Long read: how the West lost Afghanistan

The American withdrawal of military forces from Afghanistan marks a bad end to a bad policy, and even worse strategic thinking by the US and its principal allies.

Not that this will be the end of the story. Afghanistan once again becomes a roiling cockpit of rival factions, with none capable of a semblance of reasonable rule for the whole territory. “Taliban” is a portmanteau label of many causes, factions and clans.

The new round of fighting, which has started already, will provide further opportunity with subversive extreme elements seeking a global reach for their misdeeds and cockeyed view of the world. But it won’t be a story of history in discordant rhyme – the new forms of extremist groups, mutants from ISIS and its affiliates, will be more sophisticated in their methods and messaging than Osama bin Laden’s crew who set up shop in Kabul from 1996 to 2001.

The years since the US and its allies across Nato and beyond decided to go to Afghanistan in October 2001 to root out Bin Laden – the ultimate inspiration of the 9/11 attacks – have been a story of good intentions, bad planning and flawed actions and operations on the ground.

The plan to oust Bin Laden and rout his hosts, the Taliban regime of Mullah Omar, was clear and comprehensible. So too was the programme to bring succour and aid to the Afghan people, improve their governance and launch development, outlined at the Bonn donors’ conference at the end of 2001.

Warning signs were already there at Bonn for those who cared to look. Donald Rumsfeld, the uber-hawk US defense secretary, who was very much in the Washington driving seat, refused representation of the Taliban movements in any shape or form. Thus he excluded consensus and support from a large and important part of Afghan society and clan politics.

In both the US and Britain, it is surprising how much defence departments in the two countries were in the lead for foreign policy and strategy following the 9/11 attacks. Rumsfeld led the charge into Afghanistan and 18 months later into Iraq. He was mistrusted by much of his senior military command, so he worked round them with his own team headed by General Tommy Franks, who commanded the Afghanistan and Iraq incursions from his base at Tampa, Florida. Tony Blair was on side throughout, and in some respects more on side than President George W. Bush. “He liked the military,” a recent study of the Afghanistan operation states, “because he thought they would always deliver.”

The western strategy was always going to be a muddle in Afghanistan because its two strands were run by the US in a way that led to contradiction and confusion. One was the international sustaining and support operation ISAF, and the other was Operation Enduring Freedom, part of the US Global War on Terror declared after 9/11.

The turning point came in 2004, when the ISAF operation under Nato command was to extend to “stabilisation operations” across the whole territory of Afghanistan beyond the big cities. This was to take a British taskforce to the premier drug producing province of Helmand, the Dutch to neighbouring Uruzgan, and Canadians to Kandahar, as part of a combined operation which was to last the best part of 10 years. With them were specialist units from Danish, German, New Zealand and Australian allies. The cost was high in blood, treasure and reputation.

Before 2004, hardly anyone in Britain had heard of Helmand. Yet by summer 2006 British troops were caught in strings of nasty fights across the province. Ostensibly the forces led by 3^rd Battalion the Parachute Regiment were in Helmand “to keep our streets safe from terrorism – ensuring a 9/11 couldn’t happen again.” This was backed by another Blairite mantra that UK troops were to tackle poppy production in Helmand, “to keep drugs off British streets.” By the time British troops were fighting across Helmand, nobody much believed in either statement.

The strange story of how the British and Dutch planned their way into the drug centres of Helmand and Uruzgan is discussed in a brilliant study by Mirjam Grandia Mantas, a serving colonel in the Dutch Army, Inescapable Entrapments? The Civil-Military Decision Paths to Uruzgan, published this summer by the University of Leiden Press. The book, beautifully written by the author in English, is a brilliant disguised feint, or deception operation, in itself. On the face of it, it is a description of planning procedures, and their flaws, in contemporary military and peacekeeping operations, especially in so-called “Stabilisation Operations” so beloved of Tony Blair and much of the peacekeeping community.

But it goes far beyond a study for budding diplomats, commanders and strategists. In unpicking how the British and the Dutch got to Helmand, Uruzgan and the Kandahar hinterland, we see the confusion of aspiration and practical planning, the mismatches and misunderstandings – not least in the lack of any realistic understanding of the political, physical and human terrain into which they blundered. This has bedeviled much of our foreign policy practice and thinking these past 20 years.

Both the Dutch and British governments had high aspirations when they committed to southern Afghanistan in 2004. For Tony Blair’s government it was the need to prove the prowess and importance of Britain as the premier ally of the US, as a military power, and as a leader in making Nato viable. Moreover, success in Afghanistan would offset the mess of the UK’s commitments in Iraq. The Dutch also wanted to back Nato, show their forces as capable, and back the US. Not least, they needed to compensate for the knockback they had received as the UN peacekeepers in the enclave of Srebrenica, whose surrender led to the massacre of 7,000 Bosniak Muslims in the summer of 1995.

The problem, which Mirijam Grandia underscores, is that the military means – in personnel numbers, funds and sustainability – were never there to prosecute the lofty aims of the Blair government in London and the coalition of Dutch Prime Minister, Jan Peter Balkenende, in The Hague. The British military were surprised initially to be told to go to Helmand – “It was like being sent to Dorset when you wanted to be in London,” one general told me at the time. What’s more, they purported to know very little about Helmand and its tribes, and the narco-economy, though there was plenty of information around.

The book is full of expressions such as “planning paths,” “decision units,” “strategic analytics.” Don’t be put off – the story explains itself, and it is an extraordinary one.

Much of the initial planning work was by “decision units” of soldiers and diplomats, in which some powerful Dutch and British commanders took the lead. The whole thing was supposed to be an exercise in “joined up government.”

Before, during and after the operation, this never really happened. According to Professor Hew Strachan, who introduces the book, “governments have talked about joining up and sharing, but it never works. The cultures of the Foreign Office and Defence and the military are very different, and they compete.” The operation in Helmand, Op Telic, was supposed to be a joint effort between the Foreign Office, the armed forces and the Ministry of Defence, the development department DFID assisted by the Post Conflict Reconstruction Unit. This was very much the new kid on the block in Whitehall – meaning all the other older ministries could ignore it, which they did.

“Joined-up Government” has been a guiding principle of British strategic, aid and foreign policy since the Tony Blair Strategic and Defence Review of 1998. In later forms it has been called the “Fusion Doctrine”. The current head of the armed forces, General Sir Nick Carter, has promoted the “Integrated Operating Concept” – the military variation on the same theme of joined-up government. Cooperation across all public departments is headlined in the recent Integrated Review on defence, security and foreign policy. If the observations of Mirjam Grandia and Hew Strachan are anything to go by, it is going to be some time before we get near any realistic form of “jointery” in government.

The strategic aim of the Nato and allied effort in Afghanistan was to establish civil governance and justice, security and defence, and roll out a major development programme. For good measure, Tony Blair insisted that the British carried out a drug eradication programme in Helmand – expecting it all could be done in a few years. “But from the first, the insurgents knew we weren’t here to stay,” says Chris Donnelly, a former senior adviser in Whitehall and the Staff College, “and they acted accordingly, taking the aid money and doing their own thing.”

The Dutch, British and Canadian decision units had to come up with a workable plan, on quite restricted means. In early 2005 they carried out a reconnaissance in Uruzgan, aided by Australian Special Forces. This concluded the operation to stabilise the province was barely feasible, given that it was a haven for Taliban guerilla reserves for both Kandahar and neighbouring Helmand. The new force was also expected to provide protection for two American Forward Operating Bases – FOBs – in the north of the province, which were dedicated to the by now entirely separate counter-terrorism operation, Enduring Freedom.

The Dutch faced another problem not shared by the British – coalition politics. Under provisions following the Srebrenica massacre in 1995, Dutch commands and governments were obliged to send to parliament an “Article 100 letter” clearly stating the aim and intention, composition and funding, of any future military operation. A junior party in the coalition, Democrats 66, nearly voted down the Uruzgan plan altogether.

In the end the respective decision unit teams of experts proposed that a British force of 3,150 should deploy Helmand for three years in a complex stabilisation operation costing £1 billion. The Dutch would send a force of about 1200, supplemented by up to 250 Australian and other allied troops for a two-year period. They would carry out a limited stabilisation programme for a budget of €320 million.

Looking back with all the gifts of hindsight, it is surprising that anyone thought the plans for Uruzgan and Helmand were remotely practical. British generals said they were committed to bringing good governance and modern justice both to Helmand province and the country as a whole. Yet by this time the government of Hamid Karzai the British and others were propping up in Kabul was becoming one of the great kleptocracies of the region. In Helmand, rape within marriage was a norm, and in the south of Helmand at Khan Neshin I discovered a regular trade in prepubescent brides.

Within weeks the British troops – the Paras and Gurkhas – were in a fight across a wider battleground than expected from Musa Qala and Kajaki in the north to Garmsir and the southern bend of the Kabul river, the setting of a Baluch separatist insurgency. The war on drugs had unfortunate side effects. Local politicians used it to prey on the weak – often driving the growers into lifelong debt and their families into bondage – slavery, in other words. Poor squatter farmers were driven west of the Kabul river into the harsh desert, the “dasht”, where the only crop likely to grow given the sparse irrigation is poppy. Driven out by unscrupulous tribal elders and warlords, it is thought 10,000 destitute farmers became poppy growers.

The insurgents, elements of the Taliban promoted and trained by Pakistani forces, were highly effective with simple tactics. They became adept at the use of remote bombs costing a few dollars, the Improvised Explosive Devices known as IEDs.

The missing piece from Mirjam Grandia’s book is how much was known about the facts on the ground across south-west Afghanistan at the time. What was the intelligence input to the decision units in the UK and the Netherlands? She gives little raw data. It is quite clear now that a great deal was known about Helmand, its criminality and the narco-economy. Information was around and, it seems, discarded by the UK MoD planners – quite bafflingly so. Anthony Fitzherbert is an agronomist who had travelled extensively in Afghanistan in Taliban times. In 2002 he went to Helmand looking at agricultural improvement schemes for the FAO. He said: “The farmers had a terrible time, suffering from repeated drought since 1998 – a very important factor in their distress.” The cultivation of poppy was prevalent, “though curiously the only entity which managed to put a stop to opium production was the Taliban in the year 2000.”

A mild-mannered world wanderer, and man of peace, Anthony Fitzherbert was doubtful about the deployment of British troops to Helmand. Famously, he warned the government that sending in troops would stir “a hornet’s nest.” Defeating the British at the battle of Maiwand in the Second Afghan War in 1880 is part of the lively Pashtu folk memory. “I told the British government that once they put British troops into the villages, they were in for a fight,” Fitzherbert said. And so it was for eight years. In all, 456 British service men and women were killed in Afghanistan between 2001 and 2015.

Despite the deployment of thousands of troops – nearly 30,000 including the US and European allies, plus the same number of the Afghan Army at one period – whole tracts of Helmand, north and central Afghanistan are now back in Taliban hands. The expenditure of £3 billion in British aid has left little trace or legacy.

For all the elaborate layers of planning units, reporting chains and responsibilities of the different ministries, the British push for Helmand was driven by three men, according to Mirjam Grandia – John Reid, the defence secretary, Nigel Sheinwald, the bullish and idiosyncratic National Security Adviser, and Tony Blair. For all the notional checks and balances, it was Blair who decided to go into the poppy lands of Helmand, and on his own terms. She describes Blair as an examplar of “lopsided leadership” – a leader who, by sheer force of personality, could bypass the usual channels and get what he wanted. He did this by leaning heavily on the defence secretary, John Reid, to say the mission was doable, and then using the Cabinet Office as his personal Napoleonic “Conseil d’Etat” to give him his plan, including the do-it-yourself counter narcotics plan.

It was much the same as the way Blair handled the invasion of Iraq, working round legal arguments, his own cabinet and then schmoozing parliament and the Labour party. Not once did he hint that, even more than George W Bush, he was intent on regime change in Baghdad – and from a very early stage.

This makes the thesis of Mirjam Grandia’s book so powerful for any concerned observer, a journalist especially. The absence of intelligence as evidence for the plans and proposals almost beggars belief. More worrying is how weak we journalists were in forensic examination of the facts of Helmand and its insurgency.

My concern about the activities of a “lopsided” leadership such as that of Tony Blair and Donald Rumsfeld is a mnemonic of four Ps: politics, parliament, public and press. Tony Blair proved expert at massaging and diverting all four categories into getting his way of war.

For Britain, this means the Royal Prerogative on declaring war needs revision, as does the need for a prime minister to report with speed to parliament about such matters. Both need to be enshrined in tighter statutes. And we journalists need to be more forensic in getting at the facts and penetrating the waffle of official obfuscation and secrecy.

David Cameron is another prime minister with an eccentric record on defence and security, and committing forces to war. At one point he told his defence chief General David Richards to shut up: “You do the fighting, and I’ll do the talking.”

To which I added cheekily in a review of Richards’s autobiography: “Then who does thinking?” Hoist on my own petard, I was challenged to answer my question in a lecture at the Royal College of Defence Studies. It was an evening talk, so I demurred, saying it was the “how” of the thinking that mattered as much as the “who.” It depended on clear language, thought and objectives, etc.

A more trenchant answer to “who does the thinking?” is provided by Mirjam Grandia’s book. Such are the inescapable entrapments of the way government, command and politics are done in our countries, the confusions and muddle of mixed motives of the practitioners, there is almost no one doing the thinking – at least to an acceptable standard of realism and practicality.

It is time those in charge of our security, and strategic destiny got their act together.