And Thank You For Watching

by Mark Austin

  But look at Blair’s own five conditions for intervention and ask yourself whether they applied to Iraq. Was he sure of the case? Well, he convinced himself of the case on the basis of what we now know to be false intelligence. Had all diplomatic options been exhausted? No, and the Chilcot Report is scathing about that. Could military options be sensibly undertaken? Yes, that was the easy bit in Iraq (or at least the initial invasion was). Were they able to endure for the long term? Absolutely not, it turned very quickly into the murderous quagmire many people had predicted. And did it serve the national interest? Arguable at the time, but with hindsight, clearly not.

  If Iraq was a disaster, how do we describe the ongoing catastrophe that is Afghanistan? Here is an intervention that was mounted with worthy aims and widespread support, but again lost its way very quickly and has never recovered.

  In the beginning, it all seemed clear enough. After 9/11, George W. Bush, with the support of Tony Blair, launched Operation Enduring Freedom on the grounds that the Taliban leaders, who were then in control in Kabul, were refusing to hand over Osama bin Laden and his al-Qaeda cohorts. Few could argue with the reasoning, and in the wake of the appalling attack on innocent civilians in New York, it won support around the world. The stated goal was to track down bin Laden, eliminate the terror group in Afghanistan and attack the military capability of the Taliban. This is part of Bush’s address to the nation on the night the airstrikes began:

  More than two weeks ago, I gave Taliban leaders a series of clear and specific demands: Close terrorist training camps. Hand over leaders of the Al Qaeda network. And return all foreign nationals, including American citizens, unjustly detained in their country. None of these demands was met. And now, the Taliban will pay a price. By destroying camps and disrupting communications, we will make it more difficult for the terror network to train new recruits and coordinate their evil plans. Initially the terrorists may burrow deeper into caves and other entrenched hiding places. Our military action is also designed to clear the way for sustained, comprehensive and relentless operations to drive them out and bring them to justice.

  ‘The United States of America is a friend to the Afghan people,’ he also said.

  Well, I am not at all sure what the Afghan people would think about that now, nearly two decades since the war began. Because this has turned into a brutal, costly, troublesome intervention that shows no sign of ending. It is consuming civilian lives, perpetuating a corrupt, incompetent central government in Kabul, and has done nothing to bolster security for either America or, crucially, the people of Afghanistan.

  Certainly, on several trips to that country since 2001, I have yet to meet many Afghans who feel the United States is their friend. On the contrary, many tell me that life under the Taliban was infinitely preferable to the life they now lead in a war-wracked country. The truth is that the intervention in Afghanistan meant different things to different people and took on a life of its own. In London and Washington, the whole mission went through a number of rationalizations. It turned from a well-conceived military operation to disrupt al-Qaeda and its terror network, weaken the Taliban and alleviate suffering, into a much broader and less well-defined intervention designed to bring widespread security, build a new society and democratic infrastructure, aid reconstruction and facilitate the emergence of some sort of functioning state. In short, it was nation-building, and the truth is it hasn’t worked.

  I remember one trip with British forces in Helmand in 2007, where I was specifically told by the Ministry of Defence that I would need to cover not only the military progress being made, but also the ‘extensive work being done on reconstruction and development in the area’.

  When we arrived at the British base at Lashkar Gah, it was soon pretty obvious that this would not be quite so simple. They wanted to take us to a water project in a local village, but unfortunately ‘the security situation does not permit that at the moment’. So, in effect, the British troops were too busy fighting the war to help ferry the media and officials from the UK-led Helmand Provincial Reconstruction Team around various projects. It was one small example of a much wider problem. Nation-building under fire doesn’t work, and that has been the main issue in Afghanistan. Never has there been a secure-enough environment for state-building to take place in any meaningful way. The war has never ended.

  And it’s not through lack of trying. The United States has spent almost one trillion dollars on the war itself; and another $117 billion on relief and reconstruction. It has been the most expensive attempt to rebuild a single country in the history of the United States. They’ve spent more, in the present-day dollar equivalent, on Afghanistan than the Marshall Plan delivered to the whole of Europe after the Second World War.

  And what has America got for its money? Well, 2,400 US servicemen and women have been killed, thousands more wounded and hundreds of US military contractors have also died. And war-related violence has also claimed the lives of over 30,000 Afghan civilians. Has the sacrifice been worth it? Not if you look at the official reports compiled by a key American figure in all this, the Special Inspector General for Afghan Reconstruction, John F. Sopko. In his most recent reports sent back to Washington DC, Mr Sopko is brutally honest and unsparing in his criticism of the American involvement in Afghanistan. His words are worth repeating here.

  On the question of helping prepare the Afghan forces for the fight against the Taliban, he said this: ‘The United States failed to understand the complexities and scale of the mission required to stand up and mentor security forces in a country suffering from thirty years of war, misrule, corruption, and deep poverty. We still need to address the problems of defining mission requirements, and of executing these missions adequately.’

  These are astonishing conclusions seventeen years into a mission.

  And on development and reconstruction he had this to say:

  The United States currently lacks a comprehensive strategy to guide its reconstruction efforts in Afghanistan. It also lacks overarching plans with clearly defined metrics to guide its work in a number of key areas such as anti-corruption, counternarcotics, health, education, gender, rule of law and water. The lack of planning and related strategies means the US military and civilian agencies are at risk of working at cross purposes, spending money on nonessential endeavors, or failing to coordinate efforts in Afghanistan.

  Again, this is a breathtaking critique. And there are two other points to make about the state of Afghanistan right now. According to the World Bank, despite the intervention and the expenditure, levels of poverty, unemployment, violence, crime and corruption are all on the increase.

  And in the war itself, the Americans and the Afghan security forces they train and support are bogged down. The central government in Kabul controls only about 57 per cent of the country’s districts, which is around 64 per cent of the population. The rest is under Taliban control.

  It is why Donald Trump is ordering a new push to defeat the Taliban once and for all. But there’s no new strategy. Trump spent the 2016 election campaign denouncing policy on Afghanistan as a ‘total disaster’, and railing that the costly conflict drained America of enormous resources at a time of more pressing needs at home for American taxpayers.

  And yet, as I write, the Pentagon is outlining a Trump-endorsed plan to commit yet more troops and resources to the war. It reflects a growing concern among US military leaders that battlefield setbacks for Afghan forces against the Taliban are leading to a still-deteriorating security situation inside the country.

  Interestingly, the president pledged to end the strategy of nation-building to concentrate on winning the war. ‘I share the American people’s frustration,’ he said, ‘over a foreign policy that has spent too much time, energy, money, and most importantly lives, trying to rebuild countries in our own image, instead of pursuing our security interests above all other considerations.’

  So there you have it. The era of state-building in Afghanistan is suddenly over. T
hey tried it and they failed. And what a mess it is.

  The failures of intervention were worse than even the most cynical observer could believe. In his extraordinary book about American involvement in Afghanistan, No Good Men Among the Living, the journalist Anand Gopal investigates a counter-terrorist operation in January 2002.

  Gopal recounts how American intelligence had identified two locations which were believed to be ‘al-Qaeda compounds’ housing senior operatives of the terrorist network. US Special Forces were sent in at night by helicopter. During the raid the commander, Master Sergeant Anthony Pryor, was set upon by an unknown assailant. He reacted by killing the attacker with his pistol; he and his Special Forces comrades then shot dead several others, seized prisoners and departed like swashbuckling Hollywood heroes.

  But, as Gopal explains, there was a problem. The intelligence was wrong. Pryor’s unit had not attacked al-Qaeda, or even the Taliban. They had in fact attacked the offices and accommodation of two senior district governors, both of whom were actually opponents of the Taliban and who were helping the Americans at the time.

  The American team had shot dead guards, handcuffed one of the governors to his bed and executed him, sent in AC-130 gunship helicopters to blow up most of what remained, and left a calling card behind in the wreckage saying ‘Have nice day. From Damage, Inc.’

  And it gets worse. Many of the prisoners they took were tortured before the mistake was recognized and they were released with apologies. It turned out a so-called Afghan informer had falsely informed the US that his political rivals were from al-Qaeda in order to have them killed.

  Gopal writes:

  The toll… twenty-one pro-American leaders and their employees dead, twenty-six taken prisoner… Not one member of the Taliban or Al-Qaeda was among the victims. Instead, in a single thirty-minute stretch the United States had managed to eradicate… the core of any anti-Taliban leadership – stalwarts who had outlasted the Russian invasion, the civil war, and the Taliban years but would not survive their own allies.

  The US, a friend of the Afghan people? Somehow, I don’t think so.

  I was supportive of the decision to go into Afghanistan in the wake of the attack on the Twin Towers. I can remember sitting on a hillside in northern Afghanistan watching American aircraft drop huge bombs on Taliban positions to the north of Kabul and thinking that this was a just war and a worthwhile war if it meant ridding that country of the terrorists who had planned 9/11.

  But as the months and years passed, it was increasingly obvious that British and American troops were getting ever deeper into a war they simply could not win.

  In many ways, the British had the worst of it. From 2006 they were given Helmand Province, the centre of the Taliban insurgency and consequently the area of some of the worst attacks and most intense fighting anywhere in Afghanistan. Furthermore, the British were supposed to control Helmand and defeat the Taliban with only a few thousand troops and inadequate resources.

  In the summer of 2009, I headed to Helmand Province to cover the beginning of a long-planned operation to secure canal and river crossings and establish a British presence in one of the main Taliban strongholds. It was called Operation Panther’s Claw, and involved the Welsh Guards and the Black Watch and was overseen by Brigadier Tim Radford. We flew into Camp Bastion, the main base in Helmand, and a day later we were in a Chinook helicopter for the short hop to the smaller British camp at Lashkar Gah.

  I felt guilty as I settled in the canvas seat and buckled up. Scores of British troops were being killed and injured because of the lack of helicopters in Helmand. Most had to travel by road, and that involved a huge risk of improvised explosive devices (IEDs). They were the Taliban’s most effective weapon and were taking a disproportionate toll on British lives. The trip by road was deemed too dangerous for us, but OK for the troops. I found that hard to accept. We didn’t have to be there, we were choosing to be there. They had no choice.

  So, I sat there in helmet and flak jacket peering out at the lawless, Taliban-infested terrain below and hoped for the best. They were known to take potshots or launch missiles at military choppers, although it was rare for them to score a hit. It was, though, with some relief that we descended into the dust and stifling heat of Lashkar Gah. The base is well defended, and has to be. The enemy is not exactly at the gates but they’re not far away.

  We found our accommodation tent, I threw my kit onto a camp bed and went off for a meeting with Brigadier Radford. He seemed pleased to see us and asked to see me alone for half an hour. He wanted to outline the plan for the operation but he first wanted to make sure that he could trust me. It was fair enough. I told him that whatever he told me would remain confidential until the operation started. We got along. I liked him, and he tolerated me.

  But it was a harrowing start to the visit. Within a couple of hours, as the sun was going down, we were standing on the parade ground with hundreds of troops and other personnel, listening to the camp clergyman pay tribute to four soldiers who had lost their lives in the previous days. Three of them had been killed by IEDs. It was an emotional ceremony, and that night in the mess tent, several of the troops mentioned how unhappy they were about the lack of proper protection in their military vehicles, and the lack of helicopters to move them around the battlefield. ‘It’s not the Taliban killing us,’ said one, ‘it’s the Ministry of Defence.’

  I was taken aback by the anger. They all seemed convinced of the justness of the war, but much less impressed by the resources they were being given to fight it. The American philosophy is ‘overwhelming power’; the British one seemed to be ‘whatever we can muster’.

  Operation Panther’s Claw began on our second night in Helmand. We had a reporter on the front line and I was presenting News at Ten from the base.

  The information we were getting suggested it had begun well, and within a couple of days I was flying with Brigadier Radford to Babaji Fasal, an area that had been cleared of Taliban by a few hundred troops of the Black Watch, 3rd Battalion, Royal Regiment of Scotland.

  The operation followed what the Ministry of Defence described as ‘one of the largest air operations in modern times’ and involved Apache and Black Hawk helicopters and Harrier jets. We found the Black Watch troops exhausted, covered in dust and hunkered down in a compound that gave them protection. Their commander, Lieutenant Colonel Stephen Cartwright, told us it had been an extremely tough fight and they had only managed to push the Taliban a mile or so out of the village.

  He took us into the village itself and it was deserted. Just a few of his men patrolling. For some reason, I interviewed Brigadier Radford on the forecourt of what seemed to pass as the local garage, with two old fuel pumps out front. He chose the location because it afforded some protection from Taliban snipers out in the countryside. Interview over, we filmed a little more before heading back to the helicopter and returning to Lashkar Gah to edit a piece reporting the first success of the operation.

  The following day, Brigadier Radford called me into his office and he showed me a photograph of a mangled British military vehicle. It was a write-off, and I feared more troops had been killed in an IED.

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘Fortunately the driver of this vehicle survived. It was in that village we filmed in yesterday. He was checking out the fuel from one of those pumps we were standing next to.’

  He laughed. It was the exact spot on which we had conducted the interview. We had been standing on the IED. ‘We just weren’t heavy enough to detonate it,’ he said. ‘Thank God you’re a lightweight.’

  I didn’t think it was funny.

  In many ways, Panther’s Claw epitomized both the success and the futility of the British involvement in Afghanistan. In military terms it was a victory, in the sense that the aims of the mission were satisfied. They had secured the areas they wanted to and forced out the Taliban.

  But it was achieved at a terrible cost. Ten British soldiers died in a five-week campaign to take an area the size o
f the Isle of Wight. And here’s the thing that will be hard to accept for the relatives of those who died: the area of Babaji Faisal is now back in the hands of the Taliban. As are huge areas of Helmand which were taken at one time or another by British forces over the past few years. It is the story of the war. Incredible bravery on meagre resources, short-term success, but ultimately pointless. Much of what was ‘achieved’ in Helmand looks now to have been basically lost.

  Gradually, it began to dawn on politicians and the public that this was not a war that was going to be won in any final sense. There would be battles won, there would be setbacks, but there would be no victory in the true sense of the word.

  In 2012, six British soldiers were blown up in one IED attack while they were on patrol. It was a defining moment in many ways. I wrote a column for the Sunday Mirror asking why on earth the war was still going:

  Is it no more for this Afghan war?

  The war has invaded all our lives – but still it goes on. Why?

  Most wars are doomed when they invade the lives of the public and the public starts saying ‘No more’. Well, next week, just like last week, Afghanistan will invade our lives again. Not just the lives of a bereaved wife, mother or father. But the lives of all of us.

  The moment will come on Tuesday when six coffins containing the bodies of the soldiers killed in the worst single attack on British troops in this conflict will return home.

  Such repatriations have happened before, of course. They’ve happened time after time. So many times, in fact, that the emotion-drenched ceremonies were in danger of becoming what they most certainly were not… routine.

  But this time it will be different. It will be different because I sense the public mood is changing in a quite dramatic way. Over the last few years, when the fallen were returned, there was sadness and tears and grief, but also a feeling that it is the inevitable consequence of war. And this was coupled with the belief that this was the right war, the war to rid Afghanistan of al-Qaeda, to track down the mastermind of 9/11, Osama bin Laden, and to put a new government in place.