Fall of Kabul just a precursor to building a new Afghanistan

Martin Kettle, Guardian News Service, London

If the events of the late 20th century taught leftwing people anything, it was above all that they needed to adapt. And not adapt in order to survive, though the left's political survival was certainly at stake. The underlying need for adaptation was intellectual honesty. It was the need to adapt long-standing ideas credibly to a changed world. Some on the left managed this hard task better than others. Some lost their bearings entirely. Some did not attempt the task at all. But the Afghan crisis has renewed the challenge in a very sharp form, and too many have failed to confront it.

This week, it is the turn of the German left to face these life-defining choices about the use of troops in Afghanistan. That issue, which could bring down the Schroder government, still causes huge pain and real dilemmas for all progressive Germans of the post-Hitler era. Twenty or 40 years ago, the German left would undoubtedly have voted against the deployment of German troops in Afghanistan. Today, though, the context is different, and probably the outcome will be too.

It has become very common on the British left to discuss these kinds of issues in starkly moral terms. But the terrorist attacks against America, and the responses to the attacks, have also confronted the left with an intellectual challenge about the nature of conflict and power in the modern world, and too many for comfort have ducked and failed it.

The intellectual failure primarily concerns America, and in particular the use of American power. Within hours of the Sept. 11, we heard the confident assertion that America would lash out blindly in its rage. In fact the Bush administration did not do so, but few of the critics drew the appropriately humble conclusion that they might have misread the situation or George Bush, or that Washington was actually rather smarter, and even more principled, than they had supposed.

In the ensuing weeks, events have proved that a succession of instant, gloomy assumptions made by the left critics were wrong. The U.S. would attack Iraq; but it has not done so. It would bypass the United Nations; in reality, it has continued to use the UN very extensively.

Britain could have no influence in moderating rightwing instincts in the U.S. or in channeling the crisis into addressing issues such as the Middle East or the humanitarian needs of Afghanistan; as things have turned out, Britain has played a significant part in doing all of these things.

These outcomes should not be oversold, as they sometimes are on the right. But they should not be undersold either, or even ignored, as they all too often have been on the left. One of the most striking and most disturbing aspects of the past two months has been the reflexive pessimism and reflexive suspicion with which the left has responded to every single action, every single statement, and every single claim of the Blair government.

No issue highlighted this suspicion and pessimism more acutely than the use of American military force and, in particular, the U.S. bombing. While it is clear that some of the bombing was wrongly targeted, that some civilians were killed by it, and that many in the Muslim world and beyond were, to put it mildly, extremely uneasy about it, it is now also clear that most of the bombing was correctly targeted, had a focused military purpose and, in the end, that it achieved a result that was welcomed by Afghans themselves, as well as more widely.

Only a fool would not have had doubts about the bombing. But what was most striking about the left was the absolutism of its pessimistic insistence that only catastrophe could follow from the bombs. No sooner had the U.S. begun to bomb than we were told with total confidence that the West had lost the propaganda war, had triggered a humanitarian catastrophe and had set off a chain of events which would overthrow governments from Cairo to New Delhi. Yet none of these things has happened.

This is not to say that they may not yet do so. If they do, then those of us who have gritted our teeth and hoped that the military campaign would work out for the best will have to be honest about the fact that we have got things wrong about modern history. It would not be the first time, and the need for honesty is indivisible.

But is there a similar honesty and humility at large today among those on the left who opposed the war, who made very large claims about its catastrophic consequences, and who are now faced with the fact that they seem, at the moment, to have got it wrong? These are early days, and the point is not made in any kind of triumphalist way, but I do not hear the sounds of self- doubt or self-criticism on the left.