Machiavellians With Double Standards

I posted a while back about David Cameron's comments on Pakistan's (alleged) dual attitude to the problem of violent islamism. As I noted it attracted quite some flack but comparatively little about the accuracy of the comments. It seems, at the very least, I was right about the popular feeling aspect of this.

'on the recent controversy over David Cameron’s comments on Pakistan the public agreed with what Cameron actually said about Pakistan and the export of terror by 66% to 15%. However, they also had negative view about Cameron’s abilities as a statesman – 30% thought he was a good statesman, 43% thought he wasn’t (compare that to his overall approval ratings which remain positive).' - UK Polling Report

What I didn't think about at the time was that the Pakistanis are not the only ones whose double standards are on display in this affair. This can be explained as just simple cognitive polyphasia (a much better term for double standards), a well know phenomenon in political polling and nothing particularly remarkable in this case. What this reflects is only that people's image of Cameron as a statesman is not in fact informed by any of diplomatic activities - this is just how people think about politics.

But in this case there is a way out of the usual indictment of public opinion. Alternatively we can explain this by saying that the public genuinely view diplomacy and statesmanship as an exercise in deception and lying. Tell the truth in the wrong circumstances and you have done the wrong thing, regardless of the facts. Nothing new in that either, that doctrine has been ever present in politics since Machiavelli, and a very mature attitude for the public to take (if that isn't too pejorative). Except that when you put it like that it starts to look like double standards and polyphasia again. Imagine the reaction if a British politician admitted having lied about domestic matters in the same way. I defy anyone to find an example of press or popular criticism of a minister for being excessively truthful about the domestic situation. Could you really see those headlines? 'Minister Admits Crime Is Rising, Should He Have Hushed It Up?' or 'PM Should Have Lied Over Economic Figures'. Lying to johnny foreigner = good, lying to Brits = bad.

The good news is that on balance I don't think this is about racism. It isn't really British people that we object to dishonesty toward, it's to us personally, but it is far easier to express it this way (it gives you a few more allies). Even though we are rarely as patriarchal as to exclaim on a regular basis 'You can't handle the truth!' we all do hold the view (don't we?) that there are at least some truths that some people really can't, or perhaps more to express it more sympathetically - shouldn't be made to, handle. And this is what is really at work, not some mistrust of other collectives, just a simple mistrust of every other person on earth! So what is to be done? If you will excuse the pun. Simple, we just have to stop trusting ourselves and what we can and can't 'handle' so that next time when we are told that there are some things that we can't or shouldn't know, for our own good, we might just believe them and be better off for it.

Why Watching The Oposition Could Tell You More Than Watching The Government...

It might just be that the Labour Party, in spite of being out of power since May, will tell us more about British politics in the next few years than the coalition will - even though they will be the ones dictating the focus of the national conversation and agenda (this is after all what liberal government really consists in, yes?). The reason for this is the litmus test it will provide for political reactions. Reactions are not quite the same as opinions. An opinion is pretty easy to measure, you just ask, but a reaction is much harder to gauge. You can ask people (How would your opinion change if x happened?) but people are very bad at knowing how their opinion would change. There are probably a number of reasons for this, not least the fact that people rarely find the actuality of something the same as they had envisaged it and so take a less favourable attitude once a thing has actually come to pass, but it clearly happens. One of the best examples is the fate of the Conservative Party in 2005.

Polling at that time, much as now, showed that people were uneasy and unhappy about the levels of immigration to the UK. The Conservatives took a harder line than Labour but were rewarded with yet another defeat. The stock explanation for this was that while people may have agreed with the Conservatives on this issue Labour had one the 'big arguments' and so were, taking everything into account, preferred by voters. But the Polling had also shown that Immigration was the most mentioned issue when people were asked what the 'most important issue' facing the country was, with 42% also identifying the conservatives as the best party to deal with it. This seems totally absurd, what was going on? The best explanation is probably that while people thought that they would feel inclined to vote for an anti-immigration conservative the reacted to the reality in a way that they didn't expect or predict - they voted Labour instead. On that occasion what we learned about at least one section the British people was that, although they were opposed to immigration, they were not prepared to identify with a party that, because it took an anti-immigration line, came to be seen as unsympathetic and heartless (the 'nasty party' to borrow Theresa May's phrase).

What we stand to learn from Labour now is even more interesting. Labour are determined to do the difficult thing, at least what they perceive as the difficult thing. I'll let David Milliband explain...


'There are two ways of defining the task for Labour. One blames election defeat on public boredom after 13 years in government, a leader who was a great thinker but not a good communicator, the recession and expenses scandal, and voter anger about immigration. This is a comfortable analysis, but wrong. While the points are true, there is something more fundamental. The second view instead argues that we lost and lost badly because we did not occupy the ground of progressive reform.'



I think that more or less sums up the view of most of the contenders in the ongoing leadership race. Of course what progressive reform means, to slightly over-generalise, is a move to the left. This is because there is no 'hard lesson' for labour in this message. Sections of the party have been aching do dump what remained of the the Blairite reform agenda from the party program. They thought that labour had 'lost touch' even when they were winning - so it seems fairly clear that a move to the left is coming. What this move will tell us is whether people will, in spite of being opposed to excessive wealth and growing inequality, will actually react against a party that promises it, just as they did with the Conservative Party over immigration in 2005. This will be hugely revealing about what socialism means to people in the 21st century, and attitudes to wealth more broadly. Perhaps people will react positively, this would be just as interesting, it may depend on exactly the way in which it was done. In any case it may well end up shaping the paradigm of politics far more than the coalition, which by it's nature may end up being more pragmatic than ideological.

What Exactly Are We Doing In Afghanistan?

'We are certain that we are winning. Why should we talk if we have the upper hand, and the foreign troops are considering withdrawal, and there are differences in the ranks of our enemies?' - Zabiullah Mujahedd (Taliban spokesman)

The Afghan Taliban think that they have time, as well as god, on their side. This would be far easier to dismiss if it wasn't for the fact that we seem to agree with them (about the time, not god). Of course we don't say this directly, but all the talk of deadlines has exactly the same effect. This isn't the same as admitting defeat, the idea is that one more push can buy us one last chance to change the trajectory the future, and so for now the war goes on. The message however is clear, the weight of history is against us and thus we have to be 'realistic'. But is there far more danger in this than we realise? We only have to look back at what is usually taken as proof of the intractability of the Afghan problem - the Soviet occupation - to see one suggestion in this direction. 


'Afghanistan didn't just defeat the Soviet army. It reached out and corrupted and corroded the Soviet Union's faith in itself. Above all it destroyed what was left of the dream that communism was the future universal model for the world. The fascinating question now is whether Afghanistan is beginning to do the same to us in the West. Bit by bit, as we accept torture, corruption and rigged democracy, is our faith in the universalism of our European idea of democracy beginning to falter? And with it our power.' - Adam Curtis

In terms of domestic politics this is almost impossible to evaluate. Even though it is true that the majority of people on both sides of the pond think that the war is going badly, and is being mismanaged by political leaders, there are so many other factors that affect people's faith in their government it is extremely difficult to know if this precisely is what has undermined our faith in our political institutions of late. But it does highlight the extent to which we do appear to have given up on transplanting our idea of the best political institutions to Afghanistan. The crucial question now is, why?

There are, to my mind, three answers to this. Firstly we can simply deny that we have in fact done so, all our realism in this case means is that we have rejected the naive idea that any radical transformation like the one we are trying to effect can happen overnight. Even the deadlines reflect only the recognition that the process cannot be completed by ISAF and NATO but only once Afghan security is handled entirely by forces under the control of a sovereign Afghan authority - this is part of democratic accountability and nationhood.

I find this very problematic. Sovereignty and central government control, even when democratically accountable, does not mean that the positive (so we see it) values of freedom, meritocracy, and maximum possible individual self-determination will flourish. We have surely learned by now that democracy and western values are not identical, even if they are often coextensive. And so, as so often seems to happen, we have a Catch 22 situation. If we are to justify pulling out as part of the process of transformation then we need to appeal to the popular sovereignty issue, but when we do this we give up our only way of ensuring that our other transformative aims are achieved - which was the only way we could justify pulling out in the first place.

Secondly we could answer that we have indeed taken a pragmatic decision to abandon the aim of a pure liberal-democratic Afghanistan. This was only ever a secondary aim anyway, the primary aim was national security and reprisal for the 9/11 attacks. An illiberal democratic government is still preferable to the old 1990's Taliban regime, even if the modern Taliban have to be cut into a post war settlement. So long as Afghanistan doesn't provide haven for terrorism or export too much opium then the country's domestic arrangements are not for us to dictate. It would be both arrogant and futile to try to tell Afghan's how to live, it is simply not sensible to rule out a solution that comes from inside of Afghan culture because it doesn't accord with how we would ideally want it. This seems to be about what the current paradigm is, and what was behind Liam Fox's poorly judged recent comments.

Again though I find this problematic. The national security benefits of the war are extremely spurious. We heard Eliza Manningham-Buller (former head of MI5) state fairly unequivocally at the Iraq inquiry that that war, which was admittedly even more unpopular, greatly increased radicalisation of British Muslims. I think it is reasonable to assume that Afghanistan is not much different, especially given it's proximity to the geographic origin of a large portion of Britain's Muslims in Pakistan. At this point someone usually quotes that statistic about how many of the terrorist plots against Britain had a connection to the Afghan-Pakistan tribal areas. However they rarely ever stop to wonder whether this is only because of the the destabilising and motivating effect of the war, as seems more likely to me - I'll go into why in another post. As for the second point, that we are simply not in principle able to bring about substantive change, why? Are Afghans somehow psychologically or biologically unable to adopt non-traditional lifestyles? This seems unlikely, we managed it (more or less). Moreover it is even more patronising than imposing change on them, thereby voiding the moral argument at the very least.

Third, and I think this is the honest truth, we find ourselves on the current unambitious course because we are fighting for, and over, nothing - simply because we can't think of a good reason to leave. The problem we face is that in spite of our inability to find a reason to fully justify continued fighting, like a really strong belief in liberal-democratic regime change (A Bush Doctrine), this does not seem to be an adequate reason for a pull out, like a really strong anti-interventionism (A Ron Paul Doctrine). In other words what we have found is that while staying in and pulling out might seem like two options in the same decision they are in fact two separate possible events that must be independently argued for, or more precisely that can be independently argued against. Thus when we find ourselves unable to make a convincing case for either we end up muddling through. In the mean time we deploy any old argument, national security, education, Pakistani stability, women's rights, Iran, until at some point in the future, when it feels like the right time, we can make a convincing argument to ourselves to justify leaving.

When we leave finally leave Afghanistan i suspect that the war will not be over. The war will in fact go on but with the key distinction that only Afghans, and maybe the odd aid worker, are being killed. As the Afghan government continues to fight the Taliban we will begin to see the war as just another global conflict - terrible and tragic yes, but also contained and manageable, something that does not demand that it is addressed directly (as our intimate involvement does now). What follows from that is impossible for me, with my limited knowledge, to predict - but what is certain is that we will not really care. The issue of Afghanistan in popular thought will simply be finished without a conclusion to the real questions ever being reached - hence we will learn nothing.

Why Should We Want Srong Individuals?

I posted yesterday about how pathetic we seem to feel individuals are that they need such optimal conditions to bloom. Of course the biggest underlying assumption was that we should feel that strong individualism is something that we want to preserve. Then I remembered something I had written about this before, something about Alighiero Boetti. Boetti was part of the artistic avant-garde movement that emerged during 1960s radicalism in Italy. If he was right then I was wrong to worry about the sheepishness of modern individualism - it might actually be a good thing.

Boetti felt that self-expression, far from being in opposition to capitalism, was actually driving it forward by its obsession with creation. My personal favourite way of thinking about his argument is by looking at ‘the American dream’ – and it’s relevant to Boetti because his work really starts to get going from the time when it was turning a little sour in the mid to late 1960s. The dream is a lifestyle full of individualism, which for lack of a better definition right now means a life of free choices from as wide a range as possible. Your Job, your relationships, where you live, how you live and ultimately (perhaps a little grandiose) the kind of person you want to be are all theoretically, but also importantly under law, down to Individuals. The American dream is also one full of objects. Left off that last list are your choice of house, car, furniture, clothes, pet, TV, newspaper and all the other half-utilitarian half-symbolic fixtures of a modern life are all down to yours truly.

Radicalism in the 1960s and 1970s is defined by the emphatic rejection of the latter list. Their idea, rarely significantly changed since then, is that any objects bought and sold in the market are not in fact about the individual needs and desires of those who buy them but are actually about the profit of the few who sell them. Capitalism, on this view, is in fact held up by the ideological domination of politics, education, work and family relationships and ultimately the psychological life of citizens. One slogan of the New Left at that time that I think expresses this nicely, ‘There is a Policeman Inside All Our Heads: He Must Be Destroyed’. That really is another story (a totally fascinating one) but the point is that Boetti went much further.

The real problem, so he thought, lay in the requirement, both social and psychological, to choose anything at all. This is because in the self expression that comes from those choices we are holding ourselves and others up to unrealistic standards of the degree of control and insight in our creations. In other words we believe that the world really can be shaped by the plans of inspired individuals. The upshot of this is that not only do the objects that were previously thought to free us become grotesque limitations, as the new left thought, but so do our attempts to control and shape our own lives. Living your life to some kind of narrative, to have a plan, to ‘know what you want from life’ is in fact a prison.

I’m perfectly willing to admit that I have no idea how to live a life like that, even if I wanted to, and it was perhaps for that reason that Boetti was a conceptual artist and not a philosopher. A major tool of his experiments was chance and randomness. He would send letters to his friends with deliberately wrong addresses using random combinations of stamps which would circle the postal system and occasionally return- at which point he would exhibit them. Even stranger though was where he eventually found a society that he thought expressed his thesis best – Afghanistan. He set up a Hotel there in 1971.

Afghanistan was a country free of created objects...

"Afghan homes, for example, are empty: no furniture therefore no objects commonly placed on furniture. There are only a few carpets and mattresses on which people lie down, drink, smoke and eat. I also like the fact that Afghans wear the same clothes at day and at night. Nothing has been added to the landscape. Rocks are moved and used to build cube houses. The resistance with which Afghans oppose our civilisation has always amazed me." - Alighiero Boetti

Leaving aside that the situation he found was at least in part due to simply poverty, the idea that something about the Afghan way of life is intrinsically resistant to grand inspired political narratives and large scale transformative schemes, for the same reason as their rejection of conventional object creation, certainly puts a new spin on the ‘progress’ we are attempting to bring to that country now.

At any rate Afghanistan had a hand in the creation of his series of works called ‘Mappa’. Mappa were a series of embroidered maps of the world. The landmass of each country was covered by that countries current flag. The significance of this was that although he commissioned the work all of its features were, in actuality, totally beyond his control. The work was carried out by multiple afghan craftswomen and the design was down in essence to the geopolitics that formed the shape and colour (because of the flags) of the landmasses (which in turn are a feature of geology).

"For me the work of the embroidered Mappa is the maximum of beauty. For that work I did nothing, chose nothing, in the sense that: the world is made as it is, not as I designed it, the flags are those that exist, and I did not design them; in short I did absolutely nothing; when the basic idea, the concept, emerges everything else requires no choosing." - Alighiero e Boetti, 1974

Cameron Direct... But Does Anoyone Think He's wrong?

A few days ago David Cameron, self styled strait talking British Prime minister (since his civil partnership with a Mr N. Clegg brought him to power) made some rather rude remarks about Pakistan. As picking the right audience goes this was a master-stroke, he was speaking in India, but the morning after the night before brought the reaction from less receptive audiences. Being undiplomatic can be a virtue in the right circumstances, but not usually when the activity is in fact diplomacy. Certainly when David Milliband appears to have bested you as an example of an experienced elder statesman you must have done or said something terribly wrong. Yes?

Well Maybe... Two thoughts strike, firstly when someone says you are being undiplomatic that is usually a way of disapproving without having to say that the claims, allegations, mud thrown ect is, in base of fact, incorrect. I should probably declare that I'm not an expert on Pakistan, or anything for that matter, so i'll have to make a general comment suffice (as opposed to some detailed factual accusation against the ISI pulled from Wikileaks). By way of that I would point out that this is by no means the first time that Pakistan has been accused of 'looking both ways' (to borrow a phrase) and that if this is a convenient fiction of the generic 'west' or the media then they have also done a bloody good job of finding Pakistanis who seem to agree.With this in mind the fact that most critical voices on Cameron's comments have sought to show more how they were 'unhelpful' or didn't 'reflect the full picture', and not that it is simply in error regarding it's central assertion, must tell us something about the central paradigmatic assumption in this debate. Namely that, while 'our' view of the problem focuses on (and I always find it impossible to find the right word in these sentences but I will grit my teeth and go for...) violent Islamists wherever they reside, Pakistan's strategic vision is uncomfortably concious of borders. For us the word key word Taleban, but in Islamabad it really matters whether it is preceded by the word Afghan or Pakistani, and this will always make us justifiably nervous. Can we really blame Cameron for daring to mention this tension so explicitly?

Secondly even in the likely event that what I have written above is total bollocks I feel bound to come back to my point about the India. We of course want to secure, if possible, excellent relations with both India and Pakistan. But what if we had to choose? In strait Machiavellian terms - whom does Britain value more? Mired in an Afghan war that we seem unable to extract ourselves from, at least in what most people would recognise as the short term, it would be easy to say Pakistan. I won't list now the various problems that a hostile Pakistan would cause but, euphemistically simply, it wouldn't help. Again however, two thoughts... Firstly there is a huge gulf between a nauseatingly friendly, heavily supportive relationship that we lose our minds looking for and 'hostile' in the traditional sense. It's easy, and probably fair, to spout out that line that goes 'anything that makes the job of our brave troops harder is unacceptable...' but it still seems totally illegitimate to then trot out everything Pakistan does for us as being at risk because of the slightest slur. Secondly if we can extricate ourselves by the not so dead 2015 deadline, which there is surely reason to think we can (even if we can find plenty more to say we can't), what will Pakistan mean to us then? We have seen that radical insurgent Islamism can survive war, or a crusade at the very least, but in the past it has been much worse at peace. We could indeed find in around a decade that we have a uselessly strong bilateral relationship with Pakistan at the expense of an extremely useful one with the world class power of India next door. If we accept this argument then even if Cameron was wrong he could in fact have been right to say it, if we take the long view.

My personal view on this is utterly clouded by the usual warm fuzzy feeling inside whenever someone says something wonderfully unexpected, off script, that reflects their real view and not what we have heard them quote off a script far too often before. I find the more I accept that the latter is what politics does and must consist of the more I really enjoy it when this breaks down. In spite of this I think I can comfortably reject the idea that this is anything remotely close to open and shut.