As the new government finds it feet and starts looking at our involvement in Afghanistan it would seem a new strategy is in the offing.
That strategy comprises of two broad elements
1. Get the fuck out of dodge
2. Pretend it was a victory
After years of failure in Afghanistan the new strategy will be to come up with a sensible disengagement. Lets face facts, we have failed.
The government has failed, the MoD has failed and the senior military leadership has failed.
It might be fashionable to blame crusty old Cold War Generals or penny pinching Treasury officials but the truth is, they are all equally responsible. Trying to undertake a complex operation with the absolute minimum of everything was never going to work and that is making the assumption that it was worth making work in the first place.
That should be Labour’s epitaph, ‘what’s the minimum we can get away with’
With confused strategic objectives that ranged from cutting opium production one day to sending Afghan girls to school the next the real strategic objective has been to coat tail the USA. There is nothing wrong in standing by the USA if we are honest about it but the dishonesty that the current argument of ‘reducing terror on the streets of the UK’ is patently ridiculous. How many British Citizens have been killed in the UK by Islamic fundamentalists and how many have been killed in Afghanistan?
The Afghan population is unwilling to actually do anything other than sit on the fence and wait and see, whilst squeezing every last drop of money out of pockets of Western nations tax payers back pockets.
The execution of the operation has been and continues to be deeply flawed, under resources and plagued by delusional optimism. It has taken the academic and free thinking US forces to come and show the supposed master of COIN how to do it. The student has become the master. Apart from the usual suspects, our NATO partners have been dragged kicking and screaming into a conflict that they perhaps quite rightly judged to foolhardy.
We have lost nearly 300 killed and countless wounded, the cost to the public finances are simply huge and on the ground, despite good news stories from the MoD, there is very little progress.
A cynic might suggest that the current government, having spent many years in opposition complaining about underfunding will have an entirely different perspective now they are in government and might have to stump up the money to do the job properly.
Better to blame those Cold War Generals.
Facing a very real defeat in Iraq we chose to use the line of ‘supporting the Afghanistan mission’ as an excuse, providing a fig leaf for the failures in Basra.
We always seem to fall back on our our successes in Malaya, Oman and particularly Northern Island as the model for this type of operation, without recognising that each is different. Look at the force levels in Northern Ireland or the tactics in Malaya, there are no parallel with Afghanistan. We have failed to apply even our own experiences.
Out of the wreckage of Afghanistan and Iraq the British Armed Forces and Great Britain itself has to recover some of it’s reputation.
I don’t buy into the ‘no one has ever won in Afghanistan’ arguments but it is really difficult to see how we can make any real difference now.
Do we double up and put enough resources in to actually make a real difference or cut and run?
Whatever the strategy…
However beautiful the strategy, you should occasionally look at the results
Winston Churchill
PS, sorry for the sweary bits!
You missed out some major “stakeholders” in the blame list:
1. The Bush government in the US – if they had not been distracted by Iraq, things could have been very different in the early days in the Stan
2. European NATO nations, who could have got more involved a lot earlier
3. The Foreign Office and the State Department, both of which could have done a lot more to deal with….
4. The Karzai Government
But don’t tar all normal Afghan citizens with the same brush, I have met some who are prepared to fight for their ‘freedom’ from the Taliban.
Should we get the hell out of dodge and pretend victory, sure, because bottom line is, we cant afford to put in the effort we would really need to in order to make a difference, plus we know what Obama seems to think about the “special alliance”, so lets “away hame” as they say north of the border…
With this new coalition government’s hasty replacement of the current defence leadership, which is likely to lead to a rapid withdrawal from Afghanistan, rendering at a stroke the ultimate sacrifice made by almost 300 men and women somewhat futile, and the threat of swingeing cuts for those that are left, I am beginning to wonder whether we’ll soon be crying: come back Bob Ainsworth, all is forgiven.
The need to cut the deficit has led our new leadership to conclude that we cannot afford to fight the war in Afghanistan any longer. It raises the valid question about whether we should have ever gone there in the first place.
The decision to fight in Afghanistan was a political decision, not a military one. It seems unfair to blame Sir Jock Strap for any perceived failure in Afghanistan. If the Government of the moment said to our military leaders: we need to be there, how do we do it, then it is the duty of senior military leaders to work out how. Making the best of a bad situation is a British military forte. So any recriminations about Afghanistan should be placed firmly at Tony Bliar’s door. Period.
What our forces have done in Afghanistan is nothing short of brilliant in the circumstances. Our failure, if indeed we are right to call the amount of casualties we have suffered failure, is primarily due to the impact of roadside IED devices. The strategy of denying the Taliban the freedom to control key areas requires boots on the ground. This carries an inevitable risk of offensive reaction by the enemy. So in the truest sense we are involved in a very real war. The problem is that the real enemy is not very obvious.
You have to ask the question: where the Taliban is getting so much explosive material from not to mention the highly sophisticated detonators and other cutting-edge materiel they are using? I don’t know whether any of you have tried to obtain any bomb-making material recently, but it isn’t easy. In such a poor country which suffers from daily shortages of the most basic commodities, it should be well nigh impossible to get it let alone afford it.
The answer is Iran. The truth about Afghanistan is that we’re not fighting the Taliban per se, but a bunch of mercenaries employed and equipped by a genuinely evil regime and one that thinks nothing of executing 16-year old girls for something that wouldn’t even be noticed here. Iran is a big problem and one that’s getting worse with its aggressive nuclear programme. Of course, neither the UK nor US wants to openly admit iran’s involvement in Afghanistan.
Those that truly understand the geo-political landscape say that we have to be in Afghanistan to prevent the country from becoming a hothouse for fast-track terrorist training. Nature abhors a vacuum and if we weren’t there, they argue that it is highly likely Iranian money would pour in, enabling the Jihad against the West to be properly prepared and implemented. If this is true, and I really don’t know whether it is, then quitting Afghanistan could be an extremely false economy.
But, if we are right to be there, the problem is how do you secure such a vast area with such open borders when you have so few troops? As usual, we seem happy to let the Americans with their mighty resources manage the entire operation.
When you don’t have sufficient resources to make a difference, it is a pretty half-assed approach. As Jed, says, it is pointless. A stop-start approach to terrorism is akin to whacking a hornet’s next with a stick: it merely aggravates the problem instead of solving it. Clearly, we cannot preemptively attack Iran. That would be wrong. But we must be under no illusion about the threat it poses. So what do we do? I don’t think the answer is obvious.
What is clear is that if it ever became necessary to fight Iran in a conventional war, then we would need all the battle tanks, infantry combat vehicles, mobile artillery and strike aircraft we could muster. So, Dr Fox needs to assess likely future scenarios very, very carefully, before he tows he party line of cutting the deficit at the expense of all else.
They can’t get out now, I mean what’s a few thousand lives compared to all the profit when the mining starts.
so many people are under the misapprehension that they’re dealing with normal Human Beings, they’re not, ambition, power and allegiance to a higher power(the moneybrokers)makes for a very strange creature
Re:
“1. Get the fuck out of Dodge
2. Pretend it was a victory”
Welcome to counter-insurgency in someone else’s country. Even the trio of better outcomes there (Malaya, Oman, N. Ireland) were, in ways sometimes a little obscure to Western eyes, more or less straight civil wars between two sides. In the first two cases the UK did a good job of supplementing the better-organized side with more capital (human and materiel) to good effect. (Malaya took a few very bloody years before Templer and his staff really cottoned on.) Op Banner tamped down a real guerilla war in the early Seventies but then went on slow bleed for twenty-five more.
Longbow,
I’d worry more about minerals if it wasn’t Afghanistan. Instead, well trained in the art by Pakistani patrons, I think various Afghan factions will spend a couple of decades extorting support from American, Russian, Chinese Iranian, etc. foreign-policy hawks with the promise of lithium-flavoured jam tomorrow and getting just enough out to keep prices high. (Like De Beers!)
Just a grammar-police point: in that second graf it should really read “the side that was both better organized and had more capital (human and materiel)” which would, in the first case, be Malay nationalists against the largely ethnic Chinese Communists, and in the second Sultan Qaboos’ unionist loyalists. (Qaboos who served in the British Army of the Rhine with The Cameronians, talk about another era ….)
Everyone on this site keeps talking about the failure of Basra. Looking on the ground at the moment Basra seems to be in a fairly good position. Especially compared to some places. I think the UK’s decision to pull out in the medium to long term was the right one. The foreign troops are causing more instability in Iraq than they are preventing.
I do agree however about the failure in Afghan. If we are all really honnest Iraq has allot of oil and at the end of the day we need oil. Its worth the cost and risks keeping troops there. Afghanistan has nothing we need or want. There is certainly nothing there to justify the cost in lives and money. At the end of the day the terror attack which prompted our involvment was infact planned in HAmburg and the terrorists trained in Florida. Aghanistan was a man hunt and we cant get the man so whats the point in staying.