When is military interventionism a good idea?

General the Lord Dannatt – Former Chief of the General Staff.

Ghazi Gheblawi – Libyan surgeon, writer and blogger.

Tom Coghlan – Defence Correspondent for The Times.

One of the saddest cases of military muscles not being flexed when they should have been was perhaps during the Warsaw Uprising in 1944. With support from the allies, the Poles might have liberated Warsaw from Nazi control. Yet - as a result of allied political agendas and Stalin's wish to see Poland on its knees - that support never came. Of course, Poland has been at the centre of many such dilemnas. So the Polish Club (Ognisko), opened shortly after WW2, was an appropriate venue. It was a grand, elegant one too and, to our delight, served affordable Polish beer. During the interval, Tom Coghlan and General Sir Dannatt sat at the bar sipping it, reflecting, no doubt, on their different perspectives and experiences in Helmand province.

Tom Coghlan spent six difficult years in Afghanistan, and has recently reported from Libya (Misrata and Sirte during the final offensive). When I read articles about affairs in the Middle East, they often feel algebraic and I can't grasp the significance of the events. So, to hear from a man who has observed the cultural impact of these campaigns at close quarters and over years – who has written a history of the Taliban in Helmand based on oral accounts - was special. His words had weight, and he had carefully prepared his speech, condensing into it his hopes and fears for a country. “Let me be clear about my view.” He said “Afghanistan has been a complete disaster.”

Coghlan was first posted in the country in 2004, when democracy was meant to take off. Accordingly, he was optimistic, even if his translator explained who he had voted for thus: “the man with a beard and a bow-tie. He must be a clever man.”

However, with time, the cultural imposition of the Anglo-American mission left Coghlan with his 'Eeyorish pessimism'. 'In the end, the Afghans are deeply suspicious of all foreigners […] they think of the West and they see MTV and internet porn coming over the horizon, they see their children saying they don't want to go to the Mosque. And who can blame them. Imagine if the Saudis occupied Britain and told us how to live, held classes telling us that our women should take the veil in order to be pious.' Some particularly patronising gender equality classes served for Coghlan as a microchosm of our mistakes in a country where we were always bound to fail. We will leave a government little fairer than the Taliban one we displaced; after we go, tribal Taliban hegemony will return to create a lawless space, stirred up, as ever, by external powers with their own agendas. Indeed, in one area already abandoned by the Americans, it took a matter of weeks for the regional government to return to its corrupt ways and to re-establish links with theTaliban.

The Libyan campaign, on the other hand, learnt from the mistakes made in Afghanistan and Iraq; the same diplomats were involved and had taken on board the pitfalls. The Libyan rebels (lacking an Islamist agenda, 'a lot of them were young lads wearing heavy-metal t-shirts – which I found somehow reassuring') did not want Nato troops on the ground. They suffered many more casualties as a result, but had ownership of their victory.

Ghazi Gheblawi impressed me as he left. “I really must go” he said, “I have to be in the theatre tomorrow morning”. It transpired that, aside from being a prominent writer, blogger and 'tweep' capable of knocking together a speech about the complexities of interventionism at a day's notice (he accepted my invitation through twitter), Gheblawi is a keyhole surgeon. He told me another interesting thing. The Libyans in London have met every Thursday for the last two or three years. And what do they think? They are astonished that the ills of Gaddafi's regime have only entered the radar of most Brits in the last year. 'This is a 40-year problem!' he said. ''Rebels'' he added, 'was like a new word' for a group of long-dissatisfied people.

Throughout his speech, Gheblawi treated the intervention as a positive thing. 'We got lucky' he said. 'The conditions in Libya were very finely balanced. For example, in Syria, I agree that there needs to be regime change, but I honestly cannot say whether intervention would be right.' Libya was lucky in the sense that there was no precedent for NATO intervention in North Africa, and in the sense that uprisings in other Arab countries arguably merited it more; Libya was lucky geographically and also regarding the European commercial interests in the country.

Unfortunately for Gaddafi, he alienated the middle classes, many of whom left the country in the eighties; Gheblawi contrasted this to the situation in Syria, where the middle classes still err on the side of the Royal Family.

During the Q&A, the gallant President of the Polish Club asked the most fundamental question. He stood at the back and got to the point: when it is not a matter of sovereignty, what are the moral grounds for intervening? Gheblawi answered philosophically: citizens have a right to a certain level of protection. If their own government is not providing it, then it is the obligation of others to do so.

General the Lord Dannatt was an exceptional orator. He spoke about a dozen different conflicts with authority; of course, he has been involved in a fair number of them. His perspective was a broad historical one. 'We put many of these regimes in place forty years ago' he said, 'it is the fact that they haven't evolved or moved on since then which has led to the uprisings of the Arab Spring.' During the Cold War, the army intervened in conflicts which had to do with British sovereignty, for example, in the Falklands war and The Troubles in Northern Ireland ('which was something I didn't really want to get involved in'). Dannatt pointed out the high death-tolls of British forces resulting from these wars: our casualties in the Falklands were only exceeded by the UK losses in Afghanistan last year; Northern Ireland cost the British army roughly the same number of servicemen as both the Afghanistan and Iraq campaigns together.

After the Iron Curtain fell, the army was re-configured to intervene quickly and forcefully and then return home (manifest in the formation of the Allied Rapid Reaction Corps). I think that General Sir Dannatt was endorsing this approach. The moral grounds for intervention became increasingly discretionary (as opposed to sovereignty-related); the goal, roughly stated, was to help failing states. But 'failing state' needs defining and the actuality was trickier than it sounded: 'We quickly found out, for example, in the case of Yugoslavia, that it is very difficult to referee peoples who don't want to be refereed.'

General Sir Dannatt differed from Tom Coghlan in his view of the inevitability of discord in Afghanistan. 'We went into Afghanistan in 2001. If we hadn't taken our eye off the ball going into Iraq in 2003, diverting our resources, things might have turned out differently.' Yet, in a wider sense he was in agreement: 'It's an old cliché to say prevention is better than the cure. But wouldn't it be better if, instead of waiting to intervene, we got alongside governments of failing states and helped them. Wouldn't it be better if we used up-stream intervention.'

The general stressed that the British Army thinks in terms of 'success' in the Middle East, rather than 'victory'. The criterion for success was quite clearly delineated when we entered Afghanistan: suffocating Al Qaeda. So, whether thanks to Western intervention or not, General Sir Dannatt wrapped up the evening with an uplifting thought: 'I bet Osama Bin Laden spent a miserable last week. When he watched the news and saw the unrest across North Africa, he must have been irritated that these were not the Islamist uprisings he had envisaged. These were ordinary people demanding a say in the way they are governed.'

These talks can stake their claim as the best yet. Beforehand, Max and I doubted whether our venture was made for current affairs; now, thanks to our remarkable speakers, we are convinced that current affairs can form a third stream, alongside the Arts and Entreprise.