Afghanistan: Britain needs more troops on the ground

Joe Biden and Boris Johnson are haggling about the deadline for the end of the rescue mission from Kabul airport. Biden wants to stop at the end of the month, while Johnson wants to gain a few more days with a target of the UK getting at least 6,000 civilians out of the Afghan capital.

The argument about the end date is a glaring example of the thinness of military planning as supervised, or not, by the politicians in both Britain and America.

The operation to evacuate from Kabul has been weak in so many aspects – which emphasises the point that we need an immediate inquiry and reform plan in the UK if our services are not to lose their fighting ethos altogether.

The biggest mistake was the terrible intelligence, or lack of it, as to what was going to happen if the US and UK and allies pulled out next month. Little credence was then given to the gathering momentum of the Taliban offensive. Ministers and officials went on holiday – and if the latest reports about Dominic Raab are to be believed, our foreign secretary wanted to stay on holiday over the last weekend. Perhaps he should now be given a permanent leave of absence to spend time with his family.

The British initially put in a task force of around 500 under the rapid deployment force from Permanent Joint Headquarters and elements of 16 Air Assault Brigade. They were to assist a skeleton crew of diplomats and civil servants to clear visas under the heroic ambassador Laurie Bristow.

Given the complexity of the task involved, and the need to flex and adapt plans almost by the hour, the force was nowhere near enough. BBC Radio 4’s Today programme, in best woke-whinge mode on Monday morning, was lamenting the predicament of 18-year-old paratroopers facing such a difficult task.

Come on! This is what young professional soldiers should be prepared and trained to do. The problem is that there aren’t enough of them to rotate and take down-time in the relentless seven-day cycle. Moreover, the planners and politicians do not seem to have provided nearly enough soldiers to establish a robust multi-layered cordon. In addition, they needed mobile forces to get patrols out to grab potential travelers from designated collection points in the city. Now they have lost that initiative and element of surprise.

As things got really difficult in the middle of last week, at least 1,000 more troops should have been put in to work with allies such as the Americans, and, yes, the Germans – who this Euro-neuralgic government has ignored up to now.

This would make the UK unit roughly that of a light brigade of 2,500 – three battalions with the appropriate logistics of signals, communications and light engineering in the mix.

It still should be done. It is now clear that a Plan B and Plan C need to be activated – getting vulnerable citizens to places of safety, to lie low, and possibly move out towards third countries.

The crassness of the Biden-Johnson headlines is measured in the fact that they deal in deadlines and time scales, end dates and not end states. This is consistent with the whole political screw-up of the direction of international operations in Afghanistan from the first. The Obama-Biden administration is particularly culpable, and Joe Biden is at it again.

By setting a timetable you immediately hand an enormous advantage to the opponents and enemies. I vividly recall standing at ISAF HQ in Kabul in December 2009 to watch on TV a very awkward President Obama address cadets at West Point. He said he was ordering a surge of 30,000 more troops in Afghanistan, immediately. This was December. He added that the gradual withdrawal of US combat troops would commence the following July.

This was worse than the Hokey Cokey. The troops would start coming out before the new surge could establish itself. No doubt the contingents would pass each other at the departure rooms at Bagram air base. I was standing with General Stanley McChrystal and Lt General Sir Nick Parker, his British deputy. They couldn’t believe what Obama was proposing. “The Taliban just knew from then on that all they had to do was to wait while the Americans set their deadlines and went,” Parker says.

Meanwhile events are now moving apace. They have blown a whole in the complacent rhetoric of Biden, and some British counterparts, that “the mission of excluding al Qaeda is accomplished” and it is time to end “the forever wars”. This very morning, we heard from the US, UK and German forces – and no doubt the excellent Afghan special forces – that they fear attacks at the airport and on the roads by suicide bombers from Islamic State-Khorasan.

We also hear that the affiliate, al Qaeda-Khorasan, is established in at least 16 provinces in Afghanistan. One of the assumptions of the American and UK media commentariat – increasingly living in a world of their own – that these groups will not take any interest in Europe, let alone the United States. Oh really? They should just look at the manifestos of Islamic State-Khorasan, available on multiple outlets on the internet, and in English. Their stated cause is global jihad, and they already seem well established in the Gulf region and Turkey for an autumn offensive.

This means the UK’s entire defence and security apparatus must be fully briefed and prepared for such an eventuality. This is primarily the responsibility of the politicians. As our colleague and fellow commentator Iain Dale points out, this means listening to those MPs and ministers who have real experience of these matters, such Tom Tugendhat, Dan Jarvis, Johnny Mercer, Tobias Ellwood. Too often these veterans are met with embarrassed silence from fellow MPs. Boris Johnson’s government has given an alarming impression of being flat-footed, and consistently behind the curve on what is happening and what now needs to be done. At least Dominic Raab has been consistent in flagging up the weakness of so much of our once vaunted diplomatic service throughout the Afghan episode. The only ministers with any sense of urgency and ability to act are Ben Wallace at Defence and James Heappey, Armed Forces Minister – both veterans of difficult campaigns.

The war is about to go in several directions at once in Afghanistan. Most of the Taliban now in town in Kabul are country boys from other provinces – with no clue how to run a modern town let alone a state. They face insurgent anarchy on the streets, the spontaneous rage of the disorientated and desperate.

The extreme elements across a string of central provinces up to Kunar on the Pakistan border are beginning their own internecine war against their own – which will hit Iran and Pakistan particularly hard. A major battle is being prepared in the Panjshir valley – a perfect defensive position for the forces of the Northern Alliance under the young Ahmed Massoud. This will bring support from the Uzbek and Tajik nationalist elements along the borderlands to the north.

Whatever the armchair generals and diplomats of the commentariat in the UK and US may say, there is very little that China or Russia can do about this in the short or even medium term.

The Biden bailout is already a catalyst to another explosion of war and violence across the South-West region, and “global” Britain and a US still adhering in practice to “America First” cannot escape the consequences.

Strangely, I am in tune with the lexicographic taste of Tony Blair. “Imbecilic” just about covers what has been going on – not least in the mind of Joe Biden.