Robin Wilton's esoterica

The DefenceSecretary, Des Browne, will apparently announce today that, following talks between Gordon Brown and President Bush, the number of British troops serving in Afghanistan is to rise to its highest level yet. The war in Afghanistan has been in the headlines recently as the number of British servicemen killed there in the current conflict passed the grim milestone of 100. US Secretary of Defense Robert Gates recently addressed NATO with the announcement that in May, for the first time, US and allied combat deaths were more numerous in Afghanistan than in Iraq.

It's not, of course, the first time Britain has been entangled in a land war in Afghanistan. Whether or not it can be regarded as canonical, the "British Battles" website makes the following interesting observations about the disatrous British retreat from Kabul to Gandamak in January 1842:

- "The First Afghan War provided the clear lesson to the British authorities that while it may be relatively straightforward to invade Afghanistan it is wholly impracticable to occupy the country or attempt to impose a government not welcomed by the inhabitants. The only result will be failure and great expense in treasure and lives.

- The British Army learnt a number of lessons from this sorry episode. One was that the political officers must not be permitted to predominate over military judgments."

Of course, that last comment reflects a basic tension: the military option is always constrained within a political context (think, for instance, of the first Gulf War, in which the military preference was to press forward having liberated Kuwait, take Baghdad and overthrow Saddam Hussein while the momentum was still there... the political reality was that such a step would have gone beyond the agreed scope of the military action, and in doing to would have used up political capital in forums such as the United Nations and among the other nations of the Middle East.

As I've had a lot of time to spend in airports recently, I've spent some of it reading recent accounts of the Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts: "Sniper One" by Sgt Dan Mills, "House to House" by Sgt David Bellavia (US, Iraq), "3 Para", by Patrick Bishop (UK, Afghanistan).

In Sgt Bellavia's book, one very seldom gets any direct hint of the political context or its effect on operations - perhaps because the US and UK styles of deployment are different, perhaps simply because his book covers a shorter and very intense period of engagement. However, in both the others, the political dimension is always there, and is portrayed almost entirely as something which muddles, frustrates and inhibits the military action - usually resulting in greater danger and further casualties. The principal, fatal dangers appear to be these:

1 - political objectives which expand, but with no corresponding increase in the available resources;

2 - a political context which results in long, confused or conflicting chains of command (particularly multi-national ones);

3 - political goals with unquantifiable military objectives;

4 - a failure to address 'macro' causes at the political level, thus failing to stem the symptoms of conflict on the ground.

In both the Sniper One and 3 Para accounts, troops were deployed to make sure that reconstruction projects could take place. In both cases, by the end of the book, any notion of reconstruction had evaporated, and the troop deployments were basically acting as a lightning rod - attracting vigorous insurgency action simply by being present.

The 3 Para book explicitly mentions "Quick Impact Projects" or QIPs; civilian aid initiatives which the military forces are meant to undertake so as to create benefit for the civilian population and win their good-will. There is a telling vignette of the 'un-plumbed-in washing machine' which the soldiers wanted to install for the local townspeople, but were instructed to leave to the civilian reconstruction agency. At the end of their tour of duty, the machine was still sitting there in its polythene wrapping.

Tellingly, there is no mention of reconstruction goals in today's BBC news article (though, of course, the Defence Secretary's full statement may read differently). Instead, it repeatedly mentioned the theme of 'taking the war to the Taleban' and 'confronting them in Afghanistan rather than in Britain'. That looks like an unquantifiable military objective to me.

There is also no mention of Pakistan in the article, although it is clear that the Afghan question cannot be resolved without Pakistan's active and committed engagement. That looks like a failure to address macro factors.

As for the balance between political and operational imperatives... only time will tell.