The Afghan Papers

Committing Britain to War in Helmand, 2005–06

Michael Clarke

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• eBook ISBN: 9781136217623
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Military & Maritime History
• Index: History

In 2006, British forces entered the Helmand Province of Afghanistan in what would become one of the defining military campaigns of the decade. At great cost in blood and treasure, the UK waged a protracted counter-insurgency against a resurgent Taliban.

But how was the decision taken to commit Britain to such a difficult and drawn out campaign? The Afghan Papers is the result of private interviews with and frank contributions by some of the most important actors in the fateful decision. Former generals, politicians and civil servants contribute to an original RUSI analysis that provides a startling insight into the decision to commit the UK to a war – a decision wracked by conflict, incoherence and confusion.

THE HELMAND DECISION

MICHAEL CLARKE

The United Kingdom’s operations in Afghanistan since 2006 have become highly controversial. There have been many accounts of the tactical skill and bravery of UK forces on the ground. Some officers have written their memoirs, journalists have published their accounts of being embedded with the soldiers on the front line, and TV series have revealed a good deal of the reality of life in a theatre of operations.¹ Other accounts, however, have presented the Afghanistan operation as confused in every key respect; a strategic blunder that is heading towards irredeemable failure.² The decision to withdraw from combat operations ‘by 2015’ is seen in these accounts as damage limitation and political expediency, rather than any meaningful completion of the mission.

Whether or not the Afghanistan operation is eventually perceived as a sorry strategic failure, a political success, or perhaps some messy compromise that nevertheless achieves some useful security objectives after 2015, its outcome will have a major effect on the burgeoning debate about strategy – national strategy and military strategy – now underway in the UK.

Afghanistan cannot be divorced from this wider debate. The Afghanistan decisions of 2005 and 2006 are increasingly seen as a significant example of the problem the UK has acknowledged it has in formulating a national strategy and carrying it through with military coherence.³ In July 2011, the House of Commons Defence Committee published a critical report that expressed deep disquiet about the way the early decisions to engage in Afghanistan seem to have been made. It regarded as ‘unacceptable’ three years of deployment in Afghanistan that was based on ‘a failure of military and political co-ordination’. The implications of initial deployment decisions, it said, were not ‘fully thought through’.⁴ The report put a good deal of new evidence into the public domain and the Committee also had the benefit of private briefings before drawing its conclusions. In addition, the published evidence of the Chilcot Inquiry, dealing with all aspect of the Iraq operation, involved some witnesses making a number of authoritative statements that also added to the understanding of some of the key Afghan decisions. Military and political writers increasingly express a consensual view that the UK is ‘not very good’ at strategy and that its politico-military decisions over the last decade have, at best, been less than satisfactory, and, at worst, have let down the men and women who have fought in Iraq and Afghanistan.⁵

A detailed discussion of the origins of the UK’s Afghan campaign is therefore of some importance in the wider strategic debate. It offers evidence to support both those who argue for the underlying coherence of the UK’s strategy in South Asia and Afghanistan, and those who cannot see any real strategic logic in the flow of decisions that were made during the critical early period. Most are agreed that tactical innovation by the armed forces on the ground – learning and adapting, applying new lessons, finding ways to prevail – has been impressive. But good tactics cannot rescue bad strategy; at most they might disguise some of its failings.

Most observers are also agreed that UK forces have struggled to dominate their tactical environment in Afghanistan; rather, they have been playing catch-up in a rapidly changing military (and political) environment. Tactical evolution in Afghanistan has certainly been rapid. The 1,000 or so UK military personnel who had operated with ISAF forces from 2001, mainly in Kabul and in posts in the north, were effectively replaced by a combat force of 3,300 troops in the southern province of Helmand during the spring of 2006. By the autumn of that year their number had jumped to 6,300 troops in theatre, and by July 2007 to almost 7,600. In 2009, the government of Prime Minister Gordon Brown confirmed that, after a temporary increase, the number would be held at ‘an enduring maximum of 8,300’,⁶ but that was quickly exceeded and despite (Brown’s successor) Prime Minister David Cameron’s troop withdrawals during 2011, numbers in theatre actually peaked at just over 10,000. Even in the current period of drawdown from combat roles, numbers are planned to remain relatively high in the approach to the deadline at the end of 2014.

Of more pressing concern than troop numbers, the threat posed by improvised explosive devices (IEDs) is a good indicator of the changing nature of the operation and the constant difficulty the forces experienced in controlling the tactical environment. IED attacks against UK forces in the province increased steadily from June 2006 to December 2007, notwithstanding a temporary fall in the autumn of 2006, reaching peaks of thirty-two attacks in a single month.⁷ In the two years after 2006, IED attacks in southern Afghanistan increased fourfold, and then more than twofold again in the following two years up to 2010.⁸ By March 2010, 78 per cent of all IED attacks in Afghanistan were in the UK’s area of operations and were causing the vast majority of UK military casualties.⁹

This threat, in turn, required the Ministry of Defence to rush into service a number of new mine-resistant vehicles; this has not only created a diverse and expensive fleet to operate, but also effectively put the final nail into the coffin of the army’s cherished programme to develop a single, generic medium-weight armoured vehicle for the long-term future.¹⁰ Snatch Land Rovers were immediately unsuitable in Afghanistan. Vector and Mastiff vehicles, introduced in 2007, were also limited; one too light underneath, the other poor in off-road conditions.¹¹ The Snatch Vixen was introduced in 2008 and then finally, in 2009, a fleet of over 560 new armoured vehicles came into service, including Jackal, Mastiff 2, Ridgeback, Panther, and the tactical support vehicles, Wolfhound, Husky and Coyote.¹²

Such adaptations, and many others, reflect well on the ability of the military, and the Urgent Operational Requirements (UOR) procedures, to address issues such as the IED threat as they have arisen. Despite persistent press speculation over these years that the military were not supplied with all the equipment they subsequently requested, there is no evidence to contradict the assertion of senior commanders and politicians that once the operation was underway no request for equipment was ever turned down.¹³ British troops and commanders in Afghanistan are now better equipped than any force the UK has ever fielded anywhere. But the evolution in equipment in these ways was never part of an integrated plan for the future of the forces, and they have created a public image more of improvisation rather than of coherent adaptation.

The key decisions over the Afghanistan campaign have come back to the home front. After so publicly playing catch-up on the ground, it is hardly surprising that domestic public support for the campaign has been tepid and sometimes confused. In 2006, unambiguous public support for the operation stood only at 31 per cent. By 2009, and in a large survey of 20,000 people, it stood at only 18 per cent. Opposition to the operation was running at somewhere between 51 per cent and 56 per cent in 2009 polls.¹⁴ Little wonder that the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition government elected in May 2010 was keen to create the trajectory of a guaranteed withdrawal between now and 2015 something that could be well advanced by the next general election. If Afghanistan is viewed as little more than a national strategic blunder, then a political decision to escape from it as soon as possible is entirely sensible. But if it is viewed as part of a more coherent strategy towards South Asia in general and Afghanistan in particular, then the announcement of withdrawal deadlines runs the risk of fundamentally undermining that politico-military strategy.

There are two plausible interpretations of policy that took UK forces into the situation they found themselves in at the beginning of 2007, moving towards a deployment of over 7,000 troops, coping with a growing IED threat and finding themselves having to learn and adapt quickly to changing circumstances. One emphasises coherent national purposes and the momentum of international commitments; the other emphasises ad hoc decisions and the difficulties of creating a meaningful strategic focus in the face of multiple challenges. The contrast lies between a coherent strategy that reacts to longer-term international trends, and a series of ad hoc and partisan responses that are retrospectively rationalised as a strategy.

A Coherent Strategy: Responding to International Momentum

Viewed in the context of events since 2001, the political intent behind the Afghan policy of the US and its allies could be stated quite succinctly; to expel Al-Qa’ida from the territory of Afghanistan where it had partly hijacked the Taliban government and launched attacks on the US, and then to deny terrorists any ungoverned space in the region for future operations. While the US worked to track down Al-Qa’ida leaders in their counter-terrorism operations around the Afghan border, the allies of the US supported efforts to create some sustainable governance in a post-Taliban Afghanistan that would remove the ungoverned spaces. This was the thinking behind the original International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) mission of December 2001. It expressed the political intent of the US and its allies clearly enough, and the military implications would evolve from that.

By 2002, the line of logic was that the ISAF role could not be performed unless its remit covered the whole country, not just Kabul and areas of the north, as only this would allow the Afghan Transitional Administration to become the post-Taliban government. Thus, when NATO agreed to take over its responsibility for ISAF in early 2003 as a ‘nation-building exercise’, it embodied the ‘clock-face’ plan to extend security operations from the north to the west, then to the south, and then finally to the east of the country which would encompass the most vigorous US counter-terrorism efforts. The alternative logic would be to stand by while a barely sustainable Afghanistan effectively split into a Pashtun heartland in the south, extending across the Durand Line border into the Pashtun areas of Pakistan, and an isolated north around Kabul with the western city of Herat probably falling even further under longstanding, historic Iranian influence. Having committed itself to make Afghanistan properly ‘governable’, the international community had to be prepared ultimately to extend security and development of the whole country in order to leave behind something sustainable. The strategy was based on the apparent success of the Provincial Reconstruction Teams (PRTs) – a concept that the UK had helped to pioneer – to create local development in key areas of the country. The PRTs would be the route to sustainability for a new Afghan government, though they would have to be protected and work in areas that were generally secure. The military would be the servant of the PRTs.

The military component of this strategy, however, remained hard to determine before 2005, since there was no clear idea of how difficult or easy it might be to ensure security across the country – the necessary but not sufficient condition for the governance and development Afghanistan. What was certain, however, was that US troops would ultimately have to be part of the equation, both for their potential numbers and the political weight they carried. The willingness of Washington’s allies to put troops on the ground in Afghanistan was, in turn, the prerequisite for getting US troops into the theatre in some numbers. So the grand strategic argument was simple, and somewhat circular. If Afghanistan was part of the international terrorist problem, it would have to be transformed in some way. The original ISAF plan would fail in this respect, unless it was extended to the whole country. To make this work, US numbers would be required, but in order to trigger this increased deployment, allied nations would have to commit in some serious way. All this, to assist the US in its own strategy and to help NATO’s credibility, both in Washington and in Europe.

For the British, however, this logic had particular force. Acting as a focus for such an allied strategic approach, the UK would stay close to the US, helping the Americans see through the strategic logic of their own Afghan policy. It would give the UK opportunities to capitalise on its historic influence with Pakistan, and it would help reinvigorate NATO with a mission that was consistent with the Alliance’s more global aspirations. In this last respect, the mission would also validate NATO’s Allied Rapid Reaction Corps (ARRC), under UK command, that would run the ISAF mission in the first instance. The ARRC was one of the key sources of UK military influence in the Alliance.

If all this was logical, and better than the alternative of an unsustainable and fractured Afghanistan, there were nevertheless some costs and dangers in this approach. The strategy was necessarily multinational and as such created a momentum of its own for a country such as the UK. Through its size and centrality, the US might have chosen to flip its strategy or do a complete U-turn; and smaller powers, as minor contributors, might have chosen to participate or not. But the UK positioned itself as a significant strategic player in the game and the potential costs of U-turns or irresolute behaviour would be very high indeed. Having engaged with the need to ‘do something’ about Afghanistan in late 2001, the momentum of multinational action was very hard to escape. The choice appeared to be to let the strategy fail, or engage more with it.

However, the strategy was already saddled with the mistakes the international community made in the very early years; the 2001 B...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• About the Authors
• Acknowledgements
• Acronyms and Abbreviations
• Maps
• Introduction
• The Helmand Decision
• Flawed ‘Comprehensiveness’: The Joint Plan for Helmand
• Canada in Regional Command South: Alliance Dynamics and National Imperatives
• UK National Strategy and Helmand
• Afghanistan and the Context of Iraq
• Conclusion