Afghanistan: another fine victory

By Richard North - August 7, 2021

Not since the fall of Saigon in 1975 have we seen such an egregious and humiliating failure of US military power, shared in part by its coalition allies which must include the British as the largest partner contingent.

Although there was considerable civilian participation on the part of the coalition governments, it has to be said that the 20-year tenure of the US-led intervention has been primarily a military effort.

The US military expedition in late 2001, launched with the initial aim of dismantling the al-Qaeda presence in the country, morphed at the end of the year into the coalition effort under the UN-established International Security Assistance Force (ISAF). Its task then was to take on and defeat the Taleban and to train the Afghan national security forces.

In August 2003, ISAF became nominally led by Nato but, while some of the US forces in the country reported to Nato, the majority remained under direct national command, in particular the massive air power deployed by the USAF, the US Navy and Marines.

With the withdrawal of US forces all but complete, and the Taleban operating freely in much of the country, few doubt that this has been a military failure, although I watched briefly General Richard Dannatt on BBC’s Newsnight.

He denied that a Taleban victory was a “slam dunk”. The Afghan national forces, he declared, were “well trained” and outnumbered the Taleban. He called for multinational support of the Afghan government and efforts to restart the Doha peace process.

The latest report on the ongoing talks, though, refers to a “deadlock”, with the Taleban demanding “the lion’s share of power” in any new government. There seems little chance, therefore, of immediate progress.

As for Dannatt’s assertion that the Afghan forces are “well trained”, no one who has stayed close to events in Afghanistan could possibly make that claim. One only has to read Ben Anderson’s book, No Worse Enemy or watch some of his films to appreciate how hollow that claim really is.

Also, when we see reports of the ANA deserting wholesale to the Taleban, or seeking refuge when confronted by Taleban fighters – amid further reports of them surrendering vehicles and weapons – numerical superiority becomes a somewhat irrelevant matter.

Then Dannatt, who was CGS from 2006 to 2009 – and possibly the worst head of the Army we’ve had in living memory – has a history of living in cloud-cuckoo land, as I pointed out in my very last post on my now defunct blog, Defence of the Realm.

There, I reviewed a BBC programme aired on 26 October 2014 entitled “The Lion’s Last Roar” but, before working through the BBC web page, I referred to my own work, written some years previously, on 17 August 2009:

… As we have watched the train wreck that masquerades as strategy in this benighted country, we have become more and more convinced that it is wrong – totally, completely, fundamentally wrong.

It cannot succeed. It will not succeed and the inevitable outcome is that, after the expenditure of much more of our treasure – which we can ill-afford – and the death of many more fine men (and, probably, some women), we will be forced into a humiliating retreat, dressed up as victory, leaving the country in no better a condition than when we found it – if not worse.

Bearing in mind the most recent events, it might be difficult to suggest that I was wholly wrong, even if in 2009 it was already obvious. Then we had the BBC telling us that: “Military leaders failed to calculate the magnitude of the conflict in Afghanistan”, with Gen. Wall admitting they “got it wrong”.

This man, for a time commanding ISAF forces, added: “We had put forward a plan saying that for the limited objectives that we had set ourselves, this was a reasonable force. And I freely admit now, that calculus was wrong”.

He then told us: “We have a phrase in the Army, ‘hope for the best but plan for the worst’. We were actually hoping for the best and planning for the best. I mean I didn’t have the resources I needed. I didn’t have a reserve, I didn’t even have an aircraft to fly round my own patch. I mean we just weren’t in the real world”.

In a comment that has not lasted well, Wall went on to say that: “The lasting impact we will have had is not just to sanitise the threat to allow the development of governance and economy, but to be a witness to and stimulus for very significant social change, with an improving economy, with jobs, with much developed farming opportunities in contrast to narcotics”. “Had we not done this”, he said, “Helmand could well be looking rather like the borders of Syria and Iraq”.

Also on the programme was Dannatt, then as always seemingly more interested in covering his own back. Having completely misread the tactical position in both Iraq – where he thought the military effort could be scaled down at the height of the insurgency – and in Afghanistan, where he thought he could Hoover up the Taliban with fast-moving squads of men in eight-wheeler mine-trap APCs – back in 2014, he told us:

Looking back we probably should have realised, maybe I should realised, that the circumstances in Iraq were such that the assumption that we would get down to just 1,000 or 1,500 soldiers by summer 2006 was flawed – it was running at many thousands.

We called it the perfect storm, because we knew that we were heading for two considerable size operations and we really only had the organisation and manpower for one. And therefore perhaps we should have revisited the decision that we the UK would lead an enlarged mission in southern Afghanistan in 2006. Perhaps we should have done that. We didn’t do that.

We did, however, have the commander of the British forces in Helmand in 2006, Brig Ed Butler, saying: “We were underprepared, we were under-resourced, and most importantly, we didn’t have a clear and achievable strategy to deliver success”.

In my conclusion, I wrote that it was all very well having these ex post facto confessionals, but the point was that it was obvious at the time that the campaign was failing and was doomed to failure.

For these “highly-paid incompetents”, I wrote, “to be admitting that they got things wrong, when they were paid to get it right – and amply rewarded with rank, baubles and privileges for so doing – is simply not good enough”.

What comes round, goes round. Despite Dannatt’s protestations, we see in the Business Insider the headline: “The US military plainly failed in Afghanistan. The generals need to answer for it”, asserting that: “As US forces leave Afghanistan, the generals who led them need to explain how the war reached such a dismal end”.

Rather than an anticipatory lament for what fate may befall Afghans in the weeks or months just ahead, the paper says, what American citizens need – and American soldiers deserve – is a forthright explanation for how a 20-year-long war undertaken by the strongest military on the planet appears headed for such a dismal conclusion.

What applies to the US military, in my view, must also apply to the British forces, although I am not optimistic that anything will be forthcoming. Back in 2014, I wrote that it had only taken the Army five years as a corporate body to convince itself that it scored a stunning victory in Iraq, despite evidence to the contrary.

By the time the whitewash machine has completed its work, I prophesised, the [British] Army will emerge unblemished from Afghanistan as well. I wait to be proved wrong.