Watching history

I write this less with the aim of communicating anything particularly profound to the small number of readers of this blog, but more with the aim of capturing what I am currently thinking so I can refer back to it at a later time to see if I'm right. Though 'right' is a ridiculously narrow concept for history. Perhaps better to say that it will be interesting and perhaps informative to see how I would change my views with the benefit of hindsight, rather than simply right/wrong. 

Maybe that's the point of all these posts. Something to reflect on later. But read on, anyway. It might be interesting.

I think that the rapid collapse of the Afghan national army, and Government, underlines why Joe Biden was right to withdraw from Afghanistan. In 20 years "the West" had failed to establish a stable Afghan state. So the options were stay in perpetuity, like on the Korean border, or leave.

But Afghanistan is not Korea. Is is not a 'frozen war' but a hot war. 'Allied' soldiers, foreigners, Afghan security forces, Taliban, and civilians, particularly, always, civilians, were dying, and if "we" stayed, those deaths would have escalated on all sides. Nobody can credibly claim that, having failed to defeat the Taliban over two decades, we could defeat them this time. No military strategy for "winning" was presented because none existed.

Staying, at current troop levels, was unsustainable. The Taliban, already buoyed by the release of 5,000 of their members by Trump, were gaining ground daily. A protracted war to push they back could not be fought with the troops we had, and the Afghan army practically useless. There would have had to have been a total repudiation of the Trump deal (disgusting as that deal was) and a massive troop increase. Deaths would have spiralled on all sides. We could presumably, once that initial burst of fighting was over and the Taliban were pushed back, have frozen the conflict with our Western troops and our Afghan allies controlling the urban centres, subject to regular terrorist attack, with the remoter regions handed over to warlords, drug gangs and the Taliban. Women in Kabul would still have been in school, and we could salved our consciences that ever time an allied rocket went astray and killed an innocent, that was a price worth paying, that every solider we sent to die went in a noble cause. It is obvious that the Taliban are total shits, and women will be treated as chattels now that they are in charge, but it is not obvious to me that the balance sheet is worth it. Then again, I'm not a woman. Still, we are very keen to talk about women in schools, and not very keen to talk about all the dead people we had to kill to keep them there, whether or not the particular people who ended up dead were bad or not. How much killing is it worth enduring to keep the schools open?

I do not believe - and this is where I could be most wrong, and in being wrong, the balance changes - that the Taliban regime can endure. But the very presence of allied forces justifies its existence. Afghanistan was in stasis, and is was a ghastly status. Poverty was, under our 'rule' endemic. Corruption was endemic. This was true in 'our' areas as well as areas outside our control. It doesn't logically follow that our withdrawal with reverse this, but the abject failure of our attempts to 'develop' the country undermine the rationale for continued occupation. Nation building had failed. Perhaps, just perhaps, under a ghastly time under the 2nd Taliban regime, something better can emerge. Of course, this is wishful thinking, but no more wishful thinking than believing that further occupation would have led to a stable Afghan state at some indefinable point in the future.

Furthermore, the presence of 'our' troops in Afghanistan was an occupation. Over successive general elections the proportion of the electorate voting has declined to 20%. Hamid Karzai could hardly demand that the Americans leave, given that they turned a blind eye to the electoral fraud that saw him elected in 2009, and Ghani could not feasibly claim to represent the majority of Afghans when such a tiny fraction of them voted for him. There was no meaningful democratic mandate for any Afghan Government from 2009 onwards, and therefore no group represent Afghan's who could ask the Americans to leave or hold them to account. I don't think, by this point, it's in any way possible to know whether Afghans in the country as a whole prefer rule by a Ghani puppet government propped up by Americans or the Taliban, who will offer stability and less corruption, if not democracy or prosperity. This is not, of course, to suggest the Taliban have any mandate other than that of force of arms. But then, by the end, neither did the former Government.

Permanent occupation of a country by an outside force is not -- to put it mildly -- a good state of affairs, though obviously it might be considered the least bad one. 

Of course, the binary surge/leave framing might be an over-simplification. Perhaps a small 'surge' could have kept the Taliban at bay, at least until the winter when the fighting tends to die down. But imagine a situation where the Taliban enter into a Government of 'national unity' with Ashraf Ghani. As soon as Western troop levels dropped, the Taliban would have killed him and taken complete control. Which is why Ashraf Ghani, not an idiot, rejected such a deal. 

We could, of course, have done a deal where we handed the entire country over to the Taliban immediately and spirited Ghani and anyone else who wanted to leave out of the country. The optics of that would have been worse than what we have now, though our withdrawal/surrender might have been more orderly.

In short, of course we could have stayed. But an honest appraisal of staying is one where Afghanistan is under permanent western occupation and in perpetual civil war, unable to go back and unable to move on. I'm not sure it is the role for the USA, the UK, or any other country, to keep the demons at bay in a far off land, particularly when they continue to sell arms to other demons, in Egypt and Saudi Arabia and Bahrain and more, and particularly when poverty cannot be fought in their own countries because there is no 'magic money tree'. To suggest that Afghanistan has to stand or fall on its own feet may feel particularly callous, given the likely killings and oppression the Taliban will probably unleash over the coming months and years, yet in the long run things may improve. "Tell that to the women of Kabul" is a reasonable response, but I guess my counter-offer is that telling the families of soldiers, Western, Afghan and Taliban, that the deaths that would have followed another "surge" were worth it rings equally hollow.

I think history may be kinder to Biden, and much less kind to Obama, than the news today would have you believe.  

A distraction

we interrupt the regular service to provide you with a message about contemporary (UK) politics 

For obvious reasons, this year's Ditchley Annual Lecture, given by The Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, is worthy of both comment and analysis.

Superficially it is hard to disagree with the general thrust of the argument, that Government should better reward risk taking, that the Civil Service should have more diversity of thought, that centralising decision-making in London means that the cultural outlook of the majority decision-makers does not reflect the wider cultural outlook of the country, and that the Government is piss-poor at measuring success, and should do better.

But anyone with even a passing interest in UK politics over the last 5 years will have noticed that our politics is now entirely tribal. We are just as split between individuals who identify as pro and anti Brexit as the US is between those who identify as pro and anti Trump. A significant number of former comrades find themselves stuck behind enemy lines - more on the right than the left, where there are plenty of Conservatives aghast at what the current leaders of their nations are doing on trade, security, fiscal policy and common decency yet are unable to align themselves with the Tories/Dems - but on the left, too, though these types are perhaps more used to being out of step with the majority of 'their' tribe. Pro-protectionist anti-immigrant leftists exist, and have existed forever, but are very much in minority, and have been for years.

The lecture is aimed solely at one tribe, and blames their woes solely on a foe with all the realism of Mantel's Thomas Cromwell -- i.e. there are grains of truth, in here, rooted in documented historical fact, but the overall concoction is entirely fictional  -- or perhaps some mythical version of Clive of India as a Hero of the Empire. If I were to ask you what went wrong in 2008, and has failed to go right since, I doubt you'd point the finger of blame at the Civil Service. Maybe you would. Maybe I'm too close. But I suspect the voices that are now claiming the Civil Service is ideologically attached to Europe would, 30 years ago, have claimed that the Civil Service was too slow to adopt to the benefits offered by globalisation. Where politicians lead, Civil Servants follow. The single market was a political creation and one which diminished the powers of Whitehall. It wasn't dreamed up by Mandarins nor do I imagine they were terribly keen on it in the early days, given that power flowed away from them. And we all know that austerity was a political, not technocratic choice. Officials seldom advocate policies which will see their Departmental budgets decimated, or as was the case for several Departments, far worse than decimated.

But I'm going on too long. Many many columns will be written about the impending re-organisation of Whitehall. Here are some others.

But I would like to point out what I think is a flaw at the heart of the argument that we need . It's about Maths and Science. As a physical scientist, I completely reject the assertion that decision-making should be "less reliant on those with social science qualifications and more welcoming to those with physical science and mathematical qualifications".

As a citizen rather than a Civil Servant I've seen policies come and go. Most policies, in my observation, fail or a best offer extremely poor value for money compared to readily available alternatives. Some crash and burn spectacularly, like privatization of probation services, or the Green Deal. Most chunter along, eating money and not doing much active harm or good. Occasionally we hit a great one (in my field, both the boiler regulations, which drove down UK gas use, or Contracts-for-Difference which, in the wind sector at least, have driven renewable electricity prices down beyond our wildest dreams.

But yeah. Policies usually suck. And they usually suck because the real numbers bear no resemblance to the forecast numbers.

So, more numerate people = better policy outcomes?

I'm afraid it's not that simple. There are a lot of numerate people in Government. The Government Economics Service runs the show, so far as policy appraisal (that is, assessment before the fact) goes. They know their stuff. And the Government spends a lot on building complex, often (in my view) over-complex, models to discover the truth.

And there you have it. If your model of the world is wrong, then no amount of mathematics can help you. Let me put to one side any beliefs I have about any given Government's moral model of the world. Let us just assume something morally neutral, like the way people make decisions to buy gas boilers. If your mental model of that "simple" decision is wrong (and, it turns out, it isn't a simple decision at all) no amount of numeracy can dig you out of the hole in which you find yourself. Indeed more complex models (by which we really mean equations, hidden from view, nestling in code) makes it worse, because you cannot easily see (or even difficultly see) where you went wrong, so many twists and turns have you taken.

Big data and machine learning (let us not even pretend that AI has any short or medium term role in policymaking) are a deeper concern. In finance these tools are already used. They make a small number of people a lot of money. They don't, obviously, know anything about the immediate health or outlooks for any given stock, beyond what values humans have already applied themselves, through the buying and selling which provides the data the machines then 'feed' on.

Nothing scares me more than the idea of a data scientist who knows nothing abut decarbonisation using a learning algorithm to find the 'answer' to a complex policy problem. This isn't a joke. If you 'analyse' the data without understanding what real world forces give rise to the data, you can kill lots of people.

If data can be used to provide insights which then allow humans, and most particularly social scientists (I exclude economists from this category), to investigate patterns and find out probably reasons for them, then more power to the data monkeys. But if we believe that the Civil Service is too reliant on Social Sciences, we will fail to generate policy that has a positive impact on citizens, because citizens are rooted in society, and society follows social science 'rules', not the rules of physics.

It took me 9 paragraphs to say that policies depend on a robust understanding of the behaviour of citizens, and that only by properly equipping the Civil Service with Social Scientists - not merely economists - can we ever hope for better policy. That numbers alone mislead without human insight. A lack of understanding of Natural Science, or Mathematics, or Social Science, will lead to choices which, with hindsight, look very foolish.

To illustrate my point with a field that I know something about. Civil Servants, we are told, need to know "how to interrogate climate modelling". Well, the Civil Servants who work on climate already possess this knowledge. Indeed, it is an area where the Civil Service already has deep expertise, and better, can draw on the deep expertise of the Met Office, and others. But that isn't the real issue. The big question is what "interrogate climate modelling" means. It should not mean that Civil Servants should be looking at climate models to better forecast when Hebden Bridge will next flood. Because climate models cannot tell you when Hebden Bridge will next flood. They can't tell you what the probability of Hebden Bridge flooding is. They can't even tell you what the probability of the level of rainfall that last caused Hebden Bridge to flood falling over the next 5 years is. They can tell you what the probability is of that rainfall level occurring according to the model  but (and very few people seem to recognise this) the model is not reality.

What can climate models tell us? Well, if we have a range of climate models all of which can resolve rainfall at the level required to tell us something about Hebden Bridge and floods, we could look at the range of outputs from those models, and perhaps look at how well each model performs historically (a model which doesn't produce weather over the last decade that in any way resembles the actual weather over the last decade is probably a poor guide to future weather). It doesn't give us a numerical probability of Hebden Bridge flooding, because none of the models are reality and the 'average' of all the models certainly isn't a model of reality but it gives us the best possible scientific insight as to whether Hebden Bridge is more likely to flood over the next decade than it did in the last. Which is useful policy-relevant information.

But at this point you can see that it is easy to get lost in the numbers, and begin to believe that the numbers tell you some 'truth'. The do not. They numbers are shadows on the walls of a cave.

I'm not for a moment suggesting that climate modelling is a wasted endeavour or that we should not take notice of the outputs of climate models. It is precisely because climate models tell us that changing the concentrations of GHGs (and particulates) in the atmosphere changes the weather around us that we should pay attention to them, particularly as climate models are significantly more skillful (I don't care what the dictionary says, "skilful" looks awful and both spellings are valid) than anyone who tells you that GHGs don't cause climate change. But our response to climate models, particularly as civil servants, should not be to interrogate the data. It should be to look at the data, and decide what actions are a proportionate response to the evidence available.

What I am talking about here is risk management, at national (and, of course, global) level. The fact that the future is unknowable does not prevent us from making decisions because we can predict, with some greater or lesser certainty, what is likely to happen. I am very uncomfortable with putting numbers on these things, as it gives a false sense of precision. Rather I would suggest we believe that an outcome which all models predict in most circumstances is more likely than one which only some models predict, which is more likely still than an outcome which only one model predicts, and infrequently. (But of course, the low probability event can't be ruled out).

So if "interrogate climate modelling" means understand the strengths and limitations of climate models and use that to develop a risk framework that focuses the available resources for climate change adaptation where we predict they will do most good, and prevents stupid policy (like building in areas which are predicted to be increasingly prone to catastrophic flooding) then I am all for it. But if "interrogate climate modelling" means drilling down into the data to find deeper meaning, then I fear some fundamental misunderstanding of what a climate model is and isn't, has occurred.

I hope by now, if you have made it this far, you recognise that a framework to respond to climate change relies on social scientists just as much as it does on physical scientists (and that mathematicians, while they have an essential role in developing and verifying models, are of limited use when it comes to applying them in the real world).

We live (and continue to live, we hope) in a world of people. If you don't understand people, you can't build effective policy.    

Eerie parallel

Last time Kate was away in Morocco I went to bed safe in the knowledge I would awake to a sane decision by the electorate. Tonight I go to bed dreading the worst.

So, er

Hi

It's been a while. To be honest, Kate and I have been completely preoccupied with Fergus. He's got to a stage where he's so engaging and, well, just lovely (I know, but sometimes I lack the words to express things) that posting on the blog or writing emails (my correspondence levels have dropped to zero) just seems rather unexciting.

And meanwhile, the world is ending.

Kate has been worried about this for a long time. There have probably been 10,001 blog posts on the subject already, and she has probably read them all. Me, I'm new to the subject. I knew it was bubbling along in the background, but since I didn't understand it I assumed that it didn't concern me (a very odd logical position, but probably a default human reaction to big things we can't control, like climate change...)

Anyway, Greece may or may not go pop. But whatever happens, it seems to me that humble Civil Servants like me are pissing in the wind. While we pontificate about decarbonising the UK, and global, economy, a massive financial tsunami (this is not 'literally a financial tsunami' - I heard someone, on the 'Today' Programme no less, claim that hydroelectricity 'literally spins water into money' which sounds like alchemy to me, but I digress) is about to engulf, well, you get the point.

Basically, I think within a year or so we're going to look back and wonder what on earth we thought we were doing.

Another great idea!

"The plans could see addicts lose benefits if they do not co-operate. "

I can see absolutely no drawbacks with inflicting further poverty on people addicted to expensive, illegal drugs. I am a Tory Minister.

What did you do in the Great War, Daddy?

In these parts, we very occasionally stray into the political. It's a broad church, unlike Nick Robinson, who never (to my knowledge) strays from the political towards film reviews.

Domestic politics is a bit boring. I mean, one can pontificate about ABSOs all day long.
"Too many? Not enough?" Or whinge about taxes and the state of the NHS. It's a bit parochial.

International stuff, like wars and diactators and things like that is far more my style. Makes a man feel glad to be alive (and living a long way away from wars and dictators).

A Global Financial Crisis with capital letters all of its own should be just the thing for a blog entry. The epic scale! The grandeur! The easy targets for scorn.

I shall (thankfully) resist the tempatation. The 'crisis' has certainly reinforced the already well recognised fact that nobody actually knows anything. I'm not talking about the bankers here (though I'm a little confused as to how they didn't know what they were buying. When I buy a pie, it's, er, a pie). And it is faintly amusing to see the politicans desperately googling "YOUR NAME HERE + regulation" to find out if they ever mentioned the word in the past, so they can yelp "I told you so!"

but I disgress, as usual.

The people who are really getting my goat are the pundits. "Thought for the day" has been particularly aflicted, since none of the thinkers can possible resist the temptation to have a pop at "greed" as if this means anything.

I haven't got a bloody clue how the financial system works, and you can bet your pension (ooops) that the Bishop of Lansbury-Hickson doesn't either. If he did, I think he'd have something a triffle more intelligent to say than "and as the current financial crisis shows, the era of greed is over". Blimey! How incisive!

I've yet to see or hear a single intelligent thing said about the current crisis, and the paradox is that if such a thing exists I wouldn't recognise it, because I just don't bloody know how it all works.

Politics, again

Hello

This is no time to be smug, especially about events that will end with the deaths of many people, but it's all so bloody obvious.

1 - The USA encourage Ethiopia to invade Somalia and destroy the Islamic Courts (with tactit approval from the EU, who I didn't see opposing the intervention). Result? Relatively peaceful Somalia is plunged back into civil war.

2 - Musharraf (our man in Pakistan) is the next Saddam.

Meanwhile, the developing world think that Zimbabwe is a suitable country to chair the Commission for Sustainable Development.