Approach to Helmand "flawed" - by Richard... Saturday, June 12, 2010

Approach to Helmand "flawed" - by Richard... Saturday, June 12, 2010

The Today programme has picked up on the series in The Times on Afghanistan, interviewing Conservative MP Adam Holloway and Rear Admiral Chris Parry, the MoD's director-general of development, concepts and doctrine in 2006. The interview has since been reported by the Press Association and The Sun.

Parry's comments are especially interesting as he played a key role in discussions leading up to the initial deployment of troops to Helmand in 2006 and he has now admitted that the MoD's approach to the mission was "flawed".

Echoing then defence secretary John Reid's comment at the time, that he hoped the UK would leave Helmand without a shot being fired, Parry confirms that the MoD top brass were not expecting to have to fight the Taliban in the province.

"I think we had an immature approach to what is now known as counter-insurgency," says Parry. "We didn't realise the complexity and the character of the context in which we were going to fight. In fact, we didn't envisage we were going to fight."

He goes on: "I think we took too much baggage with us from previous experience from Borneo, Malaya and Northern Ireland and we hadn't really recognised that the lessons we had taken from those campaigns were valid, but they weren't sufficient for the context of Afghanistan, or indeed Iraq."

Then, for the coup de grace, Parry says: "I think at the time there was considerable senior resistance to ditching the lessons from the past and moving on to more radical and progressive ideas. The senior military at the time actually believed different things about what should be done in Afghanistan. The old doctrine, the thinking about how we conduct that sort of campaign still prevailed."

At this stage, as my readers may well imagine, this blogger's blood pressure was escalating to a dangerous level. Multi-adjectival descriptive sentences were forming, in which the word "fuckwit" could qualify as one of the mildest and most complimentary.

When I think of the shit I took from any number of commentators for daring to question the wisdom and expertise of our military "experts", who so obviously knew what they were doing ... and now we get the admission that these great experts were "immature" and that they "didn't realise the complexity and the character of the context in which we were going to fight."

However, one must take a calmer, more analytical approach – which I managed to do after walking several times round the garden, kicking the cat, slamming a few doors and only with difficulty resisting the temptation to punch the laptop keys through the machine and embed them in the table below.

Thinking back to the time, we knew that our great military geniuses like Jackson and Dannatt were basing their strategy on "memories" of Northern Ireland, but actually more so in Iraq than in Afghanistan.

It is interesting though that Parry speaks of "memories" – it was the memory rather than the actuality that was being applied. While the British military was lording it over the Septics, claiming greater knowledge of counter-insurgency though NI experience, the one thing that became very clear was that the lessons of Northern Ireland were applied neither in Iraq or Afghanistan.

In fact, as I point out in Ministry of Defeat, the lessons learned were almost completely ignored in Iraq – which makes it rather interesting that Parry, the man actually responsible for doctrine, is still claiming that Northern Ireland experience did guide strategy.

As regards Afghanistan, the very attraction of this theatre was that the Brown Jobs – having been roundly whipped by the Mahdi Army in Basra and al Amarah – were looking for a new venue where they could play with their toys, without the fuzzies getting too uppity and breaking them. Insofar as there was a strategy in the early days, it was made "on the hoof". It owed nothing to COIN and stemmed more from Rourke's Drift and the Alamo, only with more modern toys.

Once of course, the mad mullahs of the Taliban found that they too – like the Mahdi Army – were having difficulty ousting the British Army from fixed positions, they also went "asymmetric" and started using nasty things like old Soviet mines and then IEDs on an industrial scale.

It was only latterly that there was talk of Borneo and Malaya, but that was not until 2009, after Parry's time (he retired in 2008). By then, even the Sceptics were getting a bit dubious about British strategic wisdom and the brass were looking for something that might restore their credibility. Thus, briefly, the Far East campaigns became fashionable.

With not a great deal of jungle in Afghanistan, the brass might have been better off studying the campaigns in Aden and Cyprus, then Rhodesia and Bosnia, where land mines and IEDs were widely deployed and countermeasures were being developed. But our "immature" brass obviously had difficulty coping with more than one idea at the same time, so the lessons there went begging.

Eventually, our geniuses alighted on the military equivalent of putting men in front of vehicles with red flags, as way of dealing with IEDs, reasoning – if that is what it can be called – that the public was less concerned with the odd bod getting blown up, provided they weren't in Snatch Land Rovers, which the media might notice.

Then we got the US version of COIN, with Gen McChrystal articulating ideas about "take – hold - build", which have about as much relevance to Afghanistan as a spaghetti sandwich does to an eight-man bobsleigh. But, relieved from the responsibility of doing their own thinking by the Sceptics, our Brown Jobs have fallen in with a strategy which Adam Holloway complains is "fatally flawed".

This is the man who was less than impressed with the fun and games in Iraq and argues that it is time to seek deals with the hardcore Taliban leaders. Personally, I would suggest killing them – in very large numbers - and then bribing the survivors, once we have re-engineered their towns, demolished their walls and straightened their roads.

However, Holloway is on the right lines when he says, "We have to have a political settlement". For that, we need to listen to what people like Maharajakrishna Rasgotra have to say. He regards the current policy as "the march of folly", and offers his own ideas. Being a former Indian government minister, his views are neither practical nor trustworthy, but his preferred direction of travel is interesting.

Certainly, it is far more realistic than anything produced by our politicians, and far better than anything our brass have even considered, not that that would be at all difficult. Given the revelations of late – combined with what we already knew – there are very few of our generals that we would be happy employing on road-crossing duties or as school dinner ladies.

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Gone AWOL - by Richard...

I have a reputation on this blog for bitching about other blogs – but if I do complain about them, it is because I care about the political blogosphere, its independence and its capabilities. I do not want to see it sell out to the MSN, and its ranks of sterile, smug, self-satisfied "clogs", nor go down the route of producing low-grade crap.

This is also about democracy and the failings of the MSM – and the bit about "democracy is not a spectator sport". Blogs are the perfect tool for the democrat. I want to see the blogosphere succeed and become an influential part of the political process.

Traditionally, the fourth estate has been an essential part of that process, in its ability to scrutinise and question government. But since it has largely given up on this duty and become part of the entertainment industry, or does it so badly that it has become part of the problem, the hope has been that the "citizen journalist" would fill the gap.

If there is a gap to be filled right now, it is Afghanistan – or, to be more precise, our military campaign there, the one that is costing us at least £3.5 billion for the coming year, and is going to result in an unhealthy number of coffins coming back from theatre.

One would like to think that this is an issue on which the blogosphere could excel, not least because Cameron's political agenda is so transparently dishonest and inept and the media are not even past first base in identifying or reporting the salient issues.

The Times and its three-day investigation is, at the moment, as good as it gets. But all that gives us is some fairly superficial criticism of the early phases of the 2006 campaign. It has managed to break out from the "received wisdom" and offer some relatively restrained criticism of the military. But remarkable as this is, there is still a long way to go.

The debate started, though, is continuing in The Times with input from back-bench MPs, and we're seeing The Economist have a go. But it is very difficult to detect any significant or sustained blogospheric activity. Even Tory Boy Blog doesn't cover its hero's derring do, preferring a softer agenda.

This and the other "big hitters" thus have nothing useful to say (or anything at all to say on the subject, for that matter), leaving some of the minor blogs such as Subrosa to have a go. It is rather ironic that a "Dundee wifey" has a view, and all the big, brave men bloggers seem to be running a mile.

Actually, it is very difficult finding any who are dealing seriously with the Afghan issues, and have anything intelligent to say. There is a blog search facility on Google but it doesn't work very well, which means a search through diverse blogrolls – with very little result.

Interestingly, we find the US network CNN citing Cameron saying "Afghanistan is the most important foreign policy and national security issue facing Britain," yet the (British) blogosphere has largely gone AWOL. And, if it is not prepared to address an issue like this, "the most important foreign policy and national security issue facing Britain," then is there any point in having a blogosphere at all? Should we just leave it to the MSM?

Or am I not supposed to ask such questions?

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Prat - by Richard... Friday, June 11, 2010

Environment minister Chris Huhne has pushed the EU for tougher climate change targets which could see an extra 2,500 wind turbines going up around Britain. The Lib-Dim used his first EU talks since taking office to call for a 30 percent cut in carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions across Europe by 2020 "to help stop dangerous global warming."

"I've been trying to think which politician on earth I would rather have less in a cabinet post in the current coalition than Chris Huhne," writes writes Dellers. Despite the competition, it is hard to think of a better candidate for exclusion. Huhne is a man who makes shooting politicians not only acceptable but a moral imperative.

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Stuffed by the eurozone - by Richard...

Euroslime Nicky Clegg has been telling the eurosthat economic sluggishness and instability in the eurozone is the "greatest threat" to Britain's own economic recovery.

The deputy Cleggeron leader was on a jolly to Spain – no doubt so his wife can pick up her Green Shield stamps – and took the time out to tell a conference in Madrid that: "Our economies are intertwined. Other EU countries are the UK's biggest trading partners by some distance - around half of all our exports go to the EU and over half our inward investment comes from there."

"That means," he said, "that economic and financial difficulties in the eurozone directly affect Britain. Indeed continuing instability and a lack of growth on our doorstep is the greatest threat to our own economic recovery ... Quite simply slow growth in the eurozone means fewer British exports, slower British growth, fewer British jobs."

Of course, there is a simple answer to that – diversify our economy, building trading relationships outside the sclerotic eurozone. Leaving the EU would also be a very good idea. But little Nicky would never agree to that ... not while he and his missus are so firmly embedded on the gravy train.

Meanwhile, Spain's economy ministry has declared that it has not made a request for economic aid from the EU, after the FT Deutschland said that Spain might need the aid if the problems at the Spanish banking sector get worse, and that the EU was preparing to activate a package in case Madrid asked for it.

On the other hand, Bloomberg is saying that European banking shares indicate a Greek debt default may be just a matter of time while Reuters claims that the ECB is continuing with its programme of buying up eurozone debt and has so far bought €40.5 billion-worth.

Yet Clegg thinks this calls for "fully" implementing existing single market legislation and extending the single market to new areas such as the digital economy. They don't call 'em Lib-Dims for nothing.

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