Lessons on foreign policy we fail to learn

Now there are reports the Royal Highland Fusiliers and a company of armoured vehicles will be guarding the Afghan National Army's officer training academy in Kabul. If it is confirmed, the soldiers' families will watch them leave with sinking hearts. They are professionals doing the job they signed up for. But they, like we, thought their Afghan War was over.

We forgot to look at the small print; at the army's on-going commitment to provide training staff and protection to the training academy. Guard duty sounds innocuous enough. But as we know to our cost there is nothing innocuous about sending troops to Afghanistan. Not only is there the Taliban there is also the threat of Islamic State (IS). It seems those masked men with their black flags are proving as attractive to unemployed Afghan youth as to some of Britain's Muslims.

The question now is: is this still our fight? Cast your eye from Afghanistan, across Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Sudan, the horn of Africa and Libya. For millions of innocents in these countries, something like Armageddon has already arrived. The deaths run into hundreds of thousands; the misery has affected tens of millions. The future holds only fear.

No wonder an estimated 500,000 are crowded on the Libyan coastline ready to risk their lives attempting to cross the Mediterranean to the safety of Europe. With hell at their heels, it's not surprising they're prepared to hand over their savings and board leaky, inadequate boats.

But as I look at them, and remember back over the past decade, I find myself wondering to what extent the upheaval that has forced so many of this desperate human tide to abandon their homes can be traced to our interfering door?

In other words, is this a mess we have had a hand in creating? Remember what was said at the time of our troops going into Afghanistan, then into Iraq. Weren't our soldiers and airmen fighting there to make the world a safer place? Well, it didn't make it safer for many of the poor people who live in those countries. Look at the chaos in Iraq today with IS rampaging. Nor did it make our lives any safer. We now live with the threat of home-grown jihadists returning from Syria and Iraq. Every week there seem to be more arrests for terror offences.

Yet (and I find this strange) there is little public debate about what Britain's role should now be. With the Middle-East, Libya and Afghanistan in such chaos it was surprising how little mention they received during the recent general election. I can hardly remember any of our leading politicians even talking about foreign affairs.

The nearest they came was when they talked about immigration or Europe. I think that was because they've had their fingers burnt. As have we. It was a silent pact between politicians and the electorate. We'd prefer not to talk about it.

But it's too important for that. The issue won't go away. Should Britain shrink from further engagement in the world's troublespots or should we learn from recent mistakes and try once again to be a force for good?

Afghanistan illustrates the problem well. Let's say we don't defend the training college. The Afghan Army might then go on to lose the new war it is waging - or it might fail to prevent IS gaining control of the narcotics trade. If IS were to gain such wealth, it could expand further and faster.

Already it controls a stretch of the Libyan coastline - and as we know that's just a hop from southern Europe. In other words, if we don't take the fight to IS, might they one day gain enough strength to bring it to us?

That's the sort of forward looking strategic thought for which we rely on government. They have experts with their ears to the ground in all these places. They have input at professorial level. Don't they?

In the run-up to the Iraq war we were given a glimpse of the material on which Tony Blair's government was basing its judgement call. We dubbed it the dodgy dossier. I'd hoped we would have improved since then but I wonder.

Rory Stewart MP, former chair if the House of Commons Defence Committee thought we hadn't - and said as much in the last parliament. (At the start of this one he was promoted to be a junior environment minister, thereby closing down his informed and uncomfortable voice on defence and foreign affairs.)

Mr Stewart pointed out in 2013 the insanity of having only three Arabic speakers among our 15 ambassadors to the Middle East. He warned last year Britain was suffering from a serious shortfall in foreign policy expertise and analytical capability which hinders its ability to cope with the multiple foreign policy threats it now faces.

He said then: "There are not enough people to analyse Libya and Syria and obviously Crimea and Ukraine."

He is a Conservative politician with considerable first-hand experience. I am inclined to believe his analysis. I recall at the advent of the Afghan war we had an old friend, an academic, who was an expert on Iran. She had in her youth walked in Afghanistan three times. When she heard about the war she put her head in her hands saying: "They have no understanding of what they are getting into."

Fourteen years later I can see she was right.

So what am I saying? It's this.

We live at the civilised end of a brutal world. We're extraordinarily fortunate in that we enjoy freedom, democracy and (despite austerity cuts) relative affluence. With so many privileges comes a degree of responsibility.

Where we see people crushed by brutal regimes or populations in desperate need, compassion - and no small hangover from empire - makes us feel we have a duty to do something. And so we should intervene if we can see clearly that we can be a force for good.

In order to see clearly we need sound information as well as a plan. We didn't have those in the run up to Iraq - as even Tony Blair must now admit. We entered that war with no idea how we would rebuild the country and no exit strategy.

We entered Afghanistan to rid it of Al Quaeda and stayed on to fight a war of attrition with the Taliban. We didn't win but managed to slide out without obvious defeat. Parliament kept us out of Syria. Thank goodness, since once again we had no idea what the consequences of our intervention would be. As for Libya, David Cameron declared victory when a massacre in Benghazi was avoided. But like George's Bush's declaration of victory in Iraq, it proved premature to the point of foolishness. Libya is now a basket case of a country, a place where jihadism and terror has taken root.

The lesson, it seems to me, is that we are too ad hoc in our responses. We don't know enough about the countries in which we intervene. We put too much faith in hard power; too little in soft. We take America's side too often. Nor do British governments listen wisely or well to experts who might be able to help devise a more durable, long-term course through the minefield of foreign affairs.

And finally this: there should never be another general election in this country where foreign affairs isn't at the heart of the debate. Don't blame the politicians. That was our fault. It was an abdication of a responsibility that we have to some of the most vulnerable people in the world and, in the end, to our own security.