Re-reading Michael Yon's latest despatch for the umpteenth time, my own thinking hardens into a single question: why are we messing about?
The heaviest piece of kit used in the entire operation to clear Pharmacy Road is an armoured JCB (pictured left) – with all the substance and presence of a Tonka toy. It is not even an HMEE.
The dangerous work is done by unprotected troops and ordnance clearance teams driving nothing more lethal than the absurdly expensive, unarmoured Tellar Disposal and Search Explosives Ordnance Disposal vehicles.
What we should have been using were these (pictured below) – the Mantak D-9 Armoured Bulldozer. There is even a remote-control version.
There are more pics here (about eight-tenths the way down). One of the captions reads:
Talk About Intimidating. You do NOT want to be anywhere around this monster when it is barrelling towards you with several tons of mines scooped up from your locally laid minefield, otherwise you might be eating a lot of dirt and body parts for dinner.Procedure-wise, what should have been done is equally straightforward. A straight line should have been drawn on a map, between FOB Jackson and FB Wishtan. The route should have been published well in advance, with warnings to keep clear. On the appointed day, the D-9 is started up, put into gear and driven from A to B, in a straight line. This is the engineering solution.
Michael Yon writes about these baked mud walls stopping 30mm cannon rounds and being left standing when 500lb bombs drop in compounds. They would not last two minutes in front of a D-9.
Then, you open up a compensation office and pay a fair price for the damage. The cost would still be cheaper than a brace of GBUs and the delivery charges – much less the compensation you have to pay to the relatives of dead soldiers and limbless servicemen.
But what about "hearts and minds?" I hear you cry. Well, there is nothing benign in permitting the Taleban to kill Afghan citizens. Yon writes that two civilians were killed by IEDs after the road clearance operation.
One was killed when he tried to strip one of the blown-up vehicles left by the British engineers. The other died on a route he had thought cleared by the British. It had not been. "The Taleban blows up a lot of local people in Sangin," Yon observes. Where is the "hearts and minds" in allowing that to happen?
The Afghanis, we are told, want security more than anything. That is how you give it to them. Sending out our own young men to die in narrow alleys, surrounded by high walls, prey to the IED and the bullet, is not. It achieves nothing.
Blessed be the peacemaker – it is called an armoured D-9.
COMMENT THREAD
When the City suffers the rest of the country will suffer, as well. Those much derided bankers, traders and hedge fund managers bring in a lot of money. And they do not like what is coming from the British government and, especially, the European Union.
The Wall Street Journal has now notedwhat has been discussed in various corridors for some time: the hedge funds are beginning to move to Switzerland. (And no, the Swiss are not stupid enough to make their lives difficult.)
Lawyers estimate hedge funds managing close to $15 billion have moved to Switzerland in the past year, with more possibly to come. David Butler, founder of professional-services firm Kinetic Partners, said his company had advised 23 hedge funds on leaving the U.K. in the 15 months to April. An additional 15 are close to quitting the U.K., he said.As it happens, this subject has been raised in the House of Lords a couple of times by Lord Pearson of Rannoch.
On July 2 he asked a question in the Chamber:
To ask Her Majesty's Government what assessment they have made of how the powers granted to the new European Union financial institutions will develop in future; and whether they will affect the independence of the United Kingdom and its financial institutions.The response was, unsurprisingly, rather bland so the Noble Lord followed up with two supplementary questions that the rules allow, one of which he specifically asked:
Secondly, have Her Majesty’s Government made their own assessment of the damage to our economy caused by firms leaving the City in droves, which they are already starting to do?Pshaw, said the Noble Minister, Lord Myners.
I am unaware of firms leaving the City of London in droves—quite the opposite. The City of London is continuing to grow in global significance, as underlined by the recent Bischoff report.Well, Lord Pearson was not going to leave matters there and, unlike his former party, he did something about it. On July 20, he tackled the subject again in a Written Question that asked
Her Majesty's Government further to the answer by Lord Myners on 2 July (Official Report, House of Lords, col. 329) saying that firms are not leaving the City of London, whether they discussed with the Swiss authorities the number of firms leaving the City of London for Switzerland.HMG was having none of it. Well, to be quite precise, HMG was not going to admit either to ignorance or to panic.
Treasury Ministers and officials have discussions with a wide variety of organisations in the public and private sectors as part of the process of policy development and delivery. As was the case with previous Administrations, it is not the Government's practice to provide details of all such discussions.I trust Lord Myners read the WSJ article with his toast and marmalade this morning.
COMMENT THREAD
Free-lance journalist extraordinaire Michael Yon, having published a number of gripping accounts of our troops activities in Sagin, has now been kicked out of the town by an anal MoD, for writingthis report.
Obsessed with OPSEC (operational security), the MoD "minders" have taken exception to the candour with which Yon writes. Yon himself gives us a clue as to how his material is being viewed.
"We set off down the market road," he writes. Then, in an oblique reference to those "minders", he adds: "Some folks believe such reports are 'security violations', as if the thousands of people living here do not know exactly where the bases are, or do not know exactly where we came from and went to. Operations take place here every day. Civilians are everywhere."
We have summarised part of his report over on Defence of the Realm to give a clearer narrative line on the operation he describes, which we call The battle for Pharmacy Road.
The operation is a success – through the skill and ingenuity of our troops. It is difficult to see what the MoD is worried about. But then it is not OPSEC they are really concerned with – it is controlling the message. And they would sooner have no message at all than allow someone else to tell the story in their own way.
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