There were no sound grounds for saying he had behaved with impropriety. Yet his days of paralysed muteness and miserable equivocation contrived to make him look shifty. He was once again the calculator who miscalculated; the media obsessive who did not understand how to deal with the media. For his many critics, it was further confirmatory evidence of his character flaws. One typical commentary said scornfully: ‘The alleged author of a book entitled Courage has once again shown his complete lack of this essential element in political leadership.’17 It was added to the list – which included the phantom election, the 10p tax debacle and the expenses scandal – of examples of his fatal procrastination, his inability to communicate a case and his propensity to try to duck below the parapet only to get hit anyway. In early September, polling suggested that less than a fifth of voters thought he was doing a good job as Prime Minister.18
Gordon Brown stomped around Number 10 in a foul temper. ‘Why wasn’t I told?’ he demanded. ‘Why wasn’t he stopped?’19 He had again been taken by surprise, this time by the resignation as a parliamentary aide of Eric Joyce, the Labour MP for Falkirk and a former major in the Black Watch. He held the insignificant political rank of PPS to the Defence Secretary, but his decision to tear off his stripes resonated because he was previously characterised by his über-loyalty and was unique among Labour MPs in having any recent experience of serving as an army officer. His resignation letter accused the Prime Minister of not making a convincing case for the war in Afghanistan and charged colleagues with using ‘behind-the-hand attacks’ to smear senior military officers critical of the Government.20
The galloping major hit the Government in one of its most tender spots. Eight years since the invasion of Afghanistan to topple the Taliban and chase out al-Qaeda, there was evaporating support for what was once seen as the ‘right war’ and what Barack Obama still liked to call the ‘war of necessity’.21 The war was being lost. Not so much on the battlefield as in the living rooms of the public at home. There was a rapidly shrinking appetite for an apparently indefinite and increasingly deadly campaign in the heat and dust of Afghanistan. The intervention had been very popular in the wake of 9/11. Now a sceptical public asked what the soldiers were dying for. Surveys indicated that most voters thought British troops should never have been sent. Even bigger majorities wanted the troops home within a year. Most of the public felt that the mission could not succeed.22 There were echoes of the darkest days of Iraq: confused and shifting aims, mounting casualties and a growing fear of strategic defeat. The Sun was running an especially aggressive campaign against the Government under the banner: ‘Don’t you know there’s a bloody war on?’ The original all-party consensus behind the intervention was disintegrating. The Liberal Democrats edged towards advocating withdrawal while the Tories repeatedly attacked the Government for not resourcing the war properly. The international coalition was fraying. The Canadians, who had taken the third-most casualties after the Americans and the British, announced they would be pulling out by 2011. The Dutch and the Spanish indicated that they might withdraw even more imminently.
Gordon Brown would never be mistaken for Henry V. He struggled to mount a cogent and eloquent case that the allies had a strategy worthy of the sacrifices being made. In his first two years as Prime Minister, he rarely made speeches explaining the war and when he did so it was with the passion of a man reading out the weather forecast for Kirkcaldy. That lack of commitment suggested that he regarded it as another conflict regretfully inherited from Tony Blair; at best, a grim necessity from which he could not extract himself rather than a cause in which he really believed. At the most recent reshuffle, he had given the job of Defence Secretary to Bob Ainsworth, the fourth holder of the post in just three years. Brown had persistently given senior officers the impression that he had no feel or care for the armed forces. ‘You don’t think I understand defence, do you?’ Brown had once said to General Charles Guthrie. ‘No, I bloody well don’t,’ replied the General.23
Flying visits to the front were not enough to repair the serious damage to the relationship between politicians and the military which was the result of the failure, first in Iraq and now in Afghanistan, to provide resources commensurate with strategic ambitions. Some frustrated commanders had become almost anti-constitutional in the vehemence of their attacks on the Government for asking the armed forces to do too much with too little. This was most explosively so in the case of General Sir Richard Dannatt, who quarrelled very publicly with ministers about soldiers’ pay, conditions and equipment, complaining that his political masters had to be dragged ‘screaming and kicking’ into resourcing the war properly.24 Shortly before his retirement as head of the army, the rebellious General made a valedictory tour of the battlefield in which he ostentatiously used an American helicopter to draw attention to the lack of British air support. Relations had reached a low in March 2009 when Brown vetoed the military’s ‘preferred option’ to send 2,000 reinforcements. Worried about the cost of the war, he sent just over a third of that number on an initially temporary basis. The Chief of the Defence Staff, Sir Jock Stirrup, usually a much more reticent and cautious character than the head of the army, publicly declared in July that he was taking to Number 10 a shopping list of demands for more equipment. The senior officers did not like having their advice rejected by Brown. He did not like being told what to do by men in uniforms. The mutual hostility was increasingly overt and explicit. Three former Chiefs of the Defence Staff mobilised to attack the conduct of the war when it was debated in the Lords in November. Field Marshal Lord Inge said that the armed forces ‘felt that the Prime Minister has never really been on their side and they have not had his support’. General Lord Guthrie accused Brown of ‘dithering’ over sending reinforcements. ‘The Government do not recognise that we are at war,’ declared a withering Admiral Lord Boyce, who described ministers’ treatment of the men they put in danger as ‘wrong and immoral’.25 The politicisation of elements of the military was one of the unintended consequences of the New Labour era. Dannatt had barely retired as a general before he was recruited to the Tories.
There had been some gains from the NATO intervention in Afghanistan. It was no longer a functioning base for al-Qaeda. Under the Taliban, only a million children were getting an education in a country with a long history of chronic illiteracy and none of them were girls. Now more than 6 million were in school, more than 2 million of them girls. Large tranches of international aid contributed to improvements in health care. Some of the provinces were stable and progressing. In an impoverished country which had been ravaged by conflict for three decades, it was a miracle of sorts to have established even the vestiges of democracy.
Yet the strategic failures were also very manifest. None of the differing ambitions for the intervention that had been articulated over the years – from the eradication of the opium trade to the creation of a stable state – had been fulfilled. Many of the current difficulties flowed from the deluded triumphalism of eight years previously when the easy toppling of the Taliban regime had not been followed by a properly resourced commitment to stabilise security and build a civic society.26 Just as in Iraq, there was scant attention paid to the tough, complex and expensive long-term challenge of conflict resolution and nation-building. Proportional to the population, the number of international troops was a twentieth of those deployed to post-conflict Kosovo. The Taliban became resurgent. They and other warlords filled the vacuum left by the thin allied forces and the weak central government. President Hamid Karzai, with his handsome profile, multicoloured Uzbek cape and astrakhan hat, was originally promoted by Western leaders as his country’s saviour. He had now become an embarrassing liability. Corruption and criminality, often linked to the very heart of the Government in Kabul, were endemic. The police were notoriously predatory. Drug traffickers continued to ply their trade. Afghans, fearing that the Western forces would tire of the conflict and abandon them to the mercy of the Taliban, were given no incentive to commit
to the building of a stable state. The shortage of NATO troops left generals over-reliant on air power. Large numbers of civilian casualties were inflicted by clumsy air strikes, which many times massacred civilians at wedding parties and killed sleeping villagers. These further damaged the war effort by alienating Afghans.
When the British went into Helmand in 2006 they got a much nastier welcome than either the generals or politicians anticipated. The deployment rapidly migrated from a mission to help reconstruction into an intense all-out battle with the Taliban.27 Many soldiers fought heroically, but they were over-exposed and under-resourced. As Alan West, the former head of the navy who became Brown’s Security Minister, puts it: ‘We didn’t have our armed forces configured to fight a war in the centre of Asia.’28 The British had too few vehicles with sufficient protective armour and too little helicopter capacity, both of which deficiencies led to additional casualties. Major-General Andrew Mackay, the commander in Helmand between October 2007 and April 2008, sent a ‘ground truth’ memorandum to London which listed grave problems with his troops’ equipment. He had tanks which could not get into reverse gear without restarting their engines. New Vector armoured vehicles to replace their inadequate predecessors could not be used because ‘the wheels kept falling off.’29
The culpability did not lie solely with the politicians. Senior officers went into Helmand believing that the British army was a world expert in counterinsurgency operations because of its now dated experiences in Northern Ireland. Sir Jock Stirrup later acknowledged that ‘we were a bit too complacent … we were a bit too smug.’30 Constant claims of decisive engagements with the enemy raised public expectations of a successful exit, hopes which were then repeatedly shown to be illusory. Military commanders made regular boasts that they were ‘routing’ the enemy31 when they were only temporarily displacing it. The army made intermittent and dangerous sweeps through Taliban-controlled zones, a mad tactic known as ‘mowing the lawn’. When the British retired to their Beau Geste-style bases, the Taliban returned, ready to kill again.
The safe transport of a huge hydroelectric turbine through Taliban-held territory to the Kajaki dam in September 2008 was a major feat by the British army. Yet since, a year later, it was still offline, it also seemed a pointless one. The Taliban, roundly defeated whenever drawn on to a conventional battlefield, adapted to lethal asymmetrical warfare. Their most murderous tactic was to blow up patrolling troops with roadside bombs known as improvised explosive devices. IEDs became the principal killer of British soldiers in Helmand. Mullah Omar, their fugitive leader, was still able to terrorise Afghan civilians eight years after he fled Kabul. In the run-up to the presidential elections on 20 August, he ordered his fighters to punish civilians found exercising their democratic rights by slicing off any finger bearing the indelible ink designed to prevent repeat voting. Even the NATO headquarters in Kabul was not safe from Taliban bomb attacks.
Those in charge of the war acknowledged that the military strategy to date had been misconceived. General Stanley McChrystal, the new US and NATO commander, likened Western forces to ‘the bull that repeatedly charges a matador’s cape – only to tire and eventually be defeated by a much weaker opponent’.32
For the British forces in Afghanistan, 2009 was the deadliest year since 2001. Paradoxically, this was because they were finally trying to pursue a more coherent strategy. The British joined the American summer offensive in Helmand designed to clear out the Taliban and then hold territory so that something better could be built for Afghans. Pakistan finally made a push against the Taliban on their side of the border in the Swat Valley and Waziristan. Operation Panther’s Claw, the name for the British contribution, was very costly. Between the beginning of May and early September, more than fifty British service personnel lost their lives and sixty-four were seriously injured. The total death toll of British military personnel climbed to over 300, exceeding the number killed in Iraq. For every death, more than four members of the armed forces were being wounded. The number of those seriously maimed, many with loss of limbs and some with permanent brain damage, was also climbing sharply.33 The perils of the conflict were highlighted when two Chinook helicopters were damaged. Unable to guard them safely until they could be lifted out for repair, the British army resorted to destroying the helicopters, worth £40 million each, rather than take the risk they would fall into enemy hands. The total bill to the taxpayer was approaching £12 billion. This steep cost in blood and treasure, paid in the name of helping Afghanistan to progress towards being a civilised state, was harder to justify when the presidential election was accompanied by massive fraud. The blatant rigging was a tipping point for much of opinion: there seemed nothing noble about sending soldiers to die to protect the tainted re-election of a corrupt regime.
There were still compelling arguments for not abandoning Afghanistan yet again. One was the threat that al-Qaeda would once more use the country as a base. Another risk was of a rampant Taliban destabilising Pakistan and even seizing control in Islamabad to become the world’s first Jihadist Government with nuclear weapons. Gordon Brown warned about the former, but left the latter peril unvoiced, when he made a lengthy speech in early September designed to address the mounting opposition. He insisted that the objectives were ‘realistic and achievable’ without being able to say when they might be realistically achieved. ‘People in Britain … ask what success in Afghanistan would look like. The answer is that we will have succeeded when our troops are coming home because the Afghans are doing the jobs themselves.’34 He suggested that British soldiers would be doing less fighting in future and concentrating on the ‘mentoring’ of Afghan security forces, a policy which was much more risky than he made it sound in that speech. A few weeks later, five British soldiers were shot dead and others critically wounded when a rogue Afghan policeman turned a machine gun on them.35
In a further speech on Afghanistan in early November, Brown described the war as a ‘conflict of necessity not choice’ and said ‘we cannot, must not and will not walk away.’ Yet in the same speech he warned Karzai, now reinstalled as President, that ‘I am not prepared to put the lives of British men and women in harm’s way for a government that does not stand up against corruption’, implying they would walk away if the Kabul government was not cleaned up.36 That exposed the dilemma and contradiction at the heart of Western policy. Despite this barrage of speeches, the British public remained unconvinced by his argument that fighting in Afghanistan made the streets of Britain safer from terror. Polling suggested that 60 per cent of voters thought the war either made no difference or heightened the threat.37
Trying to convince the public that there was a credible exit strategy, the Prime Minister implied that British troops could be home within two years.38 That was at some variance with the forecast of General Sir David Richards, a former commander in Helmand who became the new head of the army, that troops would be in Afghanistan for another five years and Britain’s engagement would continue ‘for many, many years after that’.39
Brown finally agreed to send a further 500 troops, but imposed conditions that delayed their departure. The previous Defence Secretary, John Hutton, who had been angry about Brown’s earlier veto, remarked that ‘it would have been much more helpful had we had the additional troops there six months ago’ and went on to warn that undermanning the force threatened to ‘screw it up really badly’.40 The extra troops were a supplement amounting to barely more than a twentieth on the 9,000 already there. These reinforcements were too slight to make the difference between victory and defeat. That really depended on the Americans. London was waiting on Washington to conclude its major reappraisal of strategy in Afghanistan, and Washington was waiting for Barack Obama to make up his mind about surging US forces. Sir Jock Stirrup was frank: ‘What we do does rely very heavily on whatever the Americans decide to do.’41 It was always the case, whether the Prime Minister was Blair or Brown and whether the President was Bush or Obama, that the British forces marc
hed to tunes written in the White House.
The arguments over Afghanistan and the eruption of the Libya affair deflected Brown’s efforts to launch an autumn fightback around tentative signs that the worst of the recession was over. The attempt to get back on the front foot was further undermined when the Attorney-General, Patricia Scotland, was fined £5,000 for illegally employing a Tongan housekeeper, a tale with the satirical twist that the Government’s chief law officer had broken a law that she herself steered through Parliament. When the peeress shrugged off the clamour for her resignation by comparing the offence to a motoring infraction, the Daily Mail bellowed: ‘Baroness Shameless’.42
Brown displaced his frustration and fury on to those around him. He turned on his staff for failing to prevent media attacks about the defence budget. Three of them were summoned to be vented at by the Prime Minister. To one aide, he said: ‘You’re a cunt.’ Pointing at the second, he said: ‘You’re another cunt.’ To the third, he said: ‘And you’re an even bigger fucking cunt.’
An autumn visit to the United States went awry when his anxiety to get himself photographed with Obama rebounded in headlines that he had been ‘snubbed’ and initially reduced to a fifteen-minute encounter with the American President in a kitchen at the UN building.43 The French President and the German Chancellor didn’t get quality time with Obama either, but they were not mocked by their press. He had brought this on himself by being over-desperate. At four in the morning, Tom Fletcher, his Private Secretary, ventured into Brown’s suite at the Waldorf Astoria hotel in New York. He found the Prime Minister already out of bed, wearing the BA T-shirt he had slept in and eating the leftovers from a room service steak dinner. When his staff had to tell him something he wouldn’t like, they tried to keep the Prime Minister calm by presenting him with ‘a news sandwich’: wrapping up whatever had gone wrong between two slices of more encouraging information. Unfortunately for Fletcher, there was only bad news to report about the ‘snub’ stories running in the media. Brown started to rage: ‘How did we let this happen?’ He was still railing when they were joined some time later by Stewart Wood. ‘Why are they doing this to me?’ he ranted about the media. ‘They’ve all got it in for me.’ His paranoia about the media deepened when interviewers placed him in the humiliating position of having to deny that he was going blind and that he was using happy pills. His entire party looked like it could use some anti-depressants as each publication of relentlessly bleak opinion polls took another bite out of morale.
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