Authors: Tom Bower
After the election, Blair intended to ‘settle Iraq and if possible get our troops on their way out before I left’. At the same time, the chiefs were obeying his order to send the army’s ARRC headquarters, with over 2,000 soldiers, from its German base to Afghanistan.
John Reid was the new secretary of state for defence. ‘I’ve come home,’ he told one official, reminiscing about his happy period as a junior defence minister in 1997. With the cultivated image of the shrewd politician who delivered, he told his senior officials on his first day that at the top of the prime minister’s list was ‘put[ting] some backbone into the ministry’. Looking at Kevin Tebbit, he went on, ‘Too many officials are not up for Afghanistan.’
‘The army’s too enthusiastic,’ said Tebbit. ‘This could be a mission too far.’
‘The prime minister wants it,’ Reid replied, having ingested Blair’s suspicions about civil servants.
With Blair’s encouragement, Nigel Sheinwald, his new foreign affairs adviser after David Manning had been sent as ambassador to Washington, spoke to senior officials in the ministry. Viewed by Tebbit as ‘Blair’s new attack dog’, Sheinwald hoped in particular to persuade Desmond Bowen, responsible for the ministry’s policy, to support Blair’s commitment to Afghanistan. He found resistance. The snatch arrest of two undercover SAS soldiers in Basra in September 2005 by local police in alliance with Shia militias had exposed the army’s plight. A large British operation to rescue the soldiers had provoked a
firestorm. To embark for Afghanistan while British soldiers were still dying in Basra appeared to Bowen ill considered.
Soon after, apparently without General Mike Jackson’s knowledge, a NATO meeting in Canada horse-traded a reassignment of British troops within Afghanistan as the price for securing Canadian participation in the operation. Canadian soldiers rather than British would be sent to Kandahar, a traditionally quiet region, albeit one where the Taliban had been founded. The British army would head for Helmand, a centre of narcotics trading.
‘Let’s do some proper soldiering,’ Jackson enthused to his fellow generals. Afghanistan was attractive. Sending out patrols for a few days and returning to ‘fixed’ bases was a familiar routine, unlike the unpredictable engagements in Iraq.
‘Use it or lose it,’ Generals Jackson, Richard Dannatt and Mike Walker chimed. Although the three men disliked each other, they agreed that supporting Blair might forestall the Treasury’s abolition of certain regiments to save more money. Politics smothered the practical difficulties of relocating from Iraq to Afghanistan. Even under the best circumstances, the switch would be tricky, but to Blair’s misfortune, the chiefs were divided on specifics. Despite Jackson’s enthusiasm, Air Marshal Jock Stirrup believed that the army’s withdrawal from Iraq would take longer than anticipated. Walker dismissed the airman’s objections as worthless. To avoid an unseemly split, Stirrup allowed himself to be persuaded by Jackson and Dannatt’s ‘overenthusiasm’ that the mission to Afghanistan was ‘doable’ and converted from opposition to ambivalence. ‘We had to support the NATO mission,’ he said. ‘Other countries were relying on us, and I had no evidence against it.’
Only Admiral Alan West remained opposed. At a meeting between the chiefs and Reid, West mentioned his previous role as chief of defence intelligence for three years. ‘I can tell you that there’s a lack of intelligence about the truth on the ground in Helmand. This is a leap in the dark. Do we really want to get involved in this?’ There was no evidence, he told Reid, that the Taliban had returned, and he questioned
the reason for Britain’s involvement in the operation. ‘Why are we trying to cut poppy production and focus on counter-narcotics operations?’ he asked. The Americans, he added, had been combating drug operations in Colombia and that had ‘dragged on for decades’.
‘The prime minister wants to do it,’ replied Reid once again, suspicious of the admiral. West found himself isolated – except that Kevin Tebbit privately expressed his agreement.
At a later briefing for the three chiefs at Fort Monckton, the MI6 training centre on the south coast, John Scarlett mentioned that only West opposed Britain’s engagement in Afghanistan. To allay the admiral’s grievances, particularly his unhappiness over the lack of any ‘face time’ with Blair, the prime minister agreed to host a dinner in Downing Street to discuss the fate of Britain’s involvement in Iraq.
‘What do you need to cope with this surge of violence?’ Blair asked his guests, including Reid, Jonathan Powell, Sheinwald, Scarlett, the chiefs and General Rob Fry. As usual, the Foreign Office remained invisible, just as Powell and Blair wanted.
That evening, Blair, as a well-briefed lawyer, asked good questions. For their part, the chiefs had reached the pinnacle of their careers by telling any superior what he wanted to hear. Candour was not rewarded in the military, especially in an open forum. In return, Blair did not stir controversy by seeking unknown truths. Instead, he plucked at the answers that suited him, and no one was discomfited by penetrating follow-up questions. Drawn into the Iraqi war by a mixture of idealism, emotion and faulty intelligence, Blair once again failed to realise that none of his guests – each responsible for British policy in Iraq – could offer an original insight or a realistic solution. Despite eight years as prime minister, he did not grasp that none of his generals had fought in pitched battles and none understood Islamic societies. Nevertheless, he expected the military to produce an exit plan for the following year. Walker did at least volunteer that ‘We need a minister to resolve this’ – meaning Blair himself. The prime minister did not react. ‘The generals’, observed one of the guests, ‘could not offer a military solution to
a political problem, and the Americans were not producing a political solution.’
Those at the dinner knew that, during a recent video conference with President Bush to discuss the chaos in Baghdad, Blair had ‘bolted’ rather than raise the difficult points with which he had been briefed.
‘Why didn’t you nail him on that?’ Sheinwald had asked.
‘I’ve got to play it long,’ replied Blair.
To Fry, it appeared that Blair had convinced himself that ‘If I believe hard enough and if I think hard enough, it will happen.’
The same sterile atmosphere re-emerged in Cabinet. ‘What do you think I should do, Rob?’ Blair asked Fry. ‘How do we find our way through this? I’m really struggling.’
The general gave an anodyne answer.
‘Great idea,’ said Blair, concealing any doubts over whether his ministers understood the complexities. ‘That’s it.’ The audience appeared to be impressed.
Progress for the withdrawal from Iraq and deployment to Afghanistan had been leisurely until the London explosions of 7 July. The British-born suicide bombers had been trained in Pakistan and had links to the Taliban. Like Bush, Blair wanted to minimise the danger in Britain by fighting the war against the terrorists as far away as possible. If the jihadists were defeated in Afghanistan, he calculated, the streets of Britain would be safer.
The violence in London coincided with Fry’s submission of his proposal ‘Why Helmand?’ to the chiefs of staff. His answer was: because Britain could make a difference. With America battling terrorism in Iraq, and other NATO countries unwilling to enter the line of fire in Afghanistan, British troops would prevent the terrorists re-entering an ungoverned vacuum. Fry advocated dispatching troops to Lashkar Gah, the provincial capital. To reinforce his recommendation, Colonel Charlie Knaggs was sent to produce an intelligence report. After reading Knaggs’s memo, Air Marshal Glenn Torpy, the chief of joint operations in Northwood, conducted his own survey. He confirmed
that British troops faced no danger. His judgement was endorsed by Colonel Gordon Messenger, a marine who, like his predecessors, was not an intelligence officer.
‘I had no sense from the military that Helmand was a hornets’ nest,’ Desmond Bowen would say after reading the reports. Sherard Cowper-Coles, posted as a British diplomat to Kabul in 2007, would claim that the intelligence agencies had distorted the information to avoid upsetting the politicians and generals, and that the Foreign Office’s director for the region suppressed his own opposition to avoid being fired. ‘
Cognosco melior, facio taliter
[I know the best, I do the worst],’ the official said.
No one paid attention to the negative report by Air Marshal Stuart Peach, the director of intelligence collection, who, as a former pilot, was deemed unsuited to assessing army operations in ‘bandit country’. Nor, curiously, was much notice taken of the experience of the American intelligence agencies, or of Russia’s fateful occupation during the 1980s. Torpy presented his plan to the chiefs without realising that, while Helmand was overrun with the Taliban, they remained relatively passive because the American counter-terrorist units bought peace from the local drug-traders with suitcases of dollars.
Fry proposed that the British army, as NATO’s leader, should organise the transition from America’s counter-terrorism strategy, which killed the enemy, to a counter-insurgency operation, which protected the nation-builders. ‘Winning hearts and minds’ was the sentiment, although it was not a term used by Fry because of its association with Vietnam. Just like in 2002, during the run-up to the invasion of Iraq, the Foreign Office’s few specialists were muted. Blair relied on Nigel Sheinwald as his adviser, and Sheinwald knew no more about Afghanistan than did the military.
To avoid the familiar criticism of ‘sofa’ government, Blair agreed that Margaret Aldred, the deputy head of the foreign and defence policy secretariat, should chair a committee in the Cabinet Office to co-ordinate Britain’s engagement. Aldred had been deeply immersed in the invasion of Iraq. Few regarded her as insightful, but her experience as a
loyal supporter of the war was the ideal qualification for Afghanistan.
Known as the Reid Group, Aldred’s committee oversaw the ‘Joint UK Plan for Helmand’. Although it met without Blair, Aldred was guided by his motive: by leading the march into Helmand, Britain would expose the timidity of other nations. Ringing in the committee’s ears was Mike Jackson’s enthusiasm for the mission. ‘Jackson was a dominant personality’, recalled David Omand, ‘with high prestige. He wanted to go. If he had opposed it, it wouldn’t have happened.’
‘The Americans and British could have declared victory after the Taliban’s defeat in 2002 and departed,’ observed Fry later, ‘and Afghanistan could have continued to stew in its own juice with some PRTs [Provincial Reconstruction Teams] doing the nation-building.’ Supported by his generals, Blair ignored that option.
Under the plan, the PRTs, protected by British and other NATO forces, would within three years transform Afghanistan into what was described as a ‘mini-Belgium’ by creating new education and legal systems and building a non-narcotic-based economy. Britain allocated a total budget of £1.3 billion. Eradicating the opium trade, one of Blair’s favoured ambitions, was already a target of the Post-Conflict Reconstruction Unit led in Afghanistan by Major Mark Etherington, a Guards officer. Etherington was unimpressed by Aldred’s plan. Whitehall, he cautioned at the end of 2005, was deluding itself. Afghanistan was a non-state governed by a corrupt elite of tribal leaders, financed and controlled by warring drug barons who were pretending to abide by an unsuitable constitution drafted by an ill-informed Frenchman.
Because Etherington’s report contradicted Blair’s intentions, the MoD ignored it. ‘We know what we need to know about Helmand,’ Etherington was told by an MI6 officer. An attempt by a Treasury special adviser to include Etherington on the Aldred committee failed. Aldred knew that Blair did not welcome contradictory opinions.
The lesson for other independently minded officers was that disloyalty obstructed promotion. ‘Aldred’s committee just stapled papers
together,’ despaired a Treasury official who watched the wheels grind.
By excluding the critics, Blair never heard from those who doubted the intelligence reports, or from those who questioned how Britain’s under-resourced army could be effective 3,500 miles away, or from Whitehall’s few Afghan experts, who were angered by DFID officials eagerly championing women’s rights and seeking to impose ‘liberal values’ upon a feudal Islamic society. Despite the land-locked country’s history, he believed that nation-building would defeat Islamic extremism. Confirming the prejudiced naivety in Downing Street, the politically correct Foreign Office had assigned a female ambassador to Kabul, despite the inevitable affront to the Muslim rulers.
Doubters were similarly silenced during a NATO conference in London in January 2006 aimed at encouraging participation in the operation. No one was allowed to mention the possible effect of NATO’s presence on neighbouring Pakistan, a country that would eventually be destabilised by the war. Among those who would be ignored was General Graeme Lamb, who, following his exclusion by the MoD, would retire from the army after serving in Iraq and be instantly hired by General David Petraeus, the American commander, for service in Afghanistan.
The only dissident on Aldred’s committee was Des Browne, the chief secretary to the Treasury. The notion of ‘nation-building’ in a medieval country that had never been ruled from Kabul, said Browne, was incoherent.
‘What happens when we stop a convoy carrying heroin?’ he asked Reid.
‘We hand over responsibility to the sovereign government,’ came the reply.
‘Is there a sovereign government in Afghanistan?’
‘These are sensible questions,’ said Reid, adding with his familiar survivalist detachment, ‘I’ll ask the chiefs and come back with their answers.’
Browne said nothing more. He was familiar with the pattern of receiving unsatisfactory replies to questions. Criticising Reid would imply opposition to Blair himself.
To head off any disagreement, Afghanistan was listed on the Cabinet’s
agenda. While the chancellor remained silent at the meeting, Browne spoke against sending troops. ‘We must go,’ replied Reid, ‘or the NATO mission will fail.’ To end the argument, Blair assigned the decision to a Cabinet committee under John Prescott. The committee never met; Reid never answered Browne’s questions; and Aldred’s group was sidelined from the chain of command. The Cabinet Office, traditionally tasked with co-ordinating the prime minister’s policies, was mocked as a ‘Polo’ – the hole at the heart of government.