Book festival: Steeley view of a futile war

ONE of the problems about coming to moral judgment in wartime is the nature of front-line information – an issue that loomed large in two compelling sessions of disclosure. For the veteran journalist Jonathan Steele, the media have equipped us poorly on Afghanistan, toeing the Westminster line to the point where “honest analysis about the futility of the war is almost as rare as it was in Moscow in the 1980s”.

Steele covered this troubled and complicated country for the Guardian during the Soviet occupation. And he drew scathing comparisons between Gorbachev’s pursuit of a political solution to the 1980s military stalemate and president Obama’s tactic of “transition” via Nato withdrawal. “Transition means the war will continue,” he said. “The only thing that will change is the nationality of the people in the garrisons.”

This was a dry, lectern-bound account stealthily suffused with Steele’s passion as it became clear that his judgment is fired by empathy for the needless casualties. Conceding the difficulty of asserting that 400 British soldiers have died in vain, he wondered how long it will be before we are allowed to hear a squaddie’s views echoing those of a Soviet soldier writing home 30 years ago: “I’m so fed up. You don’t know what you’re fighting for, or whether the Afghan people really need us.”

Emotion is an understated but potent ingredient too in the extraordinary story of Paul Broda. Now a retired biochemist, Broda grew up with a father and then stepfather who were distinguished nuclear physicists at a time when the science was strategically vital to the Allies in the Second World War. Both men, separately and for reasons of conscience, passed information on the research to the Russians, and Alan Nunn May – the stepfather – was branded a traitor and imprisoned for breaching the Official Secrets Act.

Broda was circumspect in explaining the men’s behaviour. The Soviet Union was, after all, an ally at the time, and Tam Dalyell in the chair lent support to the idea that the scientists’ actions were credibly coloured by the fear that America might launch some future pre-emptive nuclear strike on a defenceless Russia. But Broda’s research has also been a tender reconstruction of his own family; and when pressed for a moral verdict on his fathers, his answer illustrated another complication of informed judgment: “It’s slightly unfair to ask me – because I love them.”