation, but rather domination, or even annihilation.

This is where Arendt and the liberals, and Schmitt and the illiberals, part ways.  To Arendt, there can be no violence in politics.  To Schmitt, there can be no politics without violence.   On this they are both very clear.

What is not clear, now, is Milliband’s vision.   He endorses the Soviet recipe for (temporary) success for the Kabul regime: 

forgetting communism, abandoning socialism, embracing Islam, and working with the tribes.

What is Milliband’s advice, four decades later?   How can Afghans simultaneously forget violence and embrace politics, when, according to him, Afghan

unity is founded on a deep desire among the people to live life as they see fit?

Politics will bring the West’s war in Afghanistan to an end, to be sure. But violence will accompany it all the way.