Friends with the Taliban?

Wow. Are the Taliban our friends now? It’s beginning to look that way, now we need their help against IS-K, the latest incarnation of anti-Western terrorism in that wretched nation, Afghanistan.

Twenty years of war against them, and now we have to be friends?

We’re working with these guys? They’re our friends now? Really?

Back in 2001, many suggested that, while the Americans clearly had to do something in response to the 9/11 attacks, they shouldn’t do just anything. Well, in the end they did do just anything. They replied to an attack carried out almost entirely by Saudis, led and masterminded by Saudis, and financed with Saudi money, by invading Iraq.

“Iraq?”, you may cry out.

Yep. Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11. Invading it, however, did bring down, and eventually kill, Iraq’s brutal dictator Saddam Hussein. That was something that George H W Bush, father of then president George ‘Dubya’ Bush, had failed to do when he was president. At least some unfinished family business got cleared up.

What the Iraq war eventually did, apart from racking up huge cost not just in money but in lives (mostly Iraqi), was conjure ISIS into being. That was ironic, since the war was directed against terrorism, and ISIS carried out several spectacular terrorist attacks against Western targets. It took a lot more military effort and money to defeat it over the next few years.

The war had spilled over into Syria, where it turned lousy for the West, and lousier still for the unfortunates resisting the dire Assad regime, when the West pulled out, granting victory to Assad and his Russian allies.

In a region where the West’s bogeyman is Iran, the invasion of Iraq has turned the country into an Iranian puppet. The failed intervention in Syria has further entrenched Iranian influence. Somehow, we achieved the opposite of what we set out to do.

In any case, well before Iraq, the US has also invaded Afghanistan. 

“Afghanistan?”, you may cry out.  

Yep. Well, the Americans were hardly going to invade Saudi Arabia, the homeland of the Al Qaida terrorists. But the justification was a little less flimsy than for Iraq, since Al Qaida had a base there, from which it ran the 9/11 attacks. So a swift in-and-out mission to disrupt Al Qaida would have made perfect sense.

But there were no clear objectives or exit strategy for the intervention, so mission creep set in. The next goal was to overthrow the Taliban government that had sheltered the Saudi terrorists. That turned out to be deceptively easy. A bit like when the German army defeated the French and the British in a few weeks in 1940. That gave Hitler the delusion that he could defeat the Soviet Union too. 

Look how that ended.

The US-led NATO forces in Afghanistan thought they could turn the country into a Western-style liberal democracy. 

Look how that has ended.

Yep. It’s ended with desperate refugees crushing into Kabul airport in the hope of getting out of the country. A harrowing, dismal, tragic sight. But then retreats after a defeat are like that. And we should have seen it coming. 

Way, way back, in 1842, the British had to get out of Kabul in a hurry, with an army 4500 strong, accompanied by 12,000 civilian camp followers or dependents. They needed to withdraw just 90 miles to Jalalabad, but only one European survivor made it, with a handful of Indian soldiers. Another 100 or so British prisoners were later released. As were 2000 Indian soldiers, most of them suffering from the effects of frostbite. Some eventually made it back to India, but many were left behind in beggary or even slavery.

A defeated army in retreat leaves a trail of wrecked lives behind it. Every time. Just like now.

Elizabeth Thompson, Remnants of an army.
Assistant Surgeon William Brydon reaches Jalalabad,
the only European to make it on the retreat from Kabul

So here we are. We’ve left Afghanistan in a mess again. We started out with the Taliban in power and we’re leaving with the Taliban in power again. Took a lot of effort, didn’t it, to go full circle back on that one?

In any case, the lack of resistance to the Taliban returning to power suggests that liberal democracy didn’t appeal much to the Afghan people anyway. It can’t have helped that NATO or our Afghan allies did a lot of collateral damage: wedding parties or funeral processions bombed, for instance. One can understand why Afghans might wonder why they should prefer us.

And what about the terribly sad reversal of the few real measures we did achieve? Education for women, for instance, or opportunities for them later. I wish we could have done more to make them last. But in a nation that is 76% rural (the UK, by contrast, is 84% urban) and which remains miserably poor, I suspect most people are much more concerned with earning a living. For that they need peace, any kind of peace, under any kind of government. Democracy or even human rights, including women’s rights, may be less of a priority to them than to us.

Maybe the right they care for most is to stop being hungry.

Women and the people we’ve abandoned in Afghanistan are now going to pay for our deluded attempt to impose a democracy by armed force on a people not that keen on it. Perhaps we need to ask ourselves whether you really can force freedom on people at the point of a gun. Especially when it’s our notion of freedom we’re enforcing, not theirs.

In any case, we’ve now turned the Taliban into the good guys. Because we failed in even the limited objective of wiping out the terrorist threat from Afghanistan, we have to collaborate with the Taliban against it. Surely that’s an irony that doesn’t escape anyone. And where does it leave us in acting against the Taliban to demand better protection of rights for women?

Still, what’s done is done. The issue now is what we’ll learn. Can we perhaps resolve that we’ll never again intervene militarily anywhere without a clear and above all achievable objective, and a firm exit strategy for once success has been achieved? Can we decide not to go blundering into more unwinnable wars? Could the war hawks perhaps learn to listen to those who warn them it’s unwinnable, as so many did in 2001?

Let’s make the first question we ask ourselves, how on Earth did we persuade ourselves that it was a good idea to launch an operation that took us where we are? Then the second one can be, how do we make sure we don't delude ourselves the same way again? Then we may learn wisdom and end up with better friends.

Memory of mass murder

It was a first for me. 

I’d been to rather more funerals than I care for. However, I’d never been to the reverse. On Wednesday, I attended my first exhumation.

Well, the start of one.

Removing the lid

It’s being conducted with extreme care, by a group called ArqueoAntro, archaeologists and anthropologists, and admirably professional. They’re meticulous. Careful. Painstaking. I saw them remove the black marble lid of the tomb in the morning, and then the concrete covering with a jackhammer, after which they started, centimetre by centimetre, removing the earth, sweeping away as they went. When I returned in the afternoon, they’d maybe dug down a couple of centimetres more from when I left at lunchtime.

Painstaking work

Careful work, slow work. State of play at the end of day 1

This was no ordinary grave. It wasn’t designed for single occupancy. On the contrary, it was a pit that contains, as far as we know, 76 bodies. Or, by now, bones. They were buried between 15 and 21 July 1939. 

Pit 21: 76 names, a few photos

Buried then because they were shot between those dates. 73 men. 3 women. And one more victim: the unborn child of one of the women, who was heavily pregnant at the time of her death.

The Spanish Civil War ended, technically, on 1 April 1939. That was the moment when Francisco Franco established his uncontested power across the whole country. But though the formal fighting had ended, the reprisals certainly hadn’t. 

Those 76, as I understand it, would have spent their final night in a military barracks in Paterna, the town whose council controls our own neighbourhood, and which includes the cemetery I visited. On the day of their execution, victims were taken to a military firing ground nearby. There’s a low wall still standing there, but behind it there used to be a mound of earth, now long gone, to catch bullets from live-firing practice by soldiers. It also caught stray bullets from executions.

The wall where they died

I say executions, but that’s not really the word. I don’t believe in the death sentence, if only because it relies far too heavily on fallible human judgement, but I think even those who do, would accept that it requires due process with a right to a defence, before it’s carried out. None of that kind of fussy formality was respected in these cases. That makes murder a far more accurate description. Mass murder, in fact. Our 76 were only a small proportion of the estimated 2238 shot in Paterna in those reprisal killings.

Many would counter that Franco’s enemies also carried out mass murders. That’s perfectly true. Perhaps only 50,000 compared to Franco’s 200,000, but once you’ve started killing people by the dozen, you’re a mass murderer even if you kill fewer than the other lot.

That doesn’t mean both sides were the same, however. Any more than it’s true, as many claim, that all politicians are the same. They’re not. 

Conservatives like Britain’s John Major or America’s George H W Bush, or figures of the Centre-Left like Britain’s Gordon Brown and America’s Jimmy Carter, accepted there were rules and that they had to abide by them. When they were beaten, however little they liked it, they went. 

It’s what gives all of us who dislike our government hope: we know it can be brought down and replaced. In time.

That contrasts with successful autocrats, like Putin, or the ones still pursuing success like Trump, who simply can’t accept that there’s any legitimate way they can be defeated. With them, there’s no hope of change. The cold, dead hand of sclerotic inertia descends instead, and we remain stuck with the horror and the shame for as far as we can see into the future.

That was Franco in Spain. It wasn’t enough to defeat his opponents. He wanted to exterminate them. Indeed, his side regularly used medical language to describe the other side: a disease, a cancer, something that had to be cut out surgically from the body politic, to return it to health. With serious military force behind him, a force that had just tasted complete victory, he wielded the surgeon’s scalpel freely. 

The Republic wasn’t like that. It tried to maintain the rule of law. But with most of the police going over to the other side, it quickly lost control of its own areas of the country. Mass murders certainly took place, often led by lawless elements, some of them recently released from jail, often with accounts to settle. Priests, police unfortunate enough to be caught, nuns, politicians of the right, any might be murdered. And, wherever the Communist Party exerted authority, often exactly the same people were killed as Franco would target: anarchists, so-called Trotskyists, socialists who wouldn’t bow to Moscow. 

Such behaviour was abhorrent to the democrats on the Republican side. On the Franco side, on the other hand, the murders were deliberate, a policy relentlessly and ruthlessly pursued. It led to the filling of graves like the one I visited yesterday.

Why was I there? 

One of the surnames of the bodies in that grave, ‘pit 21’, was ‘Huguet’. That’s the surname of one of our neighbours and friends. The organisers of the dig had asked whether he might be a relative. He doesn’t think so, but he went anyway, and I accepted his invitation to go along with him.

Friend and neighbour, Santi Huguet

What will happen when they get to the bones? Well, they hope to do some DNA testing to see whether they can identify relatives. And then they’ll give the remains a decent burial.

That might be valuable to the people in Spain today. As the organisers of the dig say, “to remember them is to give them their place in history”. 

The flag of the Republic, and the message (in Valencian):
Remembering them is giving them their place in history

That feels like a lesson that needs learning. There’s a growing nostalgia for Franco in Spain today. For instance, just this week, the city of Madrid changed a street name back to what it was called under Franco: General Millán Astray Street. 

A Madrid street reverts to honouring an apostle of violence

Astray built the Spanish Foreign Legion, with the slogan “Long live death”. He acted as Franco’s propaganda chief during the war, importing many ideas from their allies, Nazi Germany, including virulent anti-Semitism. Many believe that his brutality helped stoke the atmosphere that produced atrocities in the war.

This feels a little like a German town calling a street after Goebbels. That would never happen. Which leaves me feeling that their memory is something a lot more Spaniards need to refresh.

And, to be honest, not just Spaniards.

Mental illness and degenerate art

As I was hurrying out of the Reina Sofia museum in Madrid one day, close to being late for an appointment, I took a side corridor to get to the exit more quickly and was suddenly struck by a painting I’d never seen before.

Tertulia by Ángeles Santos

It was Tertulia, The Gathering, by Ángeles Santos. She was just eighteen when she painted it in 1929. It is a gathering, but a weird one. No one’s sitting comfortably, with one woman apparently gripping the back of the couch, to stop herself slumping against her companion. Another is sitting on a stool apparently supported by four springs that don’t look as though they’d take a child’s weight. One or two of them are smoking, at a time when that might have been shocking. Santos herself later said that she and her friends would smoke in secret to feel modern.

No one’s talking to anyone else, and no one’s even looking at the others. Indeed, one of them seems to be looking at us directly instead. No one’s smiling.

It’s a fine structure of flowing lines, rather than lifelike figures, in a grey setting where even the splashes of colour are subdued. The picture is troubled and therefore troubling. Perhaps it reflects the tormented world when the slaughter of the First World War was still a living memory, and where surrealism might seem a preferable alternative to reality.

This was the world in which Hitler sought power. Something that never ceases to amaze me about him is how limited a character he was. Rather like other dictators, or would-be dictators like Donald Trump, he was shallow, trivial and untalented. Good at getting into power, certainly, but with no depth of creativity to him.

I appreciate that this isn’t the most striking aspect of his character, which is obviously his indifference to the suffering of others, his ability to murder without remorse, and the casual way he could send millions to kill and be killed. But the limitations and the monstrosity weren’t unrelated, as was made clear to me recently by a Guardian article about the ‘Degenerate Art’ obsession of the Nazis.

You may know that Hitler himself lived for a while as an artist of sorts. He failed in his attempt to get into the Art Academy in Vienna, but he would do water colours from postcards of Vienna scenes and sell them to visitors. They were copies and therefore unoriginal, uninspiring and unchallenging.

Hitler copied postcards. Here, the Vienna Opera House

Take the case of Elfriede Lohse-Wächtler by way of contrast. She was painting as Hitler was beginning to move stealthily towards power. Her self-portrait of 1931 is strikingly powerful if, perhaps, a little perturbing or even frightening. The vivid colours, her unsmiling face, her hair with its green tinges and her face with a patch of red that matches her dress, border on the aggressive. The men in the background look almost like ogres.

Elfriede Lohse-Wächtler Self-portrait 1931

Like the Santos painting, Lohse-Wächtler’s also expresses uncertainty, though rather more loudly. The woman in the painting, her presentation of herself, is someone we might expect to have had a few drinks – though she would no doubt assure us, if challenged, no more than she could cope with – and would declaim on any topic, probably without letting us get a word in edgeways. The silence and cool stares of the Santos painting are nowhere to be seen. Lohse-Wächtler is smoking like Santos did, but there’s nothing secret or private about it, as she brandishes a fine cigarette holder which, no doubt, she’ll use to drive home her points.

When it comes to passion or even fear, though, nothing beats the self-portrait by Franz Karl Bühler of 1919. Doesn’t it remind you of Edvard Much’s The Scream? Now Bühler had every reason to scream at his existence, even more than just because of the horror of the war just over. He had been diagnosed with schizophrenia and would spend 42 years in mental hospitals in his native Germany. There, he learned to paint, and did himself a lot of good by painting not just self-portraits, but portraits of many of his fellow patients.

Franz Karl Bühler Self-portrait 1919

Hitler didn’t approve. Paintings like Bühler’s or Lohse-Wächtler’s were, in the Nazis’ view, degenerate art (entartete Kunst). The Propaganda chief, Joseph Goebbels, even organised an exhibition of degenerate art that travelled to eleven German and Austrian cities to underline to decent Aryans just how shamelessly Jewish and Communist tendencies were polluting fine German art. In future, proper art would be like Hitler’s little water colour of the Vienna State Opera House.

Some of Bühler’s works were included in the exhibition, as were others by Lohse-Wächtler. By then, she too was in a mental hospital, also diagnosed with schizophrenia. As many surrealists knew, mental ill-health could lend itself to surrealist creativity.

Lohse-Wächtler was asked to submit to voluntary sterilisation, since the Nazis believed that this was the only way to prevent this condition – perhaps from their point of view I should say perversion – might be passed on. She refused. But in 1935, she was sterilised against her will. Traumatised by the experience, she never painted again.

She would only have had another five years in any case. Like Bühler, she was transported in 1940 to what had once been a humane psychiatric institution in Castle Sonnenstein. There she and Bühler became just two of the victims of the ‘T4 Action’, the euthanasia programme that gassed 13,720 mental patients.

The degenerate art of the surrealist or avant-garde painters was far too troubling for the Nazis, who wanted something far more traditional and unworrying.

What about Ángeles Santos? 

Well, she avoided the fate of Bühler or Lohse-Wächtler. Indeed, she lived till 101, and died honoured in her native Spain, the recipient of numerous awards and medals. But by then she’d long turned her back on works as remarkable and disturbing as Tertulia. Soon after she’d finished it, she escaped from her parents’ house and was found by farmers behaving weirdly near a local river. Her father had her interned in a mental hospital, another parallel with her German contemporaries.

He had a change of heart and she returned home two years later. However, she never painted in her early style again. From then on she focused on a far more conventional style.

Still, let’s not get ourselves thinking that the mentally ill always produce paintings like Tertulia. The Guardian article about degenerate art quotes a 1923 psychological examination of Hitler which found he was “a morbid psychopath … prone to hysteria”. And look what that produced in art. To say nothing of what it produced in the world.

Oh, and in case you’re wondering, back then when I stopped to look at the Santos painting, I still managed to get to my appointment in time.

A comic's grave story

What better place for a story about death than a graveyard?

No one knows that better than Rafael Solaz. He’s a specialist in the history of Valencia, where he (and we) live. And he guides groups around the General Cemetery in the city. 

Solaz likes to tell one story in particular. A story he likes so much, in fact, that he’s written it up as a short book. It’s the story of Vault 1501.

It’s a Spanish tradition, as in many Mediterranean countries, to bury people in specifically built wall recesses, which I believe are generally called vaults, into which a coffin can be placed. The vault is closed by a stone which, like a gravestone, can contain a few words about the loved one.

Vault 1501 in Valencia General Cemetery is occupied by Emilia Vidal Esteve. Hers is a sad tale, of a death in 1876 at the age of nineteen, from typhoid, in the full bloom of first – and in her case only – love.

The stone that closes the vault is so eroded now that it’s hard to read what it says. But one can see the words “Memorial by V. García Valero”, in effect the signature of the man who arranged the burial.

Like Emilia, Vicente García Valero was a native of Valencia. His ambition was to be an actor and, even though at first he worked for the tax authorities to put bread on his table and a roof over his head, he devoted all the time he could to acting, as an amateur, before making it as a professional.

Caricature of Vicente García Valero
at the height of his fame

He eventually made a national name for himself. That meant leaving Valencia to settle in Madrid. As in other countries, you could only go so far as an actor in the provinces of Spain, and real success was only possible in the capital.

That all happened towards the end of the nineteenth century. As well as winning fame as a comic actor, he also wrote his own comedies and several books, including memoirs. He played many major roles, but at times settled, with equanimity, for minor ones, such as that of a deaf man who spoke just four words in the entire play. He wrote of himself, “he plays leading roles and sometimes just the appetiser.” 

The irony is that, for a man of the comic stage, death was a huge presence in his life. He’d been Emilia’s first love, just as she was to be the great love of his life. They’d been childhood sweethearts when he was 15 and she 13, but then she’d died when he was just 21. 

He was away when she died. When he got home, he discovered that her father, a musical director and composer, hadn’t had the money to bury Emilia on her own. Her remains had been buried in a common grave.

Vicente couldn’t bear the idea. Unfortunately, the civil authorities were unable, or unwilling, to help. They wouldn’t hear of disinterring the body for reburial elsewhere. Vicente was in despair.

But then he heard that the priest who managed the cemetery was – how shall I put this? – approachable on difficult matters, if sufficient lubrication could be provided to ensure that things ran smoothly.

Vicente went to confession. He told the priest his sad story and admitted that he had no authority to move the body. On the other hand, he was more than prepared to undergo any sacrifice the priest felt appropriate if it could be done.

They met a few days later at the common grave, at the point where Emilia’s body had been laid. Gravediggers dug down to the coffin, pulled it out and opened the lid.

“Yes, it’s her,” he exclaimed, “that’s enough. She looks as though she’s sleeping.”

Serious lubrication had changed hands, to the priest and his assistants, including the gravediggers. Vicente was assured that his payment would provide prayers for Emilia’s soul. Given the sum involved, Vicente couldn’t help wondering how anyone could possibly need that many prayers. 

But the deed had been done. The coffin was moved to vault 1501 and reburied there, with an engraved stone in place. Vicente swore to the family that he would keep it maintained and prepared for the visits to the graves of the dead that take place on 1 November, All Saints’ Day, each year. 

In the meantime, celibacy didn’t suit him. Poor Emilia had been snatched from him before they could be married, but there was always Ángela, her sister. He was luckier this time, and she lived long enough for them to marry. Sadly, their daughter Emilia – named in a touching gesture after Ángela’s sister, who was nearly also her sister-in-law – died in infancy, and her mother followed her to the grave at the age of 35.

Leonora Dare
Not quite what she seemed to Vicente

A widower, he found himself once more in need of a wife. This time, his professional life seemed to throw a new opportunity his way. An enchanting gymnast, Miss Leonora Dare, caught his fancy. Unfortunately – or possibly fortunately – before they got to the altar he discovered that she was in fact what we would now call trans. They decided she had the wrong genitals for the relationship they had in mind, and vanished from his life. 

Happily, there was a solution ready to hand. He’d loved Emilia and married her sister Ángela. So what about the third sister, his sister-in-law Amparo? 

She married him and they even had kids, who survived him, though sadly she didn’t. For the third time, he found himself burying a woman he’d loved. Life had injected yet another dose of tragedy into the comic actor’s life.

But there’s one more story to tell about him, from 1911, when he was married to Amparo. In his late 50s, Vicente found parts in plays becoming scarcer. That year, he realised he didn’t have the money to keep his word to look after vault 1501 and prepare it for the All Saints’ Day visits. It would be neglected for the first time since Emilia had died.

Vicente was a little bit of a gambler. Not for large sums. And entirely without success. Lucky in cards, they say, unlucky in love. Sadly, with all three sisters dying on him, and never winning at games of chance, he’d been unlucky in both.

But then, that year, he saw a lottery ticket on sale. Number 1501. Now, buying an entire ticket was too big an investment for him. But you could buy a one-tenth share in it, and he did. And, to his and Amparo’s amazement and delight, the number came up.

His one-tenth share came to 600 pesetas. That would be worth between 1500 and 2000 euros today. In one of his memoirs, he tells of Amparo’s delight that they would after all be able to prepare her sister’s grave properly.

You can make of that story what you want. Luck? Providence? You choose. I simply like it. And I’m glad that someone like Rafael Solaz is around and prepared to do the work to share them with us.

It just goes to show you can dig up some extraordinary things in graveyards.

Rafael Solaz on Vault 1501

 

Tragic numbers

Let’s have some figures

• 111,000
• 69,000
• 3500
• 20,660

And, finally: 

• Five million

So what do they all represent?

According to the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan, there have been 111,000 civilians killed, just in the time that it has been counting, since 2009. The war started eight years earlier.

There have also been 69,000 Afghan police and security force personnel killed.

Those figures naturally dwarf the NATO casualties. Still, the coalition has lost 3500 people, two-thirds of them American, representing 3500 families bereaved.

In addition, the Americans have suffered another 20,660 wounded. Some of those will be serious, life-altering injuries. That’s healthy young people who will now carry major physical damage for the rest of their lives.

That’s without taking into consideration the psychological harm many of the soldiers have suffered in the course of their service.

Finally, what about the five million? That’s the number of displaced people in Afghanistan, refugees who have fled the fighting. 

1996: Taliban entering Kabul

This would all be bad enough if the sacrifice had achieved something. But at the beginning of the war, Afghanistan was being tyrannised by the Taliban, in a shameful, backward-looking and, above all, misogynistic autocracy holding the nation in a state of medieval obscurantism and brutal persecution. 

Today, it’s on the brink once more of being tyrannised by the Taliban, in a shameful, backward-looking and, above all, misogynistic autocracy holding the nation in a state of medieval obscurantism and brutal persecution. 

2021: Taliban entering Kabul

All that death, destruction and suffering was, it seems for absolutely nothing.

How on Earth did we get here?

In the West, we have all, starting with the US, allowed ourselves to be blinded by US military power. The most powerful armed force the world has ever seen. And it led us to believe that there was no problem too big for it.

What we have failed to get our minds around is that the military is, at the level of international politics, what the fire brigade is at home. When we need them, we want them in quick and hard. But, when the fire’s out, we really don’t want those boots, axes and hoses still in use inside the house. Instead, we want builders and electricians and painters to start repairing the damage.

The same applies to the military. Once they’ve done the job, say of kicking Al Qaida out of Afghanistan, or even of bringing down the Taliban government, we need them gone, with the equivalent of the builders, electricians and painters taking over. 

Unfortunately, while the US army is, in this metaphor, an outstanding firefighting force, it doesn’t have the builders and other trades needed for repair work. I mean, individual soldiers may be highly talented builders, but that’s not the task for which the military was set up, trained or equipped. That applies equally forcefully to the other countries in the Coalition that was fighting in Afghanistan. 

However good individual soldiers may be at do it yourself work, armies aren’t designed, trained or equipped for building nations. So the United States joins the Soviet Union and, three times over, Britain in the club of foreigners who’ve come unstuck in the graveyard of Empires that is Afghanistan.

The attempt was always going to blow up in our faces. As it has. Or rather, in the faces of the Afghan people. They’re now going to be facing a Taliban revelling in the the prospect of settling some old scores.

All we can do is hope that the Afghans will, in time, free themselves. But we need to learn that we can’t free them ourselves, any more than we can free the Chinese, the North Koreans or the Russians (fortunately it looks unlikely that we’re even going to try). Above all, we need to learn never to go wandering blithely into another war we can’t win, without the slightest shade of an exit strategy for getting out.

So next time someone glibly suggests, “hey, why don’t we send in the military?”, perhaps to Libya or – God help us – Iran, the right answer is – “just say ‘no’”. 

Post-imperial apologies: who should offer them, who should demand them?

I’m not entirely sure about the demands of former colonies for apologies from their original colonial masters. I’m not denying that the colonial powers did plenty to apologise for. It’s just now always clear who should be apologising, or who should be receiving the apology.

I mean, in some cases it’s obvious. Europeans burned African slaves to death, often in the slowest possible way, in the West Indies. I can see that the descendants of the Europeans could well apologise to the descendants of those slaves. Or the French could apologise for torturing Algerians, as the Brits could apologise for torturing Kenyans. But what happens in, say, the States? Should the Americans have an apology from the Brits for their behaviour there? The behaviour was certainly lousy, towards slaves and indigenous people, but aren’t today’s US citizens the heirs of the benefits extracted by those shameful means?

You may have noticed that last Friday, 13 August – Friday the 13th but, hey, who’s superstitious? – the Mexicans celebrated, or perhaps the better word would be ‘marked’, the 500th anniversary of the fall of Tenochtitlan. That was the old Aztec capital city, and its final capture by the conquistador Hernán Cortés, marked the definitive establishment of Spanish rule over what is today called Mexico.

This year also include the 200th anniversary of Mexico’s independence from Spain, to be celebrated – no ambiguity about the term in this case, this is certainly a celebration – on 21 September. 

As part of the preparations for these momentous anniversaries, the Mexican president wrote in March to the Spanish king, calling for an official apology to Mexico for the horrors that followed the Spanish conquest of his country. Horrors there certainly were. There was murder and torture and, of course, widespread rape. 

Why, even the woman towards whom Mexicans maintain a deeply ambivalent attitude, ‘La Malinche’, Cortés’s interpreter and mistress, was the mother of his son, quite possibly the first ‘mestizo’, mixed race child, of the country. Since the mixing of the races is what made Mexico, and indeed Latin America generally, she’s the mother of the nation. But, as the mistress of the conqueror, she’s also its primordial traitor. A very complex mix of emotions…

And yet she was no mistress. Rather, he was her master. She had been given to him by an allied indigenous tribe, as a slave. Cortés had done what so many white slave owners would do down the ages, perhaps most famously the third President of the United States Thomas Jefferson with his slave Sally Hemings, and fathered a child on a slave woman who had no power to stop him, no authority to deny consent. That surely constitutes the textbook definition of rape.

The mother of the nation a rape victim? Yes, as you dig down through the complexities of this story, you find only deeper complexities.

So there’s certainly plenty for Spanish people to apologise for, I suppose. But who should be doing the apologising?

Clearly it would have to be a white European. That you could probably tell from the appearance of the person. It would be a native speaker of Spanish. And it would be somebody who had a Spanish surname, or even a pair of surnames, as is the Spanish custom. Surnames such as, for instance, López Obrador.

Those happen to be the surnames of the President of Mexico. The man who wrote the letter demanding the apology. He’s a Spanish speaker. His maternal grandfather was from Northern Spain, as were the parents of his paternal grandmother.

Just so you can check on his white European roots, I’ve included a photo of him.

AMLO, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, President of Mexico

Funnily enough, he does also have some indigenous and even African blood. Pretty remote but nonetheless there.

So perhaps, on behalf of his whole nation, and the nation of his ancestors, he could apologise to himself?

Of a cantankerous cat and Himalayan prawns

I know it can be irritating to get picky about food, but it’s just as irritating to get old, and I reckon being old gives me the right to be picky if I want.

On that subject, I’ve decided to take a page out of our cat Misty’s book. He’s not that old – not quite 14 – but he’s quite cantankerous enough for a cat four years older than that. It’s our fault, I know, for making him live in four countries, and abandoning him (with friends, you understand, but he still saw it as being abandoned) for six months prior to two of those moves. No wonder he’s a little short-tempered.

“You will, henceforth, cease this neglectful
behaviour and cater more fully to my wishes”

He’s decided in recent months that he no longer likes various types of food that, once, he’d devour with delight. So we’ve been anxiously testing a whole string of different types of food, in the hope of finding something to his taste. We finally narrowed it down to a range of little cans which he seemed to like, but now it’s become clear that there are only some of them he enjoys, while he continues to turn up his nose at the rest.

Left, Ocean Fish, good;
right, Tuna Mousse, unacceptable

So now I make a point of buying him ‘ocean fish’ rather ‘tuna mousse’ to ensure he’ll deign to eat what we serve him. Which he does with some apparent pleasure. “That’ll do nicely,” he seems to be saying. I was going to add, “thank you,” but, to be honest, he’s not the kind of cat that says “thanks” very readily.

Since he’s become so picky, I thought it was permissible for us to be a little fussy too. For instance, yesterday, we had an excellent meal from a Nepalese restaurant in the little town of Alboraya, outside Valencia, overlooking the kilometre after kilometre of farmers’ fields that run across the plain down to the beach and the sea. The restaurant has the less than strikingly original name of Kathmandu, which at least has the merit of making clear its national roots, that being Nepal’s capital.

Excellent food from Kathmandu in Alboraya

The food was outstandingly good. It seems the restaurant is heavily frequented by people from England, which is no surprise, since curry, especially curry with a bit of a bite to it, is far more popular with the English than with the Spanish. We were as pleased as any other English patron used to the curries back in Blighty. Or at least we were pleased with all the dishes bar one. The prawn curry was good enough, but far from outstanding. Nothing like as good as the chicken or vegetarian options (my granddaughter Aya, visiting us with her Dad, is vegetarian), which were excellent.

But then I got to thinking. Misty-like, we’re allowed to make arbitrary decision about what we like and what we don’t. And, in any case, this was a Nepalese restaurant. It’s hard to imagine that there’s much of a tradition of currying prawns in Nepal. At least, given the length of its coastline, it can’t really be expected to have much of such a tradition.

Prawn curry: perhaps not a Nepalese tradition

Got to make allowances.

And in all other respects, the meal was outstanding.

This experience got me thinking of one of my father’s anecdotes. He once worked in the Rome headquarters of the Food and Agriculture Organisation, the United Nations specialist agency specialising in food production and farming, as you may have guessed from its name. One of the things it does is consider projects it can back to help develop food production in countries which most need such help.

At one point, one of my father’s colleagues, based in India, submitted a project to help develop the prawn fishing industry in the Bay of Bengal. Well, I saw prawn. It might have been shrimp. Or possibly some other marine crustacean. My memory’s a bit weak on that detail.

The response from the expert in Rome was that there were no prawns in in the Bay of Bengal. Unless he said there were no shrimps. Or possibly no members of some other marine crustacean species. 

In any case, whichever it was he said there were none of, the response came back quite promptly by telegram.

“Maybe, but the plate of them I’m enjoying at the moment is absolutely delicious.”

I don’t know whether the project ever got the go-ahead.

Strange anniversary

It’s a curious anniversary, 11 August. Of two events. In different decades. And yet curiously linked.

On that day in 1972, the last US ground combat troops left South Vietnam. That still left 43,500 US personnel there, but as it’s only by ground troops holding territory that a war is ultimately won, it was clear the US now viewed the war as unwinnable.

US forces on the run, after defeat in Vietnam

That was remarkable because over the previous two centuries – or slightly less – the US had fought an incredible number of other countries. It had fought the British. Twice. It had fought the Mexicans, an appalling number of times, as a Mexican friend once told me, if you count short incursions. It had fought the Spanish, the “Barbary States” of North Africa, the Japanese, the Germans, the Italians. 

Why, in the Civil War, it had even fought itself.

Don’t get me wrong. It hadn’t fought absolutely everyone. It had never fought the Russians, for instance. It’s true that their pilots had probably exchanged fire with each other over Korea, but as Russia never admitted its involvement in that war, they’d never officially been in a hot war. Which, considering the length and bitterness of the cold war between them, and the depth of their nuclear arsenals, was just as well.

This trick, by the way, of denying its involvement in various wars, was a bit of a Russian habit. They did it during the Spanish Civil War too, and everyone pretended to go along with the fantasy, just as they did with the equally transparent fiction that Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy weren’t involved either. That was so that Britain, France and the United States could maintain the comfortable pretence that their precious non-intervention agreement over Spain was actually holding, so they could justify not helping the Republican government themselves.

A better reason for the Russians to pretend they weren’t involved is that, once their allies in Spain, the Communist Party, and their Soviet advisers had taken control of the Republican war effort, they made such a royal mess of it that nobody could possibly want to admit they had any part of it. The war was far more lost by the Communist Party generals and their Soviet mentors than won by Franco’s rebels and their mostly inept military commanders. Nothing to be proud of there.

But back to the Americans.

They’d fought all those people. And they’d never lost. In fact, they’d always won. Korea, perhaps, ought to have been a bit of warning to them. It was what in football terms I suppose we’d call a score-draw. Or, in chess terms, a stalemate. Both sides did some damage to the other, but neither could win outright.

They didn’t learn the lesson and went into Vietnam guns first, brains second. In the end, they lost 58,000 dead and 153,000 wounded. And, as demonstrated on 11 August 1972, lost a war for the first time in their history.

It was curious. A far poorer country, with far less depth of military strength, had defeated the world’s greatest superpower ever. The Vietnamese proved that, short of nuking them to destruction, the US couldn’t defeat a people in arms, however powerful a military it possessed itself.

Funnily enough, it should have known better. After all, nearly two centuries earlier, hadn’t the Americans united a majority of their people and demonstrated that one of the great powers of its day, Great Britain, couldn’t break them?

Now let’s roll forward 21 years until 11 August 2003.

That was the day that NATO took command of western forces in Afghanistan. The gesture was another of those military fictions, like Russian, German and Italian non-intervention in Spain, and Russian non-intervention in Korea. The incursion in Afghanistan was American. Making it a NATO operation just involved some other nations and gave the US a little cover, a justification for saying the effort was international, not just its own.

The reality is that it was a US response to the atrocity committed on its soil by terrorists on 9/11. Oddly, although that attack was organised by a Saudi and carried out by a massively Saudi terrorist gang, it led to US military operations in Afghanistan and Iraq. 

The Iraq invasion culminated in a victory for America’s major enemy in the region, Iran, which has now emerged as a dominant power in Iraqi politics. The fighting also spilled into Syria, where Western intervention led to withdrawal with bloody noses, and a victory for Russia.

As for the invasion of Afghanistan, it was justified by the hunt for the Saudi head of the terrorist gang that attacked the US, Osama Bin Laden, though he was eventually tracked down and killed in Pakistan. Like Saudi, Pakistan is a US ally and therefore uninvadable. That left the only threadbare excuse being the need to overthrow the Taliban who were in power in Afghanistan, which the invasion did. Now, however, NATO has pulled out again and, lo and behold, the Taliban is swiftly taking back control, provincial capital by provincial capital.

Taliban forces in Afghanistan, massing for an attack on Kandahar

We’re witnessing yet another defeat for the US, apparently undefeatable right up to the end of the Second World War.

So raise a glass tonight to mark this curious anniversary. A monument to the apparent inability of the US, and the West generally, to learn anything from its military defeats. With the consequence, of course, that we subject ourselves to more of the same. 

The best of hosts

Fine places, food or wine help make a holiday good, but nothing contributes as much as the people. And when it came to enjoying our recent trip to Cantabria, nobody did as much to make it memorable than our hosts, Ainhoa and Aitzol. They’re the couple who run the Casona del Valle de Soba, where we stayed, and they showed an exceptional ability to make the people staying there feel far more like guests than mere clients.

The Casona del Valle de Soba
With its magnificent coat of arms over the entrance

Their names, as you may have spotted, are typically Basque, and indeed they’re both from the great Basque port city of Bilbao, not much more than an hour’s drive from the Casona. He, Aitzol, used to be a cook up in the Pyrenees, but they both decided that they preferred to be near their parents. They hunted around for a place where they could set up a small business of their own, offering accommodation and meals, and found the Casona in the province next door to their own, Cantabria.

The Casona is a seventeenth-century building of a certain grandeur. The entrance is behind an arcaded porch surmounted by the imposing coat of arms of the original family, the Martínez del Valle. I enjoyed the conversation I had with Ainhoa, about the final flight of stairs inside the house, which simply ends at a wall. Really. There’s no floor that flight could reach, even though it’s wide and grand enough to promise more than a dead end.

Grand staircase to nowhere

“I once heard that whenever a nobleman lost a battle,” Ainhoa told me, “he had to remove a floor from his house.”

“Well,” I replied after giving due consideration to this suggestion, a curious one at the very least, “I just hope his house didn’t start off a great deal higher.”

“I believe it started out as a skyscraper. He wasn’t much of a general.”

The place has a fine dining room but, in high summer, both breakfast and dinner were served in the porch. The breakfasts, included in the room price if you reserve directly with them, were extraordinarily good: freshly squeezed juice of different fruits (including plum, melon and watermelon), various types of home-made bread, and always some delicacy, ‘churritos’ (a small version of the classic Spanish churro), fritters, cake (sometimes made by one or other of Aitzol or Ainhoa’s parents). 

The porch doubled as a dining room

Dinners were optional. Our original plan was to eat at the Casona most nights but pop out to local restaurants on a couple of occasions. That plan lasted only until the first time we tried one of Aitzol’s dinners. Thereafter we dined every night except the Monday, and that was only because that’s the only evening the two of them take off from preparing and serving dinner at all. 

Which takes me onto the most staggering thing about the two of them. They barely stop working. They try to take a little time off in the afternoons, and the Monday evening, but they always seem available to provide any help guests may need. From June to September, it’s a seven-day a week job. The rest of the year, they rent the whole place out for self-catering, which presumably means a slightly lower workload. It was a relief to learn that: I can’t imagine getting through even four months of the work they do, let alone having to do it for longer.

As well as conversation and help, Aitzol and Ainhoa are remarkably well-informed and offer excellent recommendations for the things to do in and near Cantabria. Thanks to them, we went to the waterfall that is the source of the local river Asón. 

The source of the Asón

We followed that up with a visit to the vineyard that makes ‘Ribera de Asón’ white wine (and a sparkling wine, that it’s forbidden to call ‘champagne’ or even ‘cava’, even though it’s made by the same method). 

Sparkling wine - not champagne, not even Cava - in production
at Bodegas Vidular, makers of wines that take their
name from the river Asón

We also wandered around the whole glorious area, sometimes under grey skies, on a couple of occasions even with a little rain, but then that’s the beauty of the region: it’s cooler, wetter and greener than most of Spain, and there are times, as I pointed out before, where the blue skies and baking temperatures get too much for those of us who live here and the cool of Cantabria is immensely attractive. One of the things I like the most about the green area is that it’s full of cows, not in byres, but out in the countryside, grazing real grass.

The right place for dairy

Ainhoa even organised a girl to look after our dogs, who were with us, for a day so we could go to Bilbao and do the usual things like visit the Guggenheim. Her mother and grandmother are a dairy farmer team which supplies the Casona with its excellent raw milk. I was particularly amused by the  sign the mother had painted to show the business she was in. She posed against it for the photo which confirms Danielle's view that she’s the prettiest dairy farmer we, at least, have ever seen. 

Not the image I usually have of a dairy farmer
And a dab hand with a paint brush too

There are plenty of horses too, many as we saw even with foals (some of them apparently quite tired and in need of a rest).

The foals like their siesta

The Casona isn’t exactly a hotel, though the room was bigger than most hotel rooms I’ve known, and wonderfully comfortable, with all the things you’d hope for, such as an ensuite bathroom. But I suppose it would need a bar to be a hotel, and perhaps the opportunity to be served dinner or breakfast over a longer period of time, though the fixed times suited us just fine.

Toffee at the Casona waiting for a walk

It was also fun to have the dogs with us. They didn’t just amuse us, they also became the centre of attention for many of the other guests. The kids, in particular, loved them – and got loved back.

Luci and Toffee hit it off with the kids at the Casona

It was a wonderful place to spend ten days. We certainly plan to go back. And when we do, it’ll be as much to see Ainhoa and Aitzol again, since they were such a vital ingredient in making this trip so enjoyable.

Why, they even threatened to come and see us in Valencia. And if they do, we’d be delighted to see them, and attempt to entertain them as well as they looked after us. That’ll be a high bar...

Spain surges ahead while Johnson fades

Whatever else he may have made a mess of – and I’m not going to get into an argument today as to how many cockups there have been – Boris Johnson has always pointed with pride to one solid achievement. And when I say ‘always’ I really mean always. Over and over. For a long time, his only answer to any criticism was to point to how fast the British Covid vaccination programme was going.

Yes, that’s his great claim to triumph. He got the British vaccination programme going faster than most. In particular, he got it going faster than the EU’s. That, though, was a pretty low bar. The EU Commission has a good track record of running major tendering processes, and next to no experience of running big procurements. Under the leadership of Ursula von der Leyen, it royally screwed up the vaccine procurement exercise. That wasn’t the proudest moment of Ursula von der Leyen’s career. It didn’t take much for Johnson to do better.

That didn’t, of course, stop Brexiters claiming Britain's small advance as a success for Brexit even though it really, really wasn’t. Nothing prevented Britain doing the same thing as an EU member. 

Johnson liked to keep blowing his own trumpet about the success of the programme. His supporters liked to keep gloating at their man’s supposed win over the rest of Europe. Unfortunately, that meant they didn’t notice what was happening to their much-trumpeted lead.

Specifically, they didn’t notice how Spain, my new home country, was, much more quietly, with far less gloating or boasting, gradually closing the gap on Britain. Last week, it overtook Britain on numbers fully vaccinated. 

Spain overtakes the UK on percentage of people fully vaccinated

This week, Spain overtook the UK even on numbers having at least one shot.

Spain overtakes the UK on percentage of people 
with at least one vaccine shot

Why’s that important? Clearly, being fully vaccinated doesn’t give total protection against the virus. But then no one claimed it would. There’s nothing surprising about vaccinated people getting Covid. Vaccines reduce the risk of being infected, but they don’t reduce it to zero. If people keep being exposed to the virus, then even if they’re vaccinated, there’s a chance they’ll catch it.

The only way to cut the risk further is to reduce the likelihood of people being exposed to the virus in the first place. And that requires a far higher proportion of vaccination. The latest view, with the more transmissible delta variant, is that the previous target of 70% vaccination is too low. To have a real impact on exposure, we need to reach 80% or perhaps even 90% vaccination.

That’s why I’m pleased to see Spain forging so steadily ahead.

In the meantime, though, it does seem that vaccinated people tend to have far milder cases, and are 50-60% less likely to pass it on to anyone else. That doesn’t mean it can’t happen, just that it’s half as likely, or less. 

Being vaccinated does you a lot of good. It doesn’t make you totally safe but it makes you a lot safer. And it helps protect everyone else too.

Conversely, not being vaccinated exposes you to more risk of getting sick, and of being a great deal sicker it you do. It also contributes to keeping the virus circulating and exposing everyone else to it. So it’s a kind of masochistic selfishness: you indulge your own unfounded delusions, which hurts others, but it harms you at least as much.

So Johnson was right to get a vaccination programme going fast in the UK. Which makes it all the sadder that he hasn’t been able to keep the early momentum going. It seems that six EU nations have overtaken Britain for fully vaccinating citizens. And Spain, as we saw, is ahead even on those partly vaccinated.

But that’s so Johnson. Good at celebrating a temporary gain. But rather short of the tenacity to achieve a worthwhile but long-term goal.

Johnson needs to get his finger out
if he wants to stay ahead of the EU...