BUYThe Good War: Why We Couldn’t Win the War or the Peace in Afghanistan by Jack Fairweather Cape, 488 pp, £20.00, December, ISBN 978 0 224 09736 9 BUY Investment in Blood: The True Cost of Britain’s Afghan War by Frank Ledwidge Yale, 287 pp, £10.99, July, ISBN 978 0 300 20526 8 British Generals in Blair’s Wars edited by Jonathan Bailey, Richard Iron and Hew Strachan Ashgate, 404 pp, £19.95, August 2013, ISBN 978 1 4094 3736 9 BUYAn Intimate War: An Oral History of the Helmand Conflict 1978-2012 by Mike Martin Hurst, 389 pp, £25.00, April, ISBN 978 1 84904 336 6 You are invited to read this free book review from the London Review of Books. Register for free and enjoy 24 hours of access to the entire LRB archive of over 12,500 essays and reviews. 00:00 19:44 ‘The British wrote cheques they could not cash.’ American Special Forces officer
In the morning, I left the village where I’d spent the night, the village where, in the ninth century, a famous king had beaten the army of a northern warlord. I climbed a steep path to a high plateau and walked along dusty tracks. There was gunfire in the distance. In the early afternoon I rested on a hilltop, on the ramparts of ancient fortifications whose shape was outlined in soft bulges and shadings on the slopes. Down in the fertile flatlands, I could see rows of the armoured behemoths Britain bought to protect its troops in Afghanistan from roadside bombs, painted the colour of desert sand and crowded around the maintenance sheds of a military base. There was a roar from the road below and the squeak of tank tracks. A column of Warriors clanked up the hill. The Warrior is a strong fighting vehicle. It can protect a team of soldiers as it carries them into battle. Bullets bounce off it. A single inch-thick shell from its cannon can do terrible damage to anything unarmoured it hits. But these Warriors looked tired. They came into service in the late 1980s, just as the Cold War they’d been designed for was ending, and Afghanistan has a way of diminishing and humbling military technology.
I’d walked the same route last year, leaving Edington after breakfast, walking round the edge of the military exercise area on Salisbury Plain and pausing at the Iron Age fort on Battlesbury Hill, which looks out over the British army’s Wiltshire estate. Since then most of the army in Afghanistan had come back to Britain, and an item of furniture had been added to the Battlesbury ramparts, among the cow parsley and purple clover: a bench. I was glad to sit down, as my pack was heavy. But the bench is also a shrine. When I came across it – this was in July – candles had been placed on it and a sun-bleached cloth poppy fastened to the back rest. It’s a memorial to six British soldiers: Nigel Coupe of the Duke of Lancaster’s Regiment, and Jake Hartley, Anthony Frampton, Christopher Kershaw, Daniel Wade and Daniel Wilford of the Yorkshire Regiment. All except Coupe, a sergeant and father of two children, were aged between 19 and 21. They died in Afghanistan in March 2012, out on patrol in Helmand province, when their Warrior triggered the pressure plate of a huge home-made mine. The explosion flipped the vehicle on its side, blew off the gun turret, ignited its ammunition and killed everyone inside.
The British army is back in Warminster and its other bases around the country. Its eight-year venture in southern Afghanistan is over. The extent of the military and political catastrophe it represents is hard to overstate. It was doomed to fail before it began, and fail it did, at a terrible cost in lives and money.
How bad was it? In a way it was worse than a defeat, because to be defeated, an army and its masters must understand the nature of the conflict they are fighting. Britain never did understand, and now we would rather not think about it. The troops are home from a campaign that lasted 13 years, including Iraq in the middle. They are coming home from their bases in Germany, too. The many car parks’ worth of mine-proof vehicles you can see from Battlesbury Hill, ordered tardily for Afghanistan at a million pounds apiece, will be painted European green and dispersed to other barracks.
David Cameron announced in December 2013 that the troops could come home because their mission had been accomplished. ‘The prime minister’s declaration of victory amounted to an instruction to the British public to forget about Afghanistan,’ Jack Fairweather writes in his powerful history of the war. The instruction was, it seems, hardly needed. The fall of Musa Qala in 2013, ‘once the focus of the British military’s anxiety about their standing in the world, barely registered in the national consciousness, and a desperate battle over Sangin in 2013 … attracted little attention’.
In 2012, when Frank Ledwidge was researching his book, which tallies the personal and financial cost of Britain’s Helmand campaign, he approached all six ministers who had held the defence portfolio since the start of the operation to ask what they thought its legacy would be. Not one – not Labour’s John Reid, now Baron Reid of Cardowan, or Des Browne, now Baron Browne of Ladyton, or John Hutton, now Baron Hutton of Furness, or Bob Ainsworth, or the Conservatives’ Philip Hammond or Liam Fox – was prepared to answer. For those not directly affected, the acceptable form of exculpation and remembrance involves obliterating any consideration of dead Afghans and folding the British war dead into a single mass of noble hero-martyrs stretching from 1914 to now. That, and more, bigger, shinier poppies.
The consequences of the Afghan war will linger. Neither the British in particular nor Nato in general kept count, but Ledwidge estimates British troops alone were responsible for the deaths of at least five hundred Afghan civilians and the injury of thousands more. Tens of thousands fled their homes. ‘Of all the thousands of civilians and combatants,’ Ledwidge writes, ‘not a single al- Qaida operative or “international terrorist’” who could conceivably have threatened the United Kingdom is recorded as having been killed by Nato forces in Helmand.’
Since 2001, 453 British forces personnel have been killed in Afghanistan and more than 2600 wounded; 247 British soldiers have had limbs amputated (the Ministry of Defence refuses to categorise the severity of these amputations on the grounds that releasing the information would help ‘the enemy’). Unknown numbers have psychological injuries.
Financially, the British operation in Helmand was under-resourced. It was, nonetheless, wildly expensive. Ledwidge puts the cost at £40 billion, or £2000 for each taxpaying household. Britain built a base in Helmand, Camp Bastion, bigger than any it had constructed since the end of the Second World War, occupying an area the size of Reading. It has now handed Camp Bastion over to the Afghan military which, at the time of writing, was struggling to prevent it being overrun by attackers. Everything the military did depended on the petrol, diesel and kerosene trucked in from Central Asia or Pakistan; one US estimate calculated that the price of fuel increased by 14,000 per cent in its journey from the refinery to the Afghan front line. In firefights, British troops used Javelin missiles costing £70,000 each to destroy houses made of mud. In December 2013, when they were packing up to leave, they had so much unused ammunition to destroy that they came close to running out of explosives to blow it up with.
Ledwidge adds in the cost of buying four huge American transport planes to shore up the air bridge between Afghanistan and the UK (£800 million), 14 new helicopters (£1 billion), a delay in previously planned cuts in the size of the army (£3 billion) and the cost of returning and restoring war-battered units (£2 billion). More contentiously, he includes the £2.1 billion spent on aid and development, not all of which was stolen or wasted – although much of it was. Ledwidge highlights the grotesque sums spent on providing security and creature comforts to foreign consultants: an annual cost of around half a million pounds per head. He was a consultant in Afghanistan himself, besides serving there as an officer. ‘A great many people, several hundred,’ he writes, ‘could be employed in Helmand for the price of a single consultant plus security team and “life-support”.’
Ledwidge estimates the cost of the British military’s bloodshed and psychological trauma – the amount spent on the ongoing treatment of damaged veterans, compensation under the recently introduced Armed Forces Compensation Scheme (AFCS), and an actuarial estimate of the financial value of human life – at £3.8 billion. He points out that, despite the AFCS, Britain’s care for its veterans falls short of the elaborate system in the United States.
An Afghan who sought compensation from the British in Helmand after losing his sight as a result of a military operation might expect a payment of £4500. A British soldier suffering the same injury would be entitled to £570,000, Ledwidge writes, the maximum possible under the AFCS. That’s not all there is to the compensation hierarchy. Ledwidge picks out one soldier acquaintance who lost his ability to communicate when a mortar shell brought a concrete bunker down on him, crushing his skull. He stands to get the maximum £570,000. Had the same man been injured in a car accident, the insurance payout would have been closer to £4 million, most of which would have been to pay for continuous care.
Ledwidge also tells the story of ‘Peter’, who served with him in the same reservist unit. A talented linguist, physically fit and a promising commander, he was seen as an ideal candidate for special forces, but was seriously injured in a bomb attack in 2006. The MoD told him, wrongly, that as a reservist he wasn’t entitled to a pension or compensation. He had to fight for three years to get them to acknowledge their mistake and pay the money owed him, while the MoD tried to show his injuries weren’t serious and to prove he hadn’t been a good soldier. He won. But not many soldiers, Peter said, had his access to good lawyers and a network of able friends. ‘If I had been alone,’ he said, ‘it was the sort of thing which could have driven me over the edge; after everything that had gone before, the pain and disabilities, this was the kind of thing that can break you.’ ‘Help for Heroes and charities like it’, he added, were ‘fig leaves for a government that wants to pass on the costs to an unaccountable charitable sector’.
Ledwidge is blunt about the division of responsibilities between society and modern volunteer soldiers who make a conscious choice to become warfighters.
The soldiers who are killed and wounded today are not victims – they are not the conscript ex-civilians of the First World War. They are professionals, willingly trained in the business of killing, and (by and large) well paid and well treated while they are soldiers … Servicemen are under no illusions as to the risks they sign up to … In looking so closely at the human costs of this war, the key point that must be borne in mind is not ‘How terrible! Those poor soldiers …’ Rather it must be a realistic and firm realisation: ‘We sent them, now we must take care of the consequences.’
*
I was in Kabul in November 2001 when the first British troops arrived in Afghanistan, a small contingent that didn’t hint at the great deployment to come five years later. I drove out to Bagram airfield to see them, but they’d been forced to hide from the media because the new Afghan masters of Kabul, the Northern Alliance, had made it clear they didn’t trust them. It was an unpromising beginning. I caught a glimpse of them in the distance on the tarmac, looking astonishingly clean-shaven, neatly turned out and weaponless compared to the ebullient bearded gunmen in pyjamas I’d been hanging out with.
It seems strange now, but it was still possible then to believe that their presence might be useful. It is easy to forget, after Iraq and Afghanistan, how high the professional reputation of the British military was in 2001. Whatever one thought of the political decisions to use them, however ugly and bloody the means, the services could say they had done what was asked of them by governments in the Falklands, in the Gulf War of 1991, in Kosovo, in Bosnia, in Sierra Leone. Their grim start in Northern Ireland eventually found a redemption of sorts with the Good Friday Agreement. Even those Britons who found the retaking of the Falklands, the bombing of Serbia and the deployment of British troops in Ulster repugnant could take pride in General Mike Jackson’s refusal, in Kosovo in 1999, to follow the orders of a hot-headed American general that could have led to an unnecessary skirmish with Russia.
It’s clear from these books, and from my own very short time with British troops in Helmand in 2006, that the military – or at least the army, which was the dominant service in Afghanistan – still recruits remarkable people, still trains them well, and provides them with a certain amount of good equipment. It’s also clear that institutionally it has been riding its luck for generations. What began at some point in the 20th century as an unsavoury means to an end – trying to use American military might to leverage the waning British military, with the end of maximising British influence – floated loose of its original aim. Preserving the means became an end in itself. The goal of the British military establishment became to ingratiate itself with its US counterpart not for the sake of British interests but for the sake of British military prestige.
Among other things, this involved increasingly desperate stratagems by the generals, admirals and air marshals to delude the Americans and, no doubt, themselves and their subordinates, that they were capable of keeping up with the relentless evolution of US tactics and the gold-plated technology that enabled it. Sometimes they were found out. After the Soviets introduced advanced anti- aircraft missiles in the 1970s, the RAF trained crews to fly low to avoid enemy radar, while the USAF took a technological approach, more protective of its aircrew, which Britain couldn’t afford. In 1991, half a dozen RAF Tornados were shot down by Soviet technology in Iraq. In the Falklands War in 1982, the Royal Navy, supposedly capable of going head to head with Soviet forces in the North Atlantic, was exposed as lacking the US navy’s multi-layered air defences, and was able to stop its aircraft carriers being sunk only by sacrificing smaller warships. Sometimes the delusion remained untested. During the Cold War, British troops in Germany trained for a war of manoeuvre against attacking Soviet divisions. The plan was for infantry to use anti-tank missiles to hold off the Red Army while British tanks manoeuvred for a decisive counter-blow. But the missiles British troops were supposed to use to blow up the advancing Soviet tanks would work only if they hit the tanks from the side. In his scathing contribution to British Generals in Blair’s Wars, a collection of 26 essays mainly by retired generals, Sir Paul Newton uses this story to mock the cliché that the British armed forces ‘punch above their weight’. ‘This was like telling a lightweight boxer he can only hit his oncoming heavyweight opponent by punching sideways … The army embraced the manoeuvre myth for it gave a veneer of plausibility to an otherwise militarily meaningless proposition.’
Both these traits – the upper echelons of the British military making American approval their primary goal, and the delusional exaggeration of British military capabilities – peaked in the 2000s. It was inevitable the two would clash; that at some point the desire to impress the Pentagon by using the Pentagon’s own resources as cover for Britain’s relatively low-budget military would conflict with America’s own interests, and end up damaging Britain’s military reputation more in Washington’s eyes than if the MoD hadn’t puffed itself up in the first place.
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