The plight of hundreds of Afghan interpreters who have served alongside British forces over the past 20 years is becoming increasingly desperate. They are hunted by a resurgent Taliban. They are executed for “collaboration”. They are ignored by a Home Office refusing to grant many of them a right of resettlement. Our national failure to acknowledge our obligation to these men and their families is a moral catastrophe. In putting things right, we might begin to rescue not only them, but also ourselves.
To the bureaucrats in government, the interpreters are not soldiers. They are mere civilian contractors, easily let go at the end of a job. That is not how it was to those of us on the ground in Afghanistan, where I served a tour of duty in 2009. They were our ’terps. They patrolled with us, ate with us, sweated with us. When we faced the risks of improvised explosive devices and ambushes, the ’terps faced them too, at our side.
I was uncertain of the legitimacy of our presence in Afghanistan. In search of justification of my own place there, I turned to the interpreters, a natural target for my many questions. What did the Afghan people think of us being there, I needed to know. Did they trust us? Were they scared of us? In answering, they interpreted more than the language. They helped all of us to better understand the people, the place, the situation. And while nothing gave me clarity as to the politics, I recall clearly the young men laughing along with our banter, showing me pictures of their family and asking about my own, speaking plainly of their hopes and dreams for themselves and their country. These same men now live in terror. Hunted along with their families they have been abandoned by us, their comrades.
What kind of country asks people, quite literally, to risk life and limb for some obscure national interests and then deserts them in their moment of greatest need? The plight of homeless and jobless British veterans shames us, the covenant between state and citizen-soldier irreparably ruptured. It is no less shameful, and no less a breach of trust, when we fail to care for those who also served, though they are not citizens of this country.
The British state has form here. Our imperial past is littered with injustices perpetrated against black soldiers and auxiliaries serving with British forces. It is a history that is graphically expressed in Rudyard Kipling’s poem, Gunga Din. The Gurkhas and Fijians were ignored and mistreated for decades, outraging the British public. In the first world war, African soldiers were brutally treated and buried in unmarked graves. In the same war, Indian soldiers were denied treatment for shell shock. Black veterans of the second world war faced discrimination over pensions.
The explanation for this moral lapse is clear – though many will refuse to see it (and complain about having it pointed out): racism. The government and its outriders will claim it is “anti-British” to say so, just “woke revisionism”. They are noisily waging their own “culture war”, in which the main tactic is to deny the truth of history when it fails to conform to their romanticised, politicised and whitewashed invention. Imperial Britain was at the forefront of developing the concept of race and applying it as a tool of government, deciding whose suffering counts and whose can be ignored. And now, dreaming of a post-Brexit empire 2.0, the government insists, in official reports, that institutional racism doesn’t exist in the UK. It can’t be part of “our island story”. Perhaps Boris Johnson, instead of inaptly quoting Kipling, might read him properly: “You’re a better man than I am, Gunga Din!”
This mistreatment of Afghan interpreters is not a simple bureaucratic mistake. It is, like the Afghan war itself, the contemporary expression of a continuing historical legacy that we too often refuse to understand. But, maybe, it is also a chance to make the idea of “global Britain” more than an empty slogan, and to reconcile with, rather than hide from, our history. As global challenges and crises increase and intensify – climate, disease, conflict – Britain’s potential contribution becomes clearer: hosting Cop26 and being truly serious about what is happening; sharing vaccines with a world that desperately needs them; reducing conflict rather than fuelling it with arms sales.
The world does not need us to lead it. It just needs us to work alongside others as we once worked alongside our interpreters. They helped me make sense of the situation I was in and to rethink my place in the world. Now is the time for the country to show solidarity to the ’terps who might once again help us to understand where we are, what we have done and what we might, in the future, do better.
Clive Lewis is the Labour MP for Norwich South.