A Warning on Afghanistan
Britain's most senior generals have issued a blunt warning to Downing Street that the military campaign in Afghanistan is facing a catastrophic failure, a development that could lead to an Islamist government seizing power in neighbouring Pakistan.
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The situation in Afghanistan is much worse than many people recognise,' Inge told peers. 'We need to face up to that issue, the consequence of strategic failure in Afghanistan and what that would mean for Nato... We need to recognise that the situation - in my view, and I have recently been in Afghanistan - is much, much more serious than people want to recognise.'
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'The consequences of failure in Afghanistan are far greater than in Iraq,' he said. 'If we fail in Afghanistan then Pakistan goes down. The security problems for Britain would be massively multiplied. I think you could not then stop a widening regional war that would start off in warlordism but it would become essentially a war in the end between Sunni and Shia right across the Middle East.'
That's an incredibly bleak assessment. A fair number of rightwing blogs and pundits use similar nightmare scenarios of what will happen after the US leaves Iraq to justify a continued presence, even if that presence isn't actually accomplishing anything to make those scenarios less likely. What worries me about this scenario, is that I have rarely heard British generals make such claims lightly, and they have a long history of involvement in the region to back up their assessments with.
The reason this worries me is because much like Iraq, I think Afghanistan has already moved past the point where we are capable of salvaging victory. The article even helpfully points out why:
Ashdown said two mistakes were being made: a lack of a co-ordinated military command because of the multinational 'hearts and minds' Nato campaign and the US-led Operation Enduring Freedom offensive campaign against the Taliban. There was also insufficient civic support on, for example, providing clean water.
Ashdown warned: 'Unless we put this right, unless we have a unitary system of command, we are going to lose. The battle for this is the battle of public opinion. The polls are slipping. Once they go on the slide it is almost impossible to win it back. You can only do it with the support of the local population.
'There is a very short shelf life for an occupation force. Once that begins to shift against you it is very very difficult to turn it round.'
The warnings from Ashdown and the generals on Afghanistan will be echoed in a report this week by the all-party Commons defence select committee. MPs will say that the combination of civilian casualties, war damage and US-led efforts to eradicate lucrative poppy crops risk turning ordinary people towards the Taliban.
Calls for greater reconstruction and resources from NATO countries that have been light on the ground so far sounds great, but there is little real prospect in getting any of it done. Not only has Iraq diverted resources from the US and UK which could have been used in Afghanistan, but the two wars are being linked into one broad US struggle. The unpopular and illegal Iraq War is therefore taking down the Afghan campaign by association. Pouring troops and resources into Afghanistan so the US can continue its focus on Iraq is of dubious worth to most people.
The simple fact remains that there are nowhere near enough forces in Afghanistan to wage a proper counterinsurgency campaign. Troops are so thin on the ground, and the countries that provide them are so casualty conscious, that there is a greater and greater reliance on air strikes to deal with threats real or perceived, which is among the worst ways to fight a counterinsurgency campaign.
The ridiculousness of the situation was brought to me the last time I read part of a briefing from the Canadian military spokesperson, saying that their mission was reconstruction, not combat, but that they couldn't get the reconstruction projects under way until things were more secure, which meant they had to participate in combat operations until things were secure enough to start reconstruction.
I read that as, "We'd like to be building stuff, but there are people around who shoot at us, so instead of building stuff up, we're going to keep blowing everything apart until there's nobody left shooting at us. At which point we'll start building things, assuming there's anybody left for us to build for."
There is no way we're going to win following that logic, and with the situation in Pakistan I noted earlier looking as though its about to get worse, and adding the warning from Inge above, I'd say we're going to be paying for the legacy of this war for a lot longer than I originally thought.
