by Gordon Brown
Our armed forces suffered not just a large loss of life but also an appalling loss of limbs with soldiers experiencing life-shattering injuries that will plague them for a lifetime. I can only marvel at the way those wounded in conflict worked day after day to recover. Having met brave men and women testing themselves to the limits at their rehabilitation centre, Headley Court, I can never forget what I saw and will always regard them as heroes.
How was it that six years after the invasion, long after the Taliban had been routed from Kabul, the conflict in Afghanistan got so much worse?
We were reaping the whirlwind of a fateful decision made in mid-2005 when Britain volunteered to take responsibility for Afghanistan’s most dangerous province, Helmand. Along with Kandahar, this was the spiritual home of the Taliban and the global centre for opium production. Helmand was only one of thirty-four provinces in Afghanistan but, with its land area covering 10 per cent of the country, it was the largest at 20,000 square miles, nearly three times the size of Wales. It was overwhelmingly rural – 1,000 villages with few big towns – and so depopulated that only around 900,000 people lived there, just forty-five per square mile, most of them in a relatively minor strip around the Helmand river. This vast, largely empty space was a prize the Taliban craved and the drug lords fought over. A third of the heroin produced in Afghanistan, itself responsible for 90 per cent of global supply, came from Helmand’s opium poppies.
The years that followed Britain’s decision to assume responsibility for Helmand were to exact the heaviest of costs – not just in money spent and public trust eroded, but most tragically in lives lost. At the peak, nearly 9,500 British troops were stationed in Helmand, most of them in Camp Bastion. From scratch, we had built a veritable city in the desert with its own airstrip, its own hospital and a twenty-five-mile perimeter fence. But to police the province, our troops had also to be spread across its unwelcoming terrain: at the height of our Helmand incursion, British soldiers were stationed at 137 bases. In brief, taking responsibility for Helmand had the effect of changing the whole basis of our presence in Afghanistan from counterterrorism to all-out war.
Ours is sometimes called the fourth Afghan war. The Anglo-Afghan wars of 1839–42, 1878–80 and 1919, fought to protect Britain’s interest in north-west India from potential Russian incursions, had led historians to call Afghanistan the graveyard of British military ambitions. But as our troops landed in 2001, there was complete unity across all political parties about our objective – to destroy al-Qaeda following the terrorist attacks of 9/11, and oust the al-Qaeda-supporting Taliban. At the outset, Britain provided 4,000 troops to Afghanistan, and the first general commanding the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) in Afghanistan was British. By 2002, the ISAF coalition had not only installed a new president, Hamid Karzai, but a General Assembly of Afghan Tribes had delivered a new constitution.
Our stated aim was to start in Kabul, move north where we had the support of the anti-Taliban Northern League, and then go west and south, in a reverse clockwise direction. As the coalition expanded out of Kabul into the north, the Treasury funded the first allied Provincial Reconstruction Teams designed to extend the authority of the central government and tackle the narco-economy; and, at the same time, I signed off funds designed to build up a strong and efficient Afghan army and police force, that could over time empower the country to survive on its own. At a later date, we were to be accused of an overambitious programme of nation-building – of trying to build Switzerland in a ‘medieval’ country. But in practice the allied forces went in with the support of the Northern League and encountered little opposition. They did not attempt the same kind of direct rule as in Iraq but quickly installed an Afghan-led government with little more than a light footprint outside Kabul.
There was, however, certainly mission deepening, if not mission creep, as objective was piled on top of objective – not only to destroy the remnants of al-Qaeda and defeat the Taliban but also to create and strengthen the Afghan police and train the army, install democracy, break the power of the drug lords, promote economic development, and bring education and healthcare to Afghan families. All the while, the most basic objective – to protect our own troops – was becoming even more difficult.
The early results – a growing economy, improved health and education, and then elections, tinged by corruption but still for the most part free – seemed encouraging. But soon the Afghan government drifted, its writ weak, its services threadbare, with corruption rife. Obsessed with establishing a strong central government in Kabul, the allied effort underestimated the importance of legitimacy out in the provinces. Our light footprint was fine if the Afghan government united the country and brought in all tribes and ethnic groups; but it did not. By 2005 the Taliban had been rejuvenated in their home bases of Helmand and Kandahar.
These early years from 2001 to 2005 should have been the time when, with the Taliban in retreat, we finished the job in Afghanistan. But Anglo-American resources and attention were concentrated on Iraq. These were, in retrospect, wasted years. And, by 2005, with half the country viewed as ‘ungoverned space’, fears grew of a divided Afghanistan and the likelihood of a breakaway Pashtunistan dominated by the Taliban and other terrorist organisations. In the provinces most at risk, Helmand and Kandahar, there were only a handful of coalition troops, no more than a hundred, conducting anti-terrorist missions.
Matt Cavanagh, a strategic thinker whose family had roots in the armed forces and who was my leading defence and security adviser, has published his own study of what became the British rush into Helmand. At the point when we were asked to do more by the US, he observes, the government should have conducted an in-depth review of what could be achieved and the cases ‘for’ and ‘against’ extending our commitment when we were already overstretched in Iraq. Instead the issue was put in stark and simple terms to be decided immediately: Kandahar or Helmand? Kandahar was probably the more strategically significant province, less intractable and a more natural centre of gravity for British interests. Helmand was, however, the centre of the narco-economy and Britain was leading the anti-narcotics work across the country. But that was not the main reason why we came to locate in Helmand; or, by some accounts, let Canada choose Kandahar while we inherited Helmand by default. As Nick Beadle, one of our leading military experts with whom I worked closely, has concluded, there was ‘a failure to persuade the US to support us, as against the preference of the Canadians’.
In Tony Blair’s account of the war, he frames decisions about Afghanistan as part of the long struggle against Islamic extremism. And when he explains our deployment to Helmand his rationale is that having started we could not walk away or lose heart. He was instinctively in favour of the bolder course, taking on the more difficult Helmand assignment. The matter did not come to the Cabinet until very late – 29 January 2006. The minutes of the meetings running up to the decision – overseen by the Defence Secretary, John Reid – reflect an urgency to do something, that we needed to ‘turn things around before it is too late’. As Matt Cavanagh records, ‘there was relatively little debate at ministerial level, in the Reid group (the small ministerial team working out the tactics) or elsewhere, about the detail of the plan, including troop numbers’.
At this point Des Browne, then Chief Secretary to the Treasury, and my representative in the discussions, warned me about the open-ended nature of the commitment we were about to make. He was strongly opposed to it, but not on grounds of cost. The suggestion that the Treasury sought to impose a cap on either troop deployments or spending is just plain wrong. Our objections were similar to those of Sir Jock Stirrup, appointed Chief of the Defence Staff in April 2006, who was later to explain in graphic terms: ‘We don’t know much about the South, but what we do know is that it’s not the North. It’s real bandit country.’ Like him, Des and I were sceptical of what an open-ended commitment to Helmand – still devoid of a plan for development – could achieve.
John
Reid is right to remind us that he delayed any decisions until he had assurances about allied support, especially from Canada and the Netherlands; guarantees about the funding of the operation; and clarity about the role that the Department for International Development (DfID) would play in reconstruction and development. The mission was to be limited in geographical scope and strategic objectives, but the prior question remained: what could we achieve by being there in the first place?
Our efforts were designed to focus less on combat and more on reconstruction – in the terminology of the Ministry of Defence, a ‘hearts and minds’ operation, rather than a ‘search and destroy’ one. The aim was, as John told the House of Commons, ‘a seamless package of democratic, political, developmental and military assistance’ to slowly transform the political, social and economic fabric starting with the main population centres. In any event, preparations were short-circuited – by the end of 2005 there had been just one small intelligence reconnaissance mission – because of a deadline: Tony felt we had to announce our new stance at the London conference on Afghanistan in late January 2006. There, he not only announced our choice of Helmand but set the starting date of April 2006 for a three-year deployment.
At first, with 8,500 British troops still in Iraq, we could dispatch only a 3,300-strong brigade-level force. As our troops moved in, John Reid said: ‘If we came for three years here to accomplish our mission and had not fired one shot at the end of it, we would be very happy indeed.’ But what was originally a limited exercise with restricted aims would quickly escalate – and in a terrain where we knew little of the physical, human or political geography.
Our commander in Helmand, Brigadier Ed Butler, planned to concentrate our troops within a central zone, referred to as the ‘lozenge of security’, and around populated areas, which were called ‘ink spots’, in the provincial capital Lashkar Gah, Gereshk, and our base at Camp Bastion. This was not dissimilar to our counterterrorism strategy in Malaysia forty years before, during the so-called ‘Confrontation’ of 1963–6, but soon the ink of conflict flowed all across the province.
Within weeks Brigadier Butler was under pressure from President Karzai and the governor of Helmand, Mohammad Daoud – an anti-corruption leader we wanted to support – to deploy outwards to more far-flung towns and villages to stop them falling to the Taliban. If we did not take on the Taliban in the north, the logic went, they could then threaten us in the centre of the province. In the event, our troops on the ground – there originally to provide security in a small area – were, as a House of Commons Foreign Affairs Select Committee later described it, ‘fighting for their lives no less than two months later in a series of Alamos in the north’. That summer, British troops charged up the valley in what became known as the ‘platoon house’ strategy: up to a hundred men, but usually around thirty to thirty-five holding outposts facing Taliban insurgents in the province’s remote areas.
This was a different kind of operation from the one that had been sketched out on the drawing board. Moreover, this new strategy was being decided in a time of flux when John Reid was moving to the Home Office, Des Browne was succeeding him at the Ministry of Defence and Jock Stirrup was taking over as Chief of the Defence Staff. Without a Cabinet decision, we had moved from a peacemaking operation focused on development to all-out combat, from counterterrorism to counter-insurgency.
At first the Taliban tried to take us on in hand-to-hand fighting, but by the end of 2006, unable to defeat us in an upfront military confrontation, they mounted a guerrilla war, hiding explosive devices in the ground. And the Taliban were nothing if not patient and persistent, lying in wait – ‘You have the watches, we have the time,’ they said. As early as the end of 2006, it was clear that UK policy had failed to meet its stated objectives. We had been forced to increase our troop numbers to around 6,000 in the autumn, and the military situation had stabilised, but the fighting left little military capacity to establish the security conditions which would permit the planned reconstruction and development activities or elements of the anti-narcotics campaign, both essential to the delivery of our overall strategy.
In February 2007, I agreed an additional £284 million for the campaign in southern Afghanistan, though the Cabinet was warned that the UK would now be unable to mount small, short-term operations in response to new demands. Around 1,400 more troops were sent to Afghanistan in the coming months, raising our deployment to around 7,700. Total projected expenditure over the lifetime of the operation was £2.3 billion, more than double the original estimate. The armed forces would be operating at the limit of their capability.
This is the situation I found when I moved into No. 10. Without announcing a public review, I asked the new ministers – David Miliband at the Foreign Office and Douglas Alexander at DfID – to re-examine our war aims. And I also had several private discussions with Des Browne about the military strategy. Was this a war to destroy terrorists or to deter terrorists, a war to introduce democracy, a war against drugs or was it a war to transform Afghan culture and society? Was our priority to prevent Afghanistan from ever again becoming a platform for al-Qaeda, or were wider, more ambitious objectives realistic? Could we ever make Afghanistan a drugs-free country, or, more than that, a modern economy with a credible and functioning democracy? How far was it going to be possible to create powerful corruption-free institutions, and could we ever have law and order without an honest police force and armed forces who would actually fight the battles? I concluded that in our first six years in Afghanistan our emphasis had moved inconsistently between one priority and another, veering uneasily between the war against the Taliban, the war against al-Qaeda, the war against drugs, the attempt to achieve a minimum level of governance and, more recently, protecting our own troops.
And I found that our stated aims did not only always not converge but were often at odds with each other. Counter-insurgency and anti-narcotics, for example, did not fit easily together. An anti-narcotics drive could often alienate the locals and undermine our counter-insurgency work. In Helmand itself, as we discovered on entering, the governor benefited indirectly from levies on a drugs trade which employed drug runners and local farmers growing poppies. Located close to the existing US Provincial Reconstruction Team was a drugs bazaar which US forces had left undisturbed. So, when we cracked down on drug-trafficking mafias, without offering any alternative employment or source of income for the people they employed, previously loyal militias defected to the Taliban. Nothing could more vividly illustrate the dilemma of having a multiplicity of objectives that were incompatible with each other.
The way forward had to be what later became known as ‘Afghanisation’. In December 2007, in a statement to the House of Commons, our government became the first in the coalition to set out how the Afghans themselves could take control of their own security. We would focus our efforts on building up the Afghan army and police, developing stronger and more effective provincial and local government, and promoting economic reconstruction, all of which was to be achieved not just by us but through greater burden-sharing with our allies.
With the change of tactics in the summer of 2006 and the Helmand intervention we had hoped to win against the insurgency militarily. Now we were trying to pursue a more nuanced counter-insurgency strategy: win the loyalty of the Afghans by securing their safety and simultaneously establish the credibility of the Afghan army and police. This became the Helmand Road Map – specific development plans for Lashkar Gah, Gereshk, Sangin and Musa Qala – which put Afghan control and economic development at the heart of our Helmand work and upgraded the status and resources for our Provincial Reconstruction Team. This was our civilian surge.
But while there was some progress – Musa Qala, which we had pulled out of before, was retaken from the Taliban at the time I outlined the new strategy in the House of Commons – ‘Afghanisation’ was undermined by President Karzai, who disowned an earlier agreement to work with a UN Special Representative who might coordinate t
he allied and Afghan civilian–military effort. And as we discovered at the 2008 NATO Bucharest summit our allies were now more reluctant to share the costs. It would not be until late 2009 that the push for increased burden-sharing would finally succeed.
As our allies stood back, our security needs grew. Before he left office, Tony had agreed an increase in British troops in Helmand. But we continued to be faced with additional demands for more troops and equipment. At every point, the story was the same: that we had ‘to turn things around before it is too late’, an argument that was tempting at the time but in retrospect sounds more like the rhetoric of redemption than a strategic plan.
In the two years after 2006, improvised explosive device (IED) bombings grew fourfold and then in the next two years to 2010 they doubled in number again. Nearly 80 per cent of allied attacks in Afghanistan were now in UK areas of operation. Up to 1,200 engineers in the best bomb squads in the world bravely worked to defuse and clear thousands of these devices. But with an estimated 10,000 IEDs buried in the ground in Helmand, our troops were in constant danger.
Our equipment needs clearly had to change to meet the new threats. The heavier warrior fighting vehicles were excellent, but the lighter vehicles were a problem. The Snatch Land Rovers had proved totally inadequate against IEDs in Iraq from 2005 onwards. Soon after Des Browne went to the Ministry of Defence, in July 2006, he asked me for extra money from Treasury reserves to buy new Mastiff vehicles that were specifically designed to resist IEDs – I agreed straight away – and the first Mastiffs arrived in Iraq around the end of the year. By then, though, it was becoming obvious that we would need far more of this type of vehicle for Afghanistan as well.
The Vector vehicle, which the army had earmarked for Afghanistan, was proving just as bad as the Snatch, but the MoD and the army high command seemed distracted by the long-running saga of its attempts to introduce a single generic medium-weight vehicle programme, known as FRES (future rapid effects system). Like Des, I felt the priority had to be IED-resistant vehicles in Afghanistan, and I supported him in ordering further waves of Mastiffs and similar vehicles over the next two years, with hundreds of millions of pounds coming from Treasury reserves via the Urgent Operational Requirements system. But the speed of delivery to the front line slowed down and it was not until late 2009 that we had the full range of vehicles out in Afghanistan that we needed.