Maj Gen James Cowan is CEO of the HALO Trust and a former British Army officer.
The percentage of the global population killed by conflict hit a post-war low of 0.0002% in 2005.
It is ironic that this date coincides with the nadir of US involvement in Iraq, a war that has become emblematic in the popular imagination for reckless intervention. Perhaps it was only therefore natural that nations like Britain should have used the apparent end of history as a reason to move expenditure from foreign to domestic priorities.
And yet the reality is that, since that low point in 2005, the world has seen an alarming rise in conflict. Indeed, a Bank of England survey this month revealed that 93% of financial firms consulted cited geopolitics as the biggest potential threat to the UK’s financial system.
Britain and America’s withdrawal from Iraq led directly to the rise of ISIS and a second far bloodier war. The 2013 House of Commons vote not to intervene in the Syrian war sentenced that country to seemingly endless conflict. The treatment of Libya by Britain and others has also left that country broken.
While the West stood and watched, Putin began the reconquest of his ‘Near Abroad’ in Chechnya, South Ossetia, Abkhazia, Armenia and Transnistria. The West’s failure to respond to the 2014 conquest of Crimea and parts of the Donbas set the conditions for full-scale invasion eight years later. In February 2022, Putin calculus that the West did not have the courage to stop him swallowing Ukraine was informed by the ignominy of the Kabul evacuation.
The West has ignored a prolonged conflict in Myanmar and three major wars in Africa – in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Ethiopia’s Tigray region, and Sudan. Vast numbers of Africans have died without enough people caring. Beyond these active conflicts, most of the nations of the Sahel have either fallen to military coups or collapsed into civil strife.
People in Britain may appear blind to the suffering of those African nations, but they are acutely conscious of everything that has befallen the Middle East: the murder of innocent Israelis at the hands of Hamas, the catastrophe that has befallen Gaza, the agony of Houthi controlled Yemen, and the existential battle between Israel and Iran that dominate the headlines.
In the UK, it wasn’t just defence spending that suffered: after more than a decade of consensus that 0.7% of our GDP should be spent on development assistance, the rate was cut by the Johnson government.
I am the only CEO of a major UK NGO both to have been a senior British army officer and a leader of a humanitarian organization. The HALO Trust saves lives and restores livelihoods in 30 conflict affected countries. We do this by destroying landmines, controlling small arms and blowing up unexploded bombs. I believe that the acute nature of the global crisis caused by multiple simultaneous conflicts can no longer be ignored.
War is not just evil in its own right, it destroys livelihoods, uproots communities from their homes, inflicts sexual violence on women, crushes children’s education and profoundly harms human health.
Even if we felt not an ounce of moral responsibility for people beyond Britain’s shores, we should care about our national interest.
Britain has suffered four economic shocks in quick succession: the financial crash, Brexit, Covid and Ukraine have all greatly damaged our prosperity. These are all shocks that show beyond all reasonable doubt that Britain may be an island, but it cannot stand in isolation.
As Andrew Mitchell points out in his recent Conservative Home comment piece, the UK faces a massive immigration crisis which cannot be disaggregated from the myriad crises engulfing the Middle East, Europe and Africa. This summer, Britain was affected by the worst civil disorder seen in living memory, the root of which were fears over uncontrolled irregular migration, much of which is a consequence of the vast human suffering emanating from conflict.
And yet instead of tackling this problem at source, the UK has spent billions on housing refugees in hotels. The largest group of irregular migrants are Afghans. My own charity works in Afghanistan, where we employ 2,500 staff clearing landmines. Each Afghan employee of HALO has about 20 dependents. That’s 50,000 people able to stay in Afghanistan and earn a decent wage. But it doesn’t end there: we calculate that four million Afghans have a sustainable livelihood on land decontaminated by HALO. Britain allocates £2million a year to this work, a fraction of the money it spends on housing Afghans in UK.
Recent parliamentary reviews into the UK’s defence and development policy are opportunities for Britain to recover its confidence and correct the global harm it has done to itself in cutting foreign expenditure. Our future prosperity is impossible unless we meet our defence and overseas aid responsibilities.
Maj Gen James Cowan is CEO of the HALO Trust and a former British Army officer.
The percentage of the global population killed by conflict hit a post-war low of 0.0002% in 2005.
It is ironic that this date coincides with the nadir of US involvement in Iraq, a war that has become emblematic in the popular imagination for reckless intervention. Perhaps it was only therefore natural that nations like Britain should have used the apparent end of history as a reason to move expenditure from foreign to domestic priorities.
And yet the reality is that, since that low point in 2005, the world has seen an alarming rise in conflict. Indeed, a Bank of England survey this month revealed that 93% of financial firms consulted cited geopolitics as the biggest potential threat to the UK’s financial system.
Britain and America’s withdrawal from Iraq led directly to the rise of ISIS and a second far bloodier war. The 2013 House of Commons vote not to intervene in the Syrian war sentenced that country to seemingly endless conflict. The treatment of Libya by Britain and others has also left that country broken.
While the West stood and watched, Putin began the reconquest of his ‘Near Abroad’ in Chechnya, South Ossetia, Abkhazia, Armenia and Transnistria. The West’s failure to respond to the 2014 conquest of Crimea and parts of the Donbas set the conditions for full-scale invasion eight years later. In February 2022, Putin calculus that the West did not have the courage to stop him swallowing Ukraine was informed by the ignominy of the Kabul evacuation.
The West has ignored a prolonged conflict in Myanmar and three major wars in Africa – in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Ethiopia’s Tigray region, and Sudan. Vast numbers of Africans have died without enough people caring. Beyond these active conflicts, most of the nations of the Sahel have either fallen to military coups or collapsed into civil strife.
People in Britain may appear blind to the suffering of those African nations, but they are acutely conscious of everything that has befallen the Middle East: the murder of innocent Israelis at the hands of Hamas, the catastrophe that has befallen Gaza, the agony of Houthi controlled Yemen, and the existential battle between Israel and Iran that dominate the headlines.
In the UK, it wasn’t just defence spending that suffered: after more than a decade of consensus that 0.7% of our GDP should be spent on development assistance, the rate was cut by the Johnson government.
I am the only CEO of a major UK NGO both to have been a senior British army officer and a leader of a humanitarian organization. The HALO Trust saves lives and restores livelihoods in 30 conflict affected countries. We do this by destroying landmines, controlling small arms and blowing up unexploded bombs. I believe that the acute nature of the global crisis caused by multiple simultaneous conflicts can no longer be ignored.
War is not just evil in its own right, it destroys livelihoods, uproots communities from their homes, inflicts sexual violence on women, crushes children’s education and profoundly harms human health.
Even if we felt not an ounce of moral responsibility for people beyond Britain’s shores, we should care about our national interest.
Britain has suffered four economic shocks in quick succession: the financial crash, Brexit, Covid and Ukraine have all greatly damaged our prosperity. These are all shocks that show beyond all reasonable doubt that Britain may be an island, but it cannot stand in isolation.
As Andrew Mitchell points out in his recent Conservative Home comment piece, the UK faces a massive immigration crisis which cannot be disaggregated from the myriad crises engulfing the Middle East, Europe and Africa. This summer, Britain was affected by the worst civil disorder seen in living memory, the root of which were fears over uncontrolled irregular migration, much of which is a consequence of the vast human suffering emanating from conflict.
And yet instead of tackling this problem at source, the UK has spent billions on housing refugees in hotels. The largest group of irregular migrants are Afghans. My own charity works in Afghanistan, where we employ 2,500 staff clearing landmines. Each Afghan employee of HALO has about 20 dependents. That’s 50,000 people able to stay in Afghanistan and earn a decent wage. But it doesn’t end there: we calculate that four million Afghans have a sustainable livelihood on land decontaminated by HALO. Britain allocates £2million a year to this work, a fraction of the money it spends on housing Afghans in UK.
Recent parliamentary reviews into the UK’s defence and development policy are opportunities for Britain to recover its confidence and correct the global harm it has done to itself in cutting foreign expenditure. Our future prosperity is impossible unless we meet our defence and overseas aid responsibilities.