Harry’s War

So Prince Harry’s cover got blown by Matt Drudge and he’s back home a ‘war hero’ from Afghanistan. It’s hard to say what I think about this. On the surface, although I’m not an ardent supporter of anyone’s armed forces, the cause of stopping the Taliban is a sound one. I also don’t believe for a second that if you researched to find out if any of Britain’s elected officials’ sons or daughters were serving in Afghanistan or even Iraq you’d find any. For the third in line to the British throne, the grandson of the Head of State, to step up to the plate like this, is impressive, all the moreso because his usual pastime in the UK is to get drunk, have wild parties and fight with the papparazzi. With him unlikely ever to become Head of State/King (although look at his great grandfather), I have no issue with him fighting on the front line in the army. That jihadist Islamist madfolk no doubt already see it as a Christian British royal coming to kill the poor, downtrodden Muslims is really their problem. There is an understood international need to stabilise Afghanistan for the first time in a generation; if side issues of oil are entwined in that is neither here nor there.

But look deeper at what he’s embroiled himself into and you can see the deeper problem. Bringing the military into a region without a development plan, any means to improve local living standards or an alternative to poppy production has fuelled alliances previously unthinkable. Fighting the Taliban might sound like a noble, grand narrative, with memories of the Taliban government tolerating Al Qaeda training camps with Osama Bin Laden, alongside a barbaric intolerance of women, but these aren’t the issues currently on the ground. We laugh at James Bond being called a ‘blunt instrument’, yet that’s what the British forces in Helmand are being used as, instead of dealing with the micro social issues which are keeping the country unstable. They’re also killing a huge number of civilians. We’re supposed to believe, as in Iraq, that it’s ok to put this to one side for the greater good of killing terrorists, indeed that increasing soldiers’ deaths are an acceptable sacrifice, but I can’t buy into that any more than I can accept that of Jean Charles de Menezes’ death. Using the army to cure social problems will fix about as many problems as leaving them to their own devices.

The media on the other hand has now reduced this war to a glamour exercise. The reasons for the Taliban’s resurgence (eg. poverty/trade issues and international attention having been diverted to Iran) are being entirely ignored to justify a ‘noble war’ narrative and to gawp at the bad-boy-made-good royal. And for all of his insistence on enjoying being ‘just one of the boys’, he couldn’t have expected that not to happen – that his cover would never be blown. I’m grateful for the hot pictures of Harry, I’ll admit, but his celebrity was always going to turn what is becoming another foreign policy nightmare into a circus. That can only benefit the previous no-hoper Harry, not the people he was assigned to protect in Afghanistan.