by Gordon Brown
It was only after my lobbying of fellow European leaders over the next two weeks that we did, in the end, agree to the deployment. In a visit to London on 17 November, the Slovakian prime minister announced a doubling of the country’s military contribution – in southern Afghanistan – to 500 troops. The Georgians made a formal offer of an infantry company to operate alongside UK forces in Helmand. And after repeated calls to him, President Karzai reassured me that an additional 5,000 Afghan troops would partner us in Helmand. Accordingly, in a statement to the House of Commons on 30 November, I announced that with my three conditions now met we would deploy the extra 500 personnel in early December.
I then set out what I considered to be the basis for the next stage of our strategy. The nation-building of four or five years before had been superseded by a laser-like focus on the actions necessary to pass control of the country to the Afghan army, police and civilian authorities. I reminded the British public that three-quarters of terrorist attacks on British soil originated in the Afghan–Pakistan borderlands and, as Obama was to do later in his December statement, I demanded Pakistani action against the terrorist threat. Our progress was, I said, not to be measured ‘in enemies killed or battles won alone’: it must be measured in the progress made in improving the capability of the Afghans to protect themselves.
Training, mentoring, partnering and embedding were not the easiest or safest course, but they were the right one. Already 500 of our soldiers were mentoring Afghan forces. In operations such as Panther’s Claw we and they were already operating together, and a joint Afghan and allied operational coordination centre had been set up in Lashkar Gah, which I visited that summer. ‘Afghanisation’ was the strategy Britain had promoted and practised in Helmand for many months, and it now needed to be the strategy of the whole coalition for all of Afghanistan: to bring the country to a point where it could control its own destiny, militarily and economically. It was vital that we improve on our past counter-insurgency strategies, and above all this meant building support from and empowering the local population.
On 1 December, President Obama raised US troop numbers to 100,000 – which meant that coalition forces would rise to 150,000. But there had to be, he rightly said, a political surge to complement his military surge. He called it an integrated civilian–military counter-insurgency campaign. The Afghan National Army was to increase in strength by 50 per cent – from 90,000 to 134,000; 10,000 of those troops were to be based in Helmand alongside 4,000 new police.
While he went further than I did by setting a deadline for departure – Obama announced July 2011 as the start of his rundown – I went further than him in detailing what had to be done if we were really serious about ‘Afghanisation’: alongside a stage by stage, province by province transfer of control to the Afghan authorities starting within twelve months, we offered a four-year, £500 million plan to build wealth-creating alternatives to heroin production. In our internal debates in 2009 some ministers wanted us to announce a date for departure too – a move that, they argued, would focus the Afghans on rectifying the weakness of their police and armed forces. Others wanted a build-up of forces to ensure a more limited set of objectives could be achieved. I was sure that we could not focus our decision-making narrowly through a military prism, but, in the end, there were no easy answers and I could also see that the earlier ideal of fostering a strong democracy and ‘modern’ society in Afghanistan was beyond our reach.
However, leaving Afghanistan as a failed state and a seedbed for renewed terrorism was unacceptable if we could possibly prevent it. We had to achieve a sufficient degree of stability where the Afghan government would be strong enough not to be overrun by the Taliban when we left. So the British presence in Afghanistan, which was increased for the time being to 9,500 troops, would fall to 8,300 from 2010. And when we added these additional 500 troops I did so with an assurance from the Chief of the Defence Staff that I felt necessary for public confidence in our war effort: that before any left for Afghanistan he would be able to guarantee publicly that each of them was properly equipped for the tasks ahead.
But unlike President Obama, who announced that his first troop surge would be his last, I did not put an end date to our mission. For the moment, our strategy of partnering with the Afghans was not to be time-limited but task-limited.
Far later than the UK, America came to the conclusion that there was no military solution to the Afghan conflict and all that the surge could do was prepare the ground for what was ultimately needed: an Afghan government that was strong enough to deal with the Taliban. I supported Karzai’s message to the insurgents: that if those now outside the entire political process were prepared to renounce violence, there was a place for them within it – though there was always a question mark over how serious Karzai was about putting this into practice. And with formal talks with the Taliban ruled out by the US, informal discussions had had to be conducted through intermediaries – provided, in the event, by Norway and later Qatar. These discussions would stretch from 2007 all the way into 2015.
For the moment, I focused on strengthening Afghan rule – first by demanding the re-elected Karzai do more to improve security, governance, anti-corruption efforts, reconciliation, economic development and engagement with Afghanistan’s neighbours. In his inauguration speech he had, perhaps reluctantly, set out these objectives. When I met Ban Ki-moon at the Commonwealth conference in Trinidad and Tobago in November, we agreed to hold a London conference on Afghanistan in January 2010. When it met we were able to announce an additional 9,000 allied troops and a plan to increase the Afghan National Security Forces to over 300,000 as we transitioned to local control. The follow-up conference – agreed for Kabul in March, but which actually took place after we left office, in July – was to be the first international conference on Afghanistan in Afghanistan.
The conference I hosted in January took place in the wake of General McChrystal’s announcement of a new division of responsibilities within southern Afghanistan. Adding 15,000 US troops into Helmand and Kandahar, making 50,000 in all, McChrystal had created ‘Regional Command (South West)’, with a headquarters in Camp Bastion, which included Helmand, Nimruz and Farah provinces, and ‘Regional Command (South East)’, which was headquartered at Kandahar airport. During the preliminary discussions of this, we asked ourselves if it made sense for the UK to move to Kandahar, which the Canadians were vacating and was now central to coalition plans. But Jock Stirrup, Bob Ainsworth and I felt it better to make use of the expertise we had gained on the ground in Helmand, including through our leadership of the Provincial Reconstruction Team in Lashkar Gah, and remain where we were. At the same time, though, we pressed for the US to take on the more northerly parts of Helmand – Musa Qala, Kajaki and Sangin – to allow us to focus, as we had originally planned in 2006, on the key population areas in central Helmand.
Musa Qala and Kajaki were handed over to the US in the spring of 2010, but Sangin was our biggest headache. It represented a volatile mix of the major tribal groupings, was seen by the Taliban as their safe haven, and delivered the terrorists a steady source of revenue through its narcotics trade. Sangin was generating half our casualties; indeed, at this time, they amounted to one in ten of overall losses incurred by all the allies across Afghanistan. I was not content to leave things as they were, but for months I found McChrystal reluctant to deploy extra forces there. It was eventually agreed before we left office that the US Marines would take over in Sangin and this happened just after I left. Sadly, even with their heavier presence, the Americans also suffered a high level of casualties here.
During 2009 divisions began to intensify. There was, of course, a legitimate argument to be had about equipment and troop numbers. The public were rightly shocked by a succession of losses – in one ten-day period, for example, fifteen troops died, eight of them in one bloody twenty-four hours. But while I admired him as a soldier, public criticism from July 2009 by the outgoing Chief of the General Staff, Sir Ri
chard Dannatt, overstepped the line. When I invited him to Chequers for lunch, he was at pains to tell me that it ought to be a senior figure from the army who held the position of Chief of the Defence Staff – Sir Jock Stirrup, who held this position, was from the RAF – and this seemed a surprising use of his time when he was publicly complaining about a lack of boots on the ground. At the Conservative Party conference that autumn, just days after retiring from the army, Dannatt was appointed as a Tory adviser. He had now fully entered party politics. When the shadow Home Secretary, Chris Grayling, heard of the move he denounced it as a ‘political gimmick’ – wrongly assuming that Dannatt had become an adviser to Labour rather than to his own party. A Tory attempt to install Dannatt in the Lords was blocked in the spring of 2010 on the grounds that he should wait at least a year before taking on a political role. But nothing did more to show how the war had been politicised by some of those whose job it was to be non-partisan.
Of course, our generals and serving officers have the absolute right to express their views in private – and one or two certainly did – but Sir Richard crossed a line when he publicly identified with the opposition to the government of the day. ‘To abandon the principle of a non-political Civil Service would be a great mistake,’ wrote a sage constitutional expert, Vernon Bogdanor, at the time. ‘To abandon the principle of a non-political army would be a catastrophe.’
And Sir Richard’s criticisms were belied by the the truth: ‘British armed forces are better equipped today than at any time in the past forty years,’ Lieutenant Colonel Nick Richardson spelt out from on the ground in Afghanistan. ‘In the last two years, we have increased helicopter numbers by 60 per cent and capacity by 84 per cent.’ The difficulties we faced arose not from Treasury parsimony but from the Taliban’s changing tactics.
Against this difficult background – tensions within the coalition, pressures for Afghan contributions, and continuing casualties in the field – the Sun was running a relentless campaign during 2009 and early 2010 that accused ministers of not sending more equipment and troops and blamed me directly for the deaths in the field. The personal attacks had been ramped up in the summer of 2009 when I decided to take only one week’s holiday – not leaving the country but staying at a hotel in the north of England. On the Monday, as I arrived, the Sun front page blared out: ‘Message to politicians failing our heroes: don’t you know there’s a bloody war on? The Sun asks the government and Gordon Brown: Where is your leadership?’ The paper said I – and the Defence Secretary, Bob Ainsworth – were ‘missing in action’. In the background were photographs of all 207 of our Afghan war dead, with the claim: ‘To its shame, our government doesn’t seem to want to face up to the fact we are in the middle of a savage conflict … Mr Brown has taken the country to war but is ducking responsibility for the conduct of it. The tradition of our country is that in wartime, the prime minister takes charge.’
By the autumn their campaign had intensified. In November 2007 the Sun had claimed I fell asleep at the Festival of Remembrance. This was, of course, not true: they used a photograph of me with my head bowed during one of the many prayers. Now in November 2009 they went one stage further – falsely alleging that I had not bowed at the Cenotaph – using a photograph of me in which I was holding my head high, just before I bowed. And, even after all the rest of the media rejected the claims from a Brighton press agency that I was indifferent to the mother of one of our war dead, the Sun took it up, alleging that I had misspelt the name of her son. I phoned the mother to say how sorry I was for the distress she felt. But the Sun secured a recording of the private telephone conversation I had with her from my desk in No. 10. Their headline was unfair and malicious, accusing me of having refused to apologise for the misspelling. Though I admit my handwriting may have been difficult to read, it was ironic that it was the Sun itself which had later to apologise for misspelling the surname of the mother concerned.
Because of this intensification of the Sun’s campaign – now covered by the BBC and the wider media – I phoned Rupert Murdoch and pointed out that his campaign criticising our conduct of the war was achieving the opposite of what he had intended. He said he wanted to strengthen the British people’s resolve over Afghanistan; I presented him with our polling evidence showing the opposite had happened. In 2006 public support had been low enough – at 31 per cent – but by 2009 it stood at only 18 per cent. Ultimately, he admitted the Sun had gone too far and urged me to talk to his editor, Rebekah Brooks. Reluctantly I did so. But the damage was done. I followed it up with a letter explaining that his paper was criticising a Britain that was in the vanguard of the campaign.
This November conversation was the only phone call I had with Rupert Murdoch in the months before we left office. He claimed later that I had threatened him in a phone call at the time of the Labour Party conference in September 2009 just after the Sun had come out for the Conservatives. No such conversation occurred and there was no phone call of any kind between us in September or October. In fact, I had decided that I would make no complaint to the Murdoch papers or Murdoch himself over their endorsement of the Conservative Party.
Afghanistan was now, however, thoroughly at the centre of domestic politics. The Sun and the Conservatives wanted people to believe that lives were being lost not just because of alleged mismanagement of the war but because we did not care. It revealed to me just how much newspapers had changed. No longer the first port of call for up-to-the-minute news, with TV and social media operating on a 24/7, minute-to-minute cycle, newspapers needed another unique selling point – hence their rising trade in sensationalism. It was not enough for the Sun to allege that I had made a mistake; it felt compelled to report an ulterior motive. So it crafted and maintained a narrative that I didn’t care about what happened to the troops. On Afghanistan, they claimed not only that our policy was suspect but that our motives were too. We were not just misguided but malevolent. A newspaper that always claimed it was defending the armed forces – running events in praise of them – ended up using the war and the troops for their own political and commercial purposes. With the Conservative Party now working hand in glove with the Sun – and promising new laws to neuter Ofcom and undermine the BBC – we were under attack every day. And with the Telegraph, the Mail and the Express as anti-Labour as ever, we faced an uphill fight in getting our message across.
I was saddened and angered at the breach of the all-party consensus on Afghanistan and felt party interest had been put before national interest; indeed, when they came into government, both the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats did not change course and followed in most respects what we had done.
But the debates we were now engaged in were a sign of something more profound: a war-weariness after eight years of conflict, during which we had been fighting on two fronts, not just in Afghanistan but also in Iraq. Ultimately, an insoluble problem lay at the heart of the British intervention. I had a clear view of the limits of what we could do – a handover to Afghan control – and recognised that we were not good at the business of state-building. It was simply too late to persuade the Afghan people that we were liberator not occupier.
By 2010, the allies had spent $1 trillion in Afghanistan: dollar for dollar, in today’s prices, vastly more than on the whole Marshall Plan for Europe after the Second World War. Yet the coalition never properly sequenced its multiple objectives nor even how they fitted together; and so every problem seemed to lead to one reflexive answer: a bigger build-up of troops – in 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009 and even later. But no military or financial resources would ever be sufficient to pacify such a large and ungovernable terrain, which had defied everyone from Alexander the Great to the Soviet Union in the 1980s. One observer has argued that over-optimism, even hubris, led Britain to assume that too few troops could do too much. Others suggest that, in a multinational US-dominated operation, Britain was free to make only the tactical judgements, not the strategic decisions. My own conclusion is that even with mor
e limited objectives and a far greater commitment of troops than we or our allies were prepared to make, our success still depended on a cooperation that was not forthcoming, neither from a local and fractured population nor, in any material sense, from the Afghan or Pakistani governments.
In conception, the nation-building (or, more accurately, state-building) we were attempting – based on the use of armed forces to underpin the construction from outside of state institutions and the fabric of the country’s economy – was very much in tune with the western notion of promoting liberal ideals. Even though ultimately it was born out of the colonial enterprises of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, it seemed to fit the new thinking contained in the UN’s ‘responsibility to protect’, agreed by all its member states in 2005. It also drew inspiration from what we saw on the ground in Afghanistan – a weak civil society and broken governmental institutions – and an understanding that we could not just kill or capture our way to a lasting victory. For this reason, the received wisdom was that military operations should be used to support the development of the economy and apparatus of state. In the American parlance, ‘stability operations’ offered a direct civilian complement to ‘military operations’. This was also sometimes known as ‘muddy-boots diplomacy’ and on occasion as ‘three cups of tea’.
Sadly no one found the best way of delivering development. Some had favoured handing this task to the military or to private contractors, as had been done in Iraq, others argued for a DIY approach, giving such responsibility to the Afghans wholesale, but we never had sufficient personnel working on development and reconstruction on the ground to achieve this end ourselves.