2013-05-23T05:04:53-04:00 Richard Pass http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/author/index.php?author=richard-pass Copyright 2008, HuffingtonPost.com, Inc. HuffingtonPost Blogger Feed for Richard Pass Good old fashioned elbow grease. tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.2114903 2012-11-11T18:02:59-05:00 2013-01-11T05:12:01-05:00

Richard Pass http://www.huffingtonpost.com/richard-pass/
Within hours of Cooper's decision going public, hundreds of University of London students under the newly formed group 'London Students for Remembrance' launched a social media campaign and pledged to force his resignation. Founder of the group Jonny Prince, who graduated from UCL this year and lost a family member - also a UCL alumnus - at Loos in the Great War, says he is 'absolutely incensed' by Cooper's decision.

Instead of attending the Remembrance Day service, Cooper announced on his blog that he would be holding an event this Thursday entitled 'Our remembrance: A working class history of war'. According to Cooper, the event aims to provide an 'alternative, socialist, account of the war and remembrance'. This event in itself is a deeply insulting message to the huge number of 'middle' and 'upper class' members of the armed forces who have perished and continue to perish with their 'working class' counterparts.

Indeed, it is most shocking that this unfortunate episode in the University of London's history smacks of political opportunism on the part of Cooper and the ULU leadership who have used the death of millions to publicly promote their own political beliefs. The whole point of Remembrance Day as we know it today is to cast politics aside and pay tribute to the courage, bravery and selflessness of those in uniform both past and present. It is for this reason we see politicians from the left and right of the political spectrum coming together to respect the fallen, as the vast majority of the British public expect.

As a recent UCL graduate, I am hugely disappointed that Cooper, as an elected representative of my former university's student population, made the decision to put his personal beliefs before those he represents. It was unprofessional, shortsighted and wrong. If Cooper wished to make such a profoundly powerful and controversial statement which runs so strongly against common decency and the values of our society, he should have held a referendum on the issue instead of acting without consent. It is for this reason that I, along with many other University of London students, strongly feel that he should resign from office.

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Richard Pass http://www.huffingtonpost.com/richard-pass/
Considering that we are in the midst of what could arguably be the most important century in Western civilisation's history given the rise of the rest and our relative decline, the lack of urgency to safeguard our position as one of the world's wealthiest nations is quite alarming. Just as we should be increasing our competiveness in the global economy and consolidating our advantages, we are experiencing a dangerous crisis of confidence caused by a concern that our economic system in its present form is unfair and no longer fit for purpose. Rather ironically, this concern materialised at the precise moment in which China became the world's second largest economy. What took Europe over 100 years to achieve has taken only one generation in China. However, this miraculous growth story occurred not through socialism but through capitalism at its purest. It is this fact, something which the 18 million Chinese being pulled out of rural poverty every year can vouch for, that makes the bigoted protestors that were outside St Paul's Cathedral earlier this year, all the more moronic and out of touch with reality.

Contrary to the Occupy movement's propaganda, the world has not changed. There has not been a global paradigm shift towards a more egalitarian form of capitalism and the sooner we realise this the better. In 2010, I spent six months at the University of Nottingham's Malaysia Campus outside Kuala Lumpur and what impacted me most was the work ethic of Malaysian students, particularly of Chinese ethnicity, in comparison to students in the UK. The typical retort is that the Chinese are grafters but not creatively minded and probably never will be in a way that we are. However, I would challenge this commonly held belief with the statistic that over the last 15 years, the number of patents being registered in China has risen 2900% to a level that is now higher than both in the UK and Germany. We are losing ground, and fast, and once we lose that edge, it may be impossible to get back. As a result, what we need in the UK is a massive investment in our best universities. Imagine what the likes of Oxford or Cambridge could do with funding that is even a fraction of what the top Ivy leagues in the US get.

We may think that our universities are a close second, but the reality is that the Ivy League is currently trouncing the Russell Group. So in a time of austerity how should we rectify this? Well, contrary to popular opinion, tuition fees have to rise. It is unavoidable and the government has made the right decision in this respect. However, where they got it wrong was cutting government funding at the same time. They should have maintained the previous levels of funding if not increased it in order to give our universities the capital they need to truly compete on a global level. Moreover, funding for bogus degrees should be scrapped in order to provide grants for degrees in Maths, Engineering and Science: If you wish to spend three years 'studying' for a BA in Celebrity Studies, do so out of your own pocket or preferably not at all. Concurrently, we also need to drastically reform our school system. At present there is unacceptable inconsistency in the quality of schools across the country, not to mention the uniform inadequacy of our exam system that leaves students woefully unprepared for what should be, the rigours of university level study. Michael Gove seems to be on the right track here, but his reforms still aren't far reaching enough. We must not forget that education is the silver bullet when it comes to social mobility and the creation of a knowledge-based economy.

In many ways what I have proposed above is the easy part. If we are truly going to ensure our future prosperity, we need to change the culture of our nation. We need to become a nation of entrepreneurs, competitors and winners. At Burlington Danes Academy School in West London where I teach for Debate Mate, all the students are ranked in every subject throughout the year, with their results posted on school corridors for everyone to see. Exam results in that school are 20% above the national average because the kids thrive off the competition. The world is an increasingly competitive place, so lets prepare the next generation for it. We also need to rediscover the virtues of past generations; hard work, self-sacrifice and the stiff upper-lip. The US gets this and as a result, is coping with the recovery better than us. In New York, people walk on average 27% faster than anywhere else in the world. Americans work harder because success is rewarded by their society. In Britain, being 'elite' in any capacity has become a source of discomfort, a dirty word. It shouldn't be. It must become a badge of pride and a source of inspiration. The nation as a whole would benefit from this.

The financial crisis showed us that short-termism is very dangerous. Whilst we have castigated the bankers for it, I wonder if we have applied the same lesson to ourselves? The fact is, over the last decade, we have lived as though tomorrow doesn't matter with profligate government and personal spending the norm. However, prosperity and true social mobility doesn't come on the cheap, it is costly. We have to make tough decisions and sacrifices now in order preserve the opportunities of future generations. Why us, you might quietly be thinking to yourself? I am sure many of the hundreds and thousands of selfless citizens who died serving our country in the Second World War thought just that, but regardless, they got on with the job and gave future generations the greatest gift of all; freedom. So instead of using this hard won freedom to pressure the government into providing more prosperity today, lets harness it in order to make it politically profitable to build the prosperity of tomorrow. It is our responsibility and we should rise to the challenge together.
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Richard Pass http://www.huffingtonpost.com/richard-pass/
The individual to be featured first in this series is former diplomat, traveller, writer and current Conservative MP, Rory Stewart. The majority of Stewart's arguments that will be outlined over the course of this post, feature in his essay entitled The Plane to Kabul that is one of two essays of which the 2011-released book, Can Intervention Work, is comprised. Having previously served as a Deputy Governor in post-invasion Iraq, traveled 6000 miles on foot through among other countries, Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan and mixed with some of the West's most influential policy makers during his years spent in Kabul and the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, few are as well placed as Rory Stewart to assess our campaign in Afghanistan.

One of Stewart's primary criticisms of the West's strategy in Afghanistan was the shift from a light to a heavy footprint, by taking the fight to the Taliban in the South and East of the country in 2006. Indeed, Stewart points to the fact that Helmand was less safe in 2011 with 32 000 ISAF troops backed up by 30 000 personnel from the Afghan National Security Force than it was in 2005, when there were only 200 Americans. When I questioned Stewart about the causality of this correlation at an event last year, he answered that it was partly due to ISAF forces being seen as occupiers rather than a force for good, which, rather ironically, resulted in the Taliban's ranks being filled with some of the Pashtun locals that ISAF was there to assist. As one British army officer friend of Stewart stated prior to the surge; 'there isn't an insurgency, but you can have one if you want'. For Stewart, what was particularly dismaying was that year after year, the Western civilian leadership, despite an ever-worsening situation, did not challenge the ISAF commanders with their 'incurable military optimism' and wrongly held belief that with a new strategy and greater resources, they would provide the 'decisive year'. The decisive year continually failed to materialise.

Although Stewart's fervent opposition to an expanded military presence had little traction in Washington's corridors of power, he was however, supported by a significant number of Afghan experts. One such expert is former Deputy EU Representative to Afghanistan, Michael Semple, who speaks both Dari and Pashto fluently and was described as having 'unrivalled understanding' of tribal areas by Britain's distinguished former Ambassador to Afghanistan, Sir Sherard Cowper-Coles, in his excellent book Cables From Kabul. Such experience and understanding contrasted quite starkly with the staff of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) and equally the US State Department and the UN. In 2008, according to Stewart, the FCO only had three individuals who could speak Dari and none who could speak Pashto, the language of the southern provinces. Moreover, whilst soldiers patrolled the most troubled provinces, civilian officials sat in their air-conditioned compounds in Kabul, sandbagged away from the reality of Afghan life because of an insurance culture that inhibited civilian organisations from doing anything else. Such deficiencies ultimately became a central cause of what Stewart described as 'the humiliating mess in Afghanistan'.

In Stewart's eyes, the depth of isolation caused by the inability of civilian personnel to spend time in troubled regions, inevitably led to a gap between the perceived and actual suitability of new policy initiatives in rural villages. Indeed, in his essay, Stewart described a conversation he had with an educated Afghan on a plane to Kabul who aptly explained how Western terms such as 'comprehensible', 'democracy' and 'market economy' had no direct Afghan translation and thus no connection to Afghan reality. For this Afghan, with a textile engineering background, the Western effort in Afghanistan was akin to 'cutting the suit to fit the cloth'. A case in point was the hundreds of millions of dollars the West spent on establishing an Afghan legal system: Despite the time and money expended training lawyers and building courtrooms, Stewart revealed that 85% of the Afghan population thought the type of informal justice system embodied by a young Taliban commander sitting under a tree was fairer and more efficient than the western constructed alternative.

Towards the end of The Plane to Kabul, Stewart employed a particularly effective, albeit superficially bizarre metaphor for intervention; mountain rescue. When are you are trapped on a mountain, he argued, you do not want a rescuer with a doctorate in mountain rescue, you want someone who knows the terrain, the weather, the context and above all, he emphasised, knows when to turn back instead of pressing on blindly into the unknown without truly understanding the powerful effects of guilt, fear and overconfidence on the mission. Indeed, Stewart blames much of what has gone wrong in Afghanistan on the West's belief that failure is not an option for, in his words, 'it makes failure invisible, inconceivable and inevitable'. In Stewart's opinion, what we needed before we plunged head first into Helmand, was leadership based on a deep understanding of the country and its people, not an overtly scientific counterinsurgency doctrine that said you needed one trained counter-insurgent for every x number of the population.

I would like to end this post by quoting from The Plane to Kabul, the great General Sir Frederick Roberts of the Second Anglo-Afghan War, who in 1880 came to the conclusion that, 'it may not be very flattering to our amour-propre, but I feel sure I am right when I say that the less the Afghans see of us, the less they will dislike us'.
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