I reviewed Frank Ledwidge's previous book Losing Small Wars, about the British defeat in Iraq and Afghanistan. You can find the Review in the June 2012 listing. When I saw this new book I didn't need any recommendation to buy it. Ledwidge is a heavyweight. He brings a background in military intelligence (the UKs military intelligence) to a critical analysis of the UKs disastrous failures in Basra and Helmand.
This time he looks at the costs of Britain's latest Afghan War, modelling himself on Stiglitz and Bilmes' Three Trillion Dollar War (2008), an economist's costing of the US invasion of Iraq. But he goes beyond that in continuing his critique of the political, strategic, and tactical failings of our political and military "policy" in Afghanistan.
Though he does not dwell on it (page 20), the Big New Mistake in the second phase of the Afghan War was the one made by Tony Blair in 2005 when he decided that in a fresh allocation of invading forces' responsibilities, the UK would take on Helmand province, centre of Afghan opium production then and bigger centre of opium production now: 40% of all Afghan opium output in 2006 and 49% in 2012 (page 180). There were two very good reasons for not taking on Helmand: (1) it's a very big place and we didn't actually have enough troops to occupy it ; (2) the Helmandis have a specific hatred of the British, dating back to the previous Afghan Wars we have launched against them.
But even bigger than this mistake was the overall mistake of giving both political and military backing to Karzai and his gang of war lords and kleptocrats. Official UK aid to Afghanistan does not trickle down much farther than their pockets. We know this. Transparency International ranks 183 countries on its scale of governmental corruption; Afghanistan is down there in position 180, far worse than say Azerbaijan (at 143) where Mr Blair likes to hang out these days. Only North Korea and Somalia (which has recently acquired a government to corrupt) are behind Afghanistan; Myanamar is equal 180th. (pages 146 - 48)
This known fact about what we are backing in Afghanistan is one reason why the British political class and its compliant civil servants (not many whistleblowers here) are determined to withhold as much information as possible on the costs of our prolonged Afghan adventure. Ledwidge repeatedly has to resort to best guesses, estimates and extrapolations from bits of known evidence. This is true for costs of military hardware and troop deployment; insurance and medical treatment costs associated with deaths, injuries, trauma both now and recurrent in the future; costs to the Afghan economy of our presence; costs of Afghan deaths, injuries and trauma.
It's an honest and unsparing book. There are two things missing.
First, recognition of the fact (stressed by Sherard Cowper-Coles in Cables from Kabul) that Afghanistan has neighbours: not just Pakistan but Iran, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Tajikstan, China and India. This is not a very encouraging list. But these countries have all paid a price for American-led adventurism in Afghanistan. And Pakistan has paid a heavy price for its former Imperial power's occupation of Helmand. Ledwidge does briefly discuss the consequences for British homeland security of the damage we have done in Helmand (pages 208 - 211). This line of thinking is one that urgently needs to be pursued.
Second, a link needs to be made to the analysis offered in David Keen's book Useful Enemies which argues that many wars drag on for years because there are stakeholders who have an interest in their continuation. Ledwidge does mention, more than once (pages 20 - 21 and elsewhere), the "use them or lose them" remark attributed to General Sir Richard Dannatt when Chief of the General Staff (2007) suggesting that if troops did not deploy from Iraq to Afghanistan then they would be declared redundant in some round of defence cuts.
But it is more than that. There are stakeholders everywhere: Karzai and his chums trousering aid money; the Taliban taking bribes not to attack enemy convoys; drug lords providing income in an economy which cannot be normal while fighting continues; British politicians basically channeling tax money to the arms manufacturers on whom we rely to keep the unemployment figures down; the military trying to defend its turf; Prince Harry needing photo ops ... the list goes on. And now we have Britain's answer to Donald Rumsfeld, our Foreign Secretary William Hague, casting around - almost desperately - for some new war to lose when the troops become free from Afghanistan. It's not the winning that matters; it's the taking part.
Showing posts with label Frank Ledwidge. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Frank Ledwidge. Show all posts
Saturday 13 July 2013
Saturday 9 June 2012
Review: Frank Ledwidge, Losing Small Wars. British Military Failure in Iraq and Afghanistan
Read this book and you will likely want immediately to confine British forces to barracks and base. It's not safe to let them go anywhere or do anything.
Lieutenant Commander Ledwidge spent fifteen years as a Naval Reserve military intelligence officer and served in Bosnia, Kosovo, Iraq and Afghanistan. He is now retired. He begins rather uncertainly, as if unsure that he should be writing this kind of book at all, but as he gets into his stride, he delivers page after page of understated, but to an outsider like me, seemingly withering critique.
His book is not about the politicians who, out of weakness or ignorance or vainglory, despatched British forces to Iraq and Afghanistan. He is concerned with how the armed forces - and principally the army - handled the missions they were assigned or, in default of proper political direction, invented for themselves.
At the very top, Ledwidge rebukes the top brass for having failed to "speak truth to power": "generals, ill-trained and inadequately educated in the basic elements of strategy, failed in their role as speakers of truth to power" (p 262). In thrall to bluff and hearty notions - Can Do, Cracking On - they failed to demand a clear mission brief, failed to say that - as they understood the brief - it could not be delivered with the resources available, failed to raises issues about what might be legitimate in the circumstances, and so on.
In both Iraq and Afghanistan, the invading and occupying British forces actually did very little - except kill and antagonise local civilians.
In southern Iraq (Basra), they were initially welcomed but squandered goodwill by aligning themselves with militias and gangsters posing as the local administration. They simply lacked the on-the-ground intelligence to realise that this is what they were doing. In the end, they ended up largely confined to base. When they did venture out, in very small numbers, local civilians were quite often terrorised and occasionally tortured and killed.
Ledwidge makes some scathing remarks around this subject. We are frequently told that problems arise when we don't understand the local culture. Nonsense, says Ledwidge, culture is the same in Basra as in Basingstoke: in neither place do people want their doors kicked in at night by heavily armed soldiers speaking a foreign language and uncertain about their reasons for being in your living room.
In Afghanistan, it was insane for the top brass to agree to deployment in Helmand - a province where the British have been hated ever since they were last there.
It was insane to suppose that you could separate the "people" from the "insurgents" (Taliban) when you actually had less to offer the people by way of provision of security and available justice than did the insurgents and when your orders were to ally yourselves with prime sources of local unhappiness - a criminal police and judiciary.
As in Basra, the Brits ended up confined to base with occasional adventures into the occupied territory. Tragically, in Afghanistan, such adventures were often enough backed up with heavy weaponry and missile attacks. Many civilians dead, many more "hearts and minds" lost. What makes us think that it is even legitimate to be firing these missiles, as if Helmand is some kind of battlefield in which we face an enemy threatening our very existence?
Ledwidge goes after these failures with chilling anecdotes, sharp thumbnail analyses, detailed critique of the Army's military culture, and occasionally open exasperation. He rejects the notion that it was all the American's fault, or NATO's fault. These were British mistakes.This is how he sums up:
"The defeats - let us not mince words - in the civil wars - the "counter-insurgencies" - in Helmand and Basra need not have been so comprehensive; indeed, they need not have happened at all... in Basra, the British started with a "winning hand" and played it poorly. In Helmand, they managed to ignore several factors to which any Afghan could (and would) have drawn their attention (and to which several soldeirs did) - this was the single worst possible province into which the British could crash" (p 259)
Lt Cdr Ledwidge is too polite to add, the politicians and the top brass even thought that Helmand would be a good place to deploy one of our spare princelings, Prince Harry.
There is one topic which Ledwidge does not address but which complicates the picture. The wars he discusses have been fought for domestic political consumption. That is why there are so many VIPs on the ground (see Cowper-Coles' Cables from Kabul for examples). That is why there have to be Photo Ops involving bullets and missiles, when really - as Ledwidge several times observes in a discussion of "courageous restraint" - the real military challenge is to manage things so that you don't fire many bullets - and certainly don't fire any missiles.
I can't see the PR man installed as Prime Minister in Downing Street reading this book - which is one reason why I say: Read This Book!
Lieutenant Commander Ledwidge spent fifteen years as a Naval Reserve military intelligence officer and served in Bosnia, Kosovo, Iraq and Afghanistan. He is now retired. He begins rather uncertainly, as if unsure that he should be writing this kind of book at all, but as he gets into his stride, he delivers page after page of understated, but to an outsider like me, seemingly withering critique.
His book is not about the politicians who, out of weakness or ignorance or vainglory, despatched British forces to Iraq and Afghanistan. He is concerned with how the armed forces - and principally the army - handled the missions they were assigned or, in default of proper political direction, invented for themselves.
At the very top, Ledwidge rebukes the top brass for having failed to "speak truth to power": "generals, ill-trained and inadequately educated in the basic elements of strategy, failed in their role as speakers of truth to power" (p 262). In thrall to bluff and hearty notions - Can Do, Cracking On - they failed to demand a clear mission brief, failed to say that - as they understood the brief - it could not be delivered with the resources available, failed to raises issues about what might be legitimate in the circumstances, and so on.
In both Iraq and Afghanistan, the invading and occupying British forces actually did very little - except kill and antagonise local civilians.
In southern Iraq (Basra), they were initially welcomed but squandered goodwill by aligning themselves with militias and gangsters posing as the local administration. They simply lacked the on-the-ground intelligence to realise that this is what they were doing. In the end, they ended up largely confined to base. When they did venture out, in very small numbers, local civilians were quite often terrorised and occasionally tortured and killed.
Ledwidge makes some scathing remarks around this subject. We are frequently told that problems arise when we don't understand the local culture. Nonsense, says Ledwidge, culture is the same in Basra as in Basingstoke: in neither place do people want their doors kicked in at night by heavily armed soldiers speaking a foreign language and uncertain about their reasons for being in your living room.
In Afghanistan, it was insane for the top brass to agree to deployment in Helmand - a province where the British have been hated ever since they were last there.
It was insane to suppose that you could separate the "people" from the "insurgents" (Taliban) when you actually had less to offer the people by way of provision of security and available justice than did the insurgents and when your orders were to ally yourselves with prime sources of local unhappiness - a criminal police and judiciary.
As in Basra, the Brits ended up confined to base with occasional adventures into the occupied territory. Tragically, in Afghanistan, such adventures were often enough backed up with heavy weaponry and missile attacks. Many civilians dead, many more "hearts and minds" lost. What makes us think that it is even legitimate to be firing these missiles, as if Helmand is some kind of battlefield in which we face an enemy threatening our very existence?
Ledwidge goes after these failures with chilling anecdotes, sharp thumbnail analyses, detailed critique of the Army's military culture, and occasionally open exasperation. He rejects the notion that it was all the American's fault, or NATO's fault. These were British mistakes.This is how he sums up:
"The defeats - let us not mince words - in the civil wars - the "counter-insurgencies" - in Helmand and Basra need not have been so comprehensive; indeed, they need not have happened at all... in Basra, the British started with a "winning hand" and played it poorly. In Helmand, they managed to ignore several factors to which any Afghan could (and would) have drawn their attention (and to which several soldeirs did) - this was the single worst possible province into which the British could crash" (p 259)
Lt Cdr Ledwidge is too polite to add, the politicians and the top brass even thought that Helmand would be a good place to deploy one of our spare princelings, Prince Harry.
There is one topic which Ledwidge does not address but which complicates the picture. The wars he discusses have been fought for domestic political consumption. That is why there are so many VIPs on the ground (see Cowper-Coles' Cables from Kabul for examples). That is why there have to be Photo Ops involving bullets and missiles, when really - as Ledwidge several times observes in a discussion of "courageous restraint" - the real military challenge is to manage things so that you don't fire many bullets - and certainly don't fire any missiles.
I can't see the PR man installed as Prime Minister in Downing Street reading this book - which is one reason why I say: Read This Book!
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