I agree with all of this:
Why we can’t continue to fight everyone’s wars
Ian Bell
The Herald
September 05 2006
Not so long ago, one of our attentive correspondents accused me of making things up. If only I could, at least where Britain's multiplying military tragedies are concerned. I had written that British forces were preparing for their biggest combat operation since the Second World War. The distinction between an operation and a full-blown campaign was overlooked somewhat in the desire to allege fabrication, but I can bite my tongue with the best of them. The claim was not mine, after all.
On August 9, Lieutenant-General David Richards, the British officer commanding Nato forces in Afghanistan, told the BBC World Service of "persistent low-level dirty fighting" in that country. He said that his troops needed more helicopters and more equipment.
He added: "This sort of thing hasn't really happened so consistently, I don't think, since the Korean War or the Second World War." The general went on to report that British soldiers were enduring "days and days of intense fighting, being woken up by yet another attack, and they haven't slept for 24 hours". If any of this was due to my inventiveness alone, the world would be a better place.
The point is, however, that the British public has only just begun to realise that our involvement in Afghanistan is deep, dangerous and likely to get worse before it gets better. The deaths of 14 men on a Nimrod MR2, 12 of them from Kinloss, will seize headlines, and rightly so. The loss of 37 young Britons, seven of them killed in action in the month of August alone, together with "hundreds" of Afghans – as usual, no-one is making a serious effort to count – will nag at our limited attention spans. But if we do not ask questions now, we never will.
Why are we in Afghanistan, precisely? The Ministry of Defence has already issued a stout rebuttal to several claims – one attributed last week to a "senior civil servant" – to the effect that the risks have been "insufficiently communicated". The brass can, meanwhile, only hint that a force of 5800 service people, 4200 in Helmand province, is undermanned and under-equipped to take on the Taliban. The idea that John Reid, then Defence Secretary, was somewhat cavalier in his description of the job, meanwhile, sends the MoD into a huff.
But the deaths go on. As I write, another Briton is reported killed, with a second seriously injured, in Kabul. Why? In mourning the Nimrod deaths, David Cameron of the Tories said that there is an urgent need to prevent Afghanistan once again becoming "a failed narco-state and global exporter of terrorism". The initial, official description of the British task involved training Afghan security forces, providing and protecting reconstruction aid, and suppressing the drugs trade.
Reportedly, nevertheless, there has been a 59% increase in opium cultivation since our troops were put in harm's way. Of the forces available, only 700 to 800 are designated for combat against an enemy that saw off the Red Army with – let's not begin to touch on ironies – American-supplied Stinger missiles. The Nimrod MR2 has been in service since the 1980s and is not, to put it no higher, state of the art. Before we begin to debate the need to support Hamid Karzai's elected government, we should ask whether the need can be met, and whether it is Britain's duty to return to an imperial killing ground.
The British Army will never accept that it cannot cope: such is the ethos. The military also insists that casualties among "insurgents" far exceed British losses, thus far, in this war of attrition. But it is also accepted that an Iraq effect is being witnessed in the Afghan hills. Foreign fighters – Chechen, Syrian, Egyptian, Pakistani, Yemeni, Saudi and even British – are being identified. Is anyone surprised? Osama bin Laden earned his tin badge, after all, in an earlier Afghani fight against the infidels.
Prior to the deployment of troops in Helmand, largely to reduce the pressure on America's overstretched forces, the usual leaks suggested that the generals harboured deep forebodings. They were warning the politicians, so it was said, that Afghanistan could become very messy indeed. Now those same, unattributable voices can be heard expressing surprise and dismay. It is worse than even they imagined it might be.
The Taliban has not only put up a fight, but seems to have welcomed the challenge in its lust for martyrdom, paradise and self-determination. Its fighters know that the west cares little about Afghan deaths, but they understand how a savage blow to a community such as Kinloss sends its ripples of grief and bewilderment through a small country. After Iraq, after Lebanon, Afghanistan is of a piece with one Prime Minister's recklessness.
I try to avoid sounding like an armchair field marshal, believe it or not. For all that, I understand two simple things. First is that headline casualty figures do not begin to describe the effects of constant warfare. An entire generation of British service people, particularly in the army, is being scarred to its soul by unremitting combat for the sake of causes "insufficiently communicated". The squaddies do not fully understand their mission, but they understand deceit, a lack of adequate equipment and political madness.
I grasp a second truism: do not start a war that you cannot win. Islamists of whatever stripe, in Iraq, Afghanistan or Lebanon, have identified a fundamental weakness in western militarism. Britons are back in the great game as part of a "Nato-led international operation to bring stability" to the many Afghans who despise the lunacy of the Taliban.
But as Israel has just learned, you cannot overwhelm a guerrilla movement unless you elect to overwhelm an entire country, an entire population. How many "boots on the ground" might that require, do we think?
Put it no higher: more boots than Britain can summon, not least when another pair of young men have just been killed in Basra thanks to a roadside bomb and a lack of armoured plating. None of this is intended to undermine morale. The realities of life and death for no obvious purpose in foreign fields will do that job, whatever I write or think. All we possess, in our mostly-safe European home, is the right to question a huge cost in blood and treasure for no identified reason.
Set a few failed states to rights? I could give you a list. Afghanistan would feature no higher than the middle of the table. Trust our leaders? I could offer chapter and verse. Quoting one's own copy is a deplorable habit, but I wrote several things before the Iraq war was launched. One said that no weapons of mass destruction existed. Another said that civil war would follow an incursion with a grisly inevitability. If only it had been me, rather than our Prime Minister, who resorted to making things up.
We cannot fight everyone's wars. As things stand, Britain's armed forces, for all their nuclear pomp, cannot fight one police action, far less two, in places in which we are not welcome. Afghanistan is bad, and about to become very much worse. For the sake of suffering Kinloss, we need to begin to pay attention.
Posts
