Richard Norton
by Richard Norton-Taylor
Whatever his motives, David Cameron’s plan to switch money assigned to the foreign aid budget to defence peacekeeping operations must be applauded.
Ever since the bloody fiasco of the invasion of Iraq, ministers, Whitehall officials and defence chiefs have been saying there is no military solution to modern conflict. The foreign secretary, William Hague, was at it again last week. “There is rarely, if ever, a purely military solution to terrorism,” he said.
He was speaking against the backdrop of the French military intervention in Mali, supported by Britain whose troops will be engaged – not in any combat role, the government insists, but in training local forces.
Aid agencies and charities have responded critically to Cameron’s suggestion. “We think the British public expect [the aid budget] to be spent on hospitals and not helicopter gunships,” Max Lawson, Oxfam’s head of policy, was reported as saying. There should be enough money for both aid and peacekeeping forces, he said. However, if cash was limited, people expected money put aside to help the world’s poorest to be spent on “schools, not soldiers”.
The chairman of the Commons international development committee, Malcolm Bruce, said: “You can’t use the aid budget to make up for defence cuts.”
You shouldn’t, but it is not as simple as that. And cash is always limited.
As aid charities also say, you can’t have effective aid programmes without adequate security. Spending money the way Cameron appears to be proposing would be wise, whether it is classified in Whitehall as “defence” or “aid”.
Ministers and Whitehall ignored the lessons of Iraq where the failure of the occupying powers to provide any coherent plan of economic or civil assistance contributed to the violent insurgency (and British troops in Basra fought off insurgents and looters with one hand and provided the population with water with the other).
Then Whitehall sent tens of thousands of British troops to Helmand province in southern Afghanistan completely unprepared for what should have been a mission to stabilise a country battered by years of civil war.
Stovepipe-thinking mandarins did not learn, or showed no signs of learning, while ministers, caught in the headlights, seemed to be incapable of lateral thinking, and military commanders kept quiet through gritted teeth.
Ministers and MPs belatedly began to pay lip service to the idea that there should be much more integration between the military aspects of conflict-solving, ie guns, and the need for experienced experts building up civil infrastructure.
Hague recognised this in his speech last week, referring to the need to combine “intelligence, diplomacy, development and partnership” with countries with vast ungoverned spaces and whose populations are vulnerable to seductive extremist ideologies that may speak the language of terrorists but also promise a way out of poverty and corruption.
Poverty and corruption are the causes of Mali’s problems, British officials say with an air of frustration rather than conviction. The present chief of defence staff, General Sir David Richards, commander of the mission to save the Sierra Leone government from rebels in 2000, should know all about the need for what international institutions, including Nato and the UN, refer to as a “comprehensive” approach to settling conflicts – the need for military presence to be backed up by civil aid.
But Whitehall departments remain stubbornly jealous, not only of their budgets but of their empires as well. While there has been much talk of cooperation between the Ministry of Defence, the Foreign and Commonwealth Office and the Department for International Development, in practice their petty rivalries persist.
The Guardian
by Richard Norton-Taylor
Whatever his motives, David Cameron’s plan to switch money assigned to the foreign aid budget to defence peacekeeping operations must be applauded.
Ever since the bloody fiasco of the invasion of Iraq, ministers, Whitehall officials and defence chiefs have been saying there is no military solution to modern conflict. The foreign secretary, William Hague, was at it again last week. “There is rarely, if ever, a purely military solution to terrorism,” he said.
He was speaking against the backdrop of the French military intervention in Mali, supported by Britain whose troops will be engaged – not in any combat role, the government insists, but in training local forces.
Aid agencies and charities have responded critically to Cameron’s suggestion. “We think the British public expect [the aid budget] to be spent on hospitals and not helicopter gunships,” Max Lawson, Oxfam’s head of policy, was reported as saying. There should be enough money for both aid and peacekeeping forces, he said. However, if cash was limited, people expected money put aside to help the world’s poorest to be spent on “schools, not soldiers”.
The chairman of the Commons international development committee, Malcolm Bruce, said: “You can’t use the aid budget to make up for defence cuts.”
You shouldn’t, but it is not as simple as that. And cash is always limited.
As aid charities also say, you can’t have effective aid programmes without adequate security. Spending money the way Cameron appears to be proposing would be wise, whether it is classified in Whitehall as “defence” or “aid”.
Ministers and Whitehall ignored the lessons of Iraq where the failure of the occupying powers to provide any coherent plan of economic or civil assistance contributed to the violent insurgency (and British troops in Basra fought off insurgents and looters with one hand and provided the population with water with the other).
Then Whitehall sent tens of thousands of British troops to Helmand province in southern Afghanistan completely unprepared for what should have been a mission to stabilise a country battered by years of civil war.
Stovepipe-thinking mandarins did not learn, or showed no signs of learning, while ministers, caught in the headlights, seemed to be incapable of lateral thinking, and military commanders kept quiet through gritted teeth.
Ministers and MPs belatedly began to pay lip service to the idea that there should be much more integration between the military aspects of conflict-solving, ie guns, and the need for experienced experts building up civil infrastructure.
Hague recognised this in his speech last week, referring to the need to combine “intelligence, diplomacy, development and partnership” with countries with vast ungoverned spaces and whose populations are vulnerable to seductive extremist ideologies that may speak the language of terrorists but also promise a way out of poverty and corruption.
Poverty and corruption are the causes of Mali’s problems, British officials say with an air of frustration rather than conviction. The present chief of defence staff, General Sir David Richards, commander of the mission to save the Sierra Leone government from rebels in 2000, should know all about the need for what international institutions, including Nato and the UN, refer to as a “comprehensive” approach to settling conflicts – the need for military presence to be backed up by civil aid.
But Whitehall departments remain stubbornly jealous, not only of their budgets but of their empires as well. While there has been much talk of cooperation between the Ministry of Defence, the Foreign and Commonwealth Office and the Department for International Development, in practice their petty rivalries persist.
The Guardian
