by Gordon Brown
Our helicopters were the vital link between the main bases and platoon houses, and later the forward operating bases. As the territory we were covering increased, along with our troop numbers, and the threat on the ground from IEDs continued to rise, the demand for helicopters grew far beyond what the MoD had planned for when the campaign began. I knew that Des was trying to address this, including by buying six new Merlin helicopters from Denmark – because the MoD told us this was the fastest way to get helicopters out to Afghanistan – and by trying to salvage the disastrous Chinook Mark 3 programme, which had left us with eight supposedly state-of-the-art helicopters that were unable to fly. The venerable Sea King helicopters were brought back from Iraq, given new blades to enable them to operate in ‘hot and high’ conditions, and sent out to Afghanistan; the smaller Lynx helicopters were given new engines for the same reason.
All of this took time – often it felt far too long. I told Des and his successors that I would do anything I could to speed up any of these initiatives, but they assured me that everything that could be done was being done – as did Jock Stirrup. I therefore focused on a different initiative, spending many hours phoning NATO colleagues asking them to loan us helicopters, or contribute to a pool which could be used by all NATO countries in Afghanistan. But although on paper Europe’s NATO members had 1,000 helicopters, hardly any of them had the ability to operate in Afghan conditions. By the end of 2009, the Merlin fleet arrived in Afghanistan, and we had tripled the helicopter capacity in Helmand from three years earlier.
While the first years of our intervention in Afghanistan had passed without partisan controversy, after 2006 a long-running saga of accusations and counter-accusations began which would dog my time as prime minister. Debates over troop numbers drowned out the wider discussion we were having on military strategy, establishing a political settlement, weeding out Afghan corruption, and ensuring that policies for aid and economic development could make a difference. The Opposition parties and press blamed the government for the equipment problems and suggested that we were denying much-needed funds – despite the fact that spending on the Afghan campaign was rising very steeply. What had once been all-party non-partisan support descended into mud-slinging.
I bent over backwards to meet every request for new equipment that the chiefs or Defence Secretary assessed as militarily justified. While in 2007 the equipment funded from the Treasury Reserve for Afghanistan was worth £190,000 for every soldier deployed, by 2010 it was £400,000. Funding for Afghanistan from Treasury reserves had increased from £700 million a year to more than £3 billion. Indeed, Jock Stirrup explained publicly that his problem was not getting approval to buy equipment but responding to the changing tactics of the Taliban. ‘Our equipment is good and improving; commanders speak of it very highly,’ he said. ‘But the enemy adapt their tactics and techniques to counter our capabilities, so what is “the right equipment” in a campaign changes, and often very quickly.’ As the acknowledged expert on the Afghan war, Michael Clarke, has stated: ‘there is no evidence to contradict the assertion of senior commanders … that once the operation was under way no request for equipment was ever turned down. British troops and commanders in Afghanistan … [were] better equipped than any force the UK has ever fielded anywhere.’
The real problem was not in the Treasury but in Helmand. What was supposed to be an intervention that began and ended with no bullets fired had descended into a day-to-day firefight simply to defend our own troops and hold their positions, and then became an attritional, asymmetric war.
By the spring of 2008 an emboldened Taliban were taking back districts, setting their sights on recapturing Lashkar Gah. In June 2008, I announced the number of British troops serving in Afghanistan would increase to 8,030 – a rise of 230.
Every advance we made against the Taliban seemed temporary: as soon as our troops moved to strengthen positions elsewhere, the Taliban returned. No one suggested that we could garrison the whole province. The strategy of ‘clear, hold, build’ was not working. While we could ‘clear’ the latest Taliban stronghold, we did not have sufficient numbers to ‘hold’, and DfID could therefore not ‘build’. Nor did the Afghan army or police, or the Helmand governor. Repeatedly in 2008 and 2009 I phoned or met Karzai to ask him to meet his promise on Afghan troops, but too often, even when dates were given, the troops never arrived. By late 2008 and early 2009, as we prepared for the incoming Obama administration, we were going back to the fundamental questions I had asked in 2007: how could we reconcile the multiplicity of our objectives, and to what extent could a country like Afghanistan ever embrace liberal values?
Throughout 2008, the security situation in Afghanistan had deteriorated, while violent extremism in Pakistan had grown. In fact, the Joint Intelligence Committee concluded in August 2008 that the deterioration in Afghanistan was at least in part due to the situation in the border areas of Pakistan, where the writ of the Pakistani government – under a new president, Asif Ali Zardari – did not extend. Al-Qaeda, the Afghan Taliban and the Pakistani Taliban had safe havens there, presenting risks to NATO’s mission in Afghanistan, British interests in Pakistan, and the UK itself. But with a civilian government now in place in Pakistan, there seemed an opportunity to make progress: Karzai’s hatred of the former Pakistan leader, General Pervez Musharraf, had previously led to fraught Afghan–Pakistani relations, but Musharraf had been forced to resign and was now in exile in London.
In mid-September 2008, President George W. Bush announced that in parallel with a drawdown of forces in Iraq, additional US military personnel would be deployed to Afghanistan in what was labelled a ‘quiet surge’. But there was uncertainty until his successor, President Obama, set out his strategy. While Obama took over with a pledge to leave Iraq but secure Afghanistan, his administration was divided over the conclusions of a long-term review of policy regarding Afghanistan and Pakistan (the ‘Af-Pak’ strategy) led by Bruce Riedel, which reported a week before NATO’s sixtieth-anniversary summit in March. One significant appointment was made by the Obama administration, though – that of Richard Holbrooke as a special adviser on Pakistan and Afghanistan. While it was said of him he was ‘a bull who brings his own china shop’, he was never able to bring the different parts of the American system together, nor speak with authority on Obama’s behalf – and I sensed he remained frustrated up to his sad death in December 2010.
Riedel’s review focused largely on building governance through political and economic means, including greater training and support for the Afghan National Security Forces, and also supported the call for the deployment of an additional 21,000 US military personnel to the country during 2009. But just as the American system was starting to implement this, it was immediately superseded by another review, by the new American commander, General Stanley McChrystal, which started in June. It was clear that McChrystal was likely to push for even more troops, but at the same time, Vice President Joe Biden was making a powerful case in the administration for troop numbers to be cut back and focus purely on counterterrorism rather than counter-insurgency.
In fact, President Obama’s review created huge difficulties for us. What Obama ultimately decided was pivotal to everything we did: while Afghanistan and Pakistan represented the UK’s greatest overseas commitment, our contribution was still small compared with that of America; and, ultimately, only the US had the political and military authority to broker real change. The series of reviews took the best part of 2009. For all that time, the uncertainty left me trapped between the British military’s demand for more troops, which I knew could only make a difference as part of a wider American surge, and the American position, which was to wait for the results of the review and the Afghan elections. When my director of political strategy David Muir explained our frustrations to the Americans, he was told to read Gordon M. Goldstein’s Lessons in Disaster, a recently published account of the fatal decisions around US involvement in Vietnam, ‘because this is what it feels like’
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The administration was completely split down the middle. In my conversations with the new president, I stressed that we needed much stronger unity of command and purpose; and, as part of a strategy for Afghan ownership, far more detailed allied agreement on our short-term, medium-term and longer-term objectives. I was keen too to impress on the Americans the opportunities presented by Pakistan’s new civilian leadership, and doubted whether US strikes in border areas would advance ‘Afghanisation’ – instead, it might radicalise the population against our presence and prevent Pakistan from signing up to our counterterrorism strategy.
When I met Obama at the G20 in early April he surprised us by, at the last minute, asking us to supply more troops. At the end of April, following a visit to Afghanistan and Pakistan earlier in the week, I made a House of Commons statement to mark our first strategy document focusing on Afghanistan and Pakistan together. If we were to deal with what I called the ‘crucible of global terrorism’, the lawless borderlands between the two countries which ultimately threatened our own security, we had to prevent young people ‘falling under the sway of violent and extremist ideologies’. In Pakistan, we would want to enlist active support for counterterrorism work. In Afghanistan, the goal would be to achieve a ‘district by district, province by province handover’ to Afghan control. The Afghan army would grow to 134,000 by 2011, though I accepted the police were not yet seen as an ‘honest and fair institution’.
At the same time, I announced 700 additional British troops to provide security during the forthcoming Afghan presidential elections, taking British forces up to 9,000. Despite pressure to do so, I did not agree to an indefinite increase in UK troop numbers. My adviser Matt Cavanagh wrote a memo at this time warning me that the ‘the military will start to brief against you’. In fact, I was not against more troops: what I needed to be sure of was that, if we were to put more troops at risk, we had what I called ‘a compelling strategy’ and the ‘sharing of tasks’ in Helmand with the Americans. Yet, we had no choice but to keep waiting for the US to make their decision in order to find out what the overall strength of the allied presence in Afghanistan was going to be.
From June 2009, UK armed forces were engaged in a major offensive, Operation Panther’s Claw, supported by Afghan soldiers, aimed at driving the Taliban from central Helmand, with the Americans doing similar work in the south. Having cleared the area, the question was whether we could ‘hold’ and ‘build’. In theory the governor of Helmand, Gulab Mangal, and his district governors would follow up with plans to deliver basic services – clean water, electricity, roads, healthcare and basic justice – and then to promote economic development. But still only one part of the ‘clear, hold, build’ strategy was working and only then for a time: while we could ‘clear’ we did not have the resources to ‘hold’ and ‘build’.
One ten-day period saw the loss of fifteen men and on my return from the G8 summit at L’Aquila in Italy – a trip that allowed us to visit the Italians made homeless by an earthquake – I went straight to Joint Command Headquarters to meet the chiefs. When I asked why the casualty figures had been so high and heard them respond that there were fewer casualties than expected – something for which we had not prepared public opinion – I knew our strategy had to change. When I raised the need for further coalition support, our chiefs, I sensed, were reluctant to concede they needed someone else’s help. While I had wanted to await the outcome of the US review, I felt that the pressures our forces were under gave me no choice. So in July I announced that the 700 extra troops we had provided for the election would now stay longer – though I did not feel, not least because no decision had come out of America, that we had yet reached a tenable or lasting position. All the time I felt that there had to be greater burden-sharing if we were to reduce our losses and make headway; so when the request came for further troops in four areas – troops we needed to hold position, to deal with IEDs, to train the Afghan army and to staff our own Camp Bastion – I immediately agreed to extra troops to deal with the IED threat, but asked whether other countries could share the additional tasks with us.
As a result, over the next few months we improvised as we awaited coalition agreement on the next steps. While I had wanted to await the outcome of the Obama review, I felt that the pressures our forces were under gave me no choice but to agree to the request of Jock Stirrup and our commanders on the ground: that was why I made permanent the addition of the 700 troops that had initially been deployed as a temporary measure for the elections.
In August, with Parliament in recess, I met General Petraeus, who visited me at my home in North Queensferry. This was a good meeting at which we discussed the general shape of the next few years. But our plans, we knew, depended on the decision President Obama was yet to take. Once again as we waited we stepped up our engagement, this time with new surveillance measures to protect our anti-mine squads.
While the delay in the US decision constrained us from without, the Afghan elections, which had been postponed from August, were a major source of tension from within the coalition. My view was that President Karzai was bound to win, but our Afghan allies could not resist trying to fix the vote to ensure his victory. Worried that divisions within Afghanistan fuelled by electoral corruption would set back our core strategy for Afghan control, I asked Ban Ki-moon, the secretary general of the United Nations, that the UN do more to monitor and discourage corrupt practices. And when President Karzai topped the ballot but failed to secure an outright majority, the chairman of the US Senate Foreign Relations Committee John Kerry and I agreed that if Abdullah Abdullah, Karzai’s main opponent, stood down, Karzai would have to promise far greater openness and transparency and hold to his commitment to a build-up of Afghan forces if ‘Afghanisation’ was going to happen.
At the start of October, I met General McChrystal in Downing Street. His report, submitted in September but the conclusions of which had been shared with us in August, had eventually come down in favour of 40,000 more US troops on top of the 68,000 already there. In fact, he had wanted 50,000 more, but he was persuaded to reduce his request. We met on the morning after he had given a controversial speech attacking Biden’s preferred strategy – referred to by McChrystal as ‘Chaosistan’ – of relying more on drone missile strikes and special-forces operations against al-Qaeda. Tension was in the air as we met, and indeed the next day McChrystal would be summoned to a face-to-face meeting with Obama on board Air Force One on the tarmac in Copenhagen, where the president had arrived to promote Chicago’s ultimately unsuccessful Olympics bid. In No. 10, McChrystal and I discussed his basic idea to embed coalition troops within the newly trained Afghan National Army. This was in line with our own thinking. As he explained, we both hoped for a ‘sovereign, independent, democratic, secure and stable Afghanistan’ but we would have to settle for something less than ideal.
McChrystal had divided the country into three categories: areas to focus on with more troops, those to leave entirely, and those not significant enough to reinforce but too important to leave. Sadly, I found that he had put Sangin in the third category. The fate of Sangin was a central concern for me throughout 2009: while our own generals wanted to show that we could win this part of Helmand ourselves, I was so aware of the losses we were suffering here that I wanted the Americans to bring more troops into the area and kept asking for greater burden-sharing. Generally, however, the McChrystal plan appealed to us: partnering with the Afghans and embedding our troops with them would be the shortest route to our eventual departure.
Contrary to expectations, an immediate response from the US administration to McChrystal’s recommendations was not forthcoming. One possibility was that the US administration was waiting to see the benefits of the already enhanced US presence and the impact of the new ‘Af-Pak’ strategy before making any further deployment. Another was that the addition of troops was conditional for them on there being identifiable progress on political reform from the Afghans, in particular when it
came to combating corruption. And of course the battle between proponents of a counter-insurgency strategy and a counterterrorism strategy was still unresolved. But it was clear to me that we could not wait any longer for the US to decide.
On 8 October, I asked the Cabinet to agree in principle to increase our troop numbers by a further 500 if specific conditions were met – namely that the Afghans also supplied more troops; that the right equipment was available; and that other countries also made a contribution. I had thought long and hard as to whether we should make these conditions public. Indeed, I discussed this at length during the Labour conference with Bob Ainsworth, who had taken over as Defence Secretary from Des Browne’s successor, John Hutton. Making these conditions known would signal to the public that we had a plan with a chance of working. On the other hand, citing conditions did not please our military command. I decided that it would make no sense to add to our troop numbers unless we could show that with the help of further Afghan and allied troops they would make a real difference.
When the Commons returned on 14 October, I read out the name and rank of each of the thirty-seven heroes who had died that summer. I then announced our new troop total of 9,500, while stressing the importance of the three conditions. Indeed, on 16 November, because the conditions on burden-sharing and provision of Afghan National Security Forces had not yet been fulfilled, we delayed the uplift in UK numbers. At the conclusion of that meeting, I said I would try to pin down our allies over the following days.