That's journalism!

As another British soldier is reported killed in Afghanistan, two investigative sleuths from The Daily Mail, Tim Shipman and Matthew Hickley, breathlessly tell us that the announcement came "as Lt Col Richardson revealed that American, Dutch and even Australian helicopters are being used to launch British combat operations in Afghanistan." UK forces have used coalition aircraft to "seize areas of ground" from the Taliban, said the Colonel.

The Daily Telegraph goes one further as star reporter Rosa Prince scribes these immortal words:

The Daily Telegraph understands that American Chinooks were used for a combat mission as part of the Panther's Claw operation within the last month. Lieutenant Colonel Nick Richardson, spokesman for Task Force Helmand confirmed that UK forces were forced to rely on foreign helicopters.

These fearless hacks can however, shelve their dreams for nominations for the next Pulitzer prize for investigative reporting. The MoD Website for 23 June – nearly a month ago – blandly informs us that:

More than 350 soldiers from The Black Watch, 3rd Battalion The Royal Regiment of Scotland (3 SCOTS), have launched an airborne assault into one of the last Taliban strongholds.

Twelve Chinook helicopters, supported by 13 other aircraft including Apache and Black Hawk helicopter gunships, a Spectre gunship, Harrier jets and unmanned drones, dropped the British soldiers into Babaji, north of Lashkar Gah, just before midnight on Friday 19 June 2009.

Not only did we rely on helicopters (with the MoD thoughtfully providing a pic – see above), we were "forced" to rely on a USAF Spectre gunship, Harriers (USMC – ours have gone home) and probably US Predator UAVs. Since 90 percent – or thereabouts – close air support is provided by US assets, we are routinely "forced" to rely on F-15s, F-16s, B-1 Lancers, A-10s ...

And then, of course, on the ground, we are "forced" to rely on Danish Leopard II tanks, on their APCs, on Estonian APCs and even the Ex-MoD Mamba mine protected vehicles which we sold off for a song.

But Hey! This is a coalition effort. We are not alone ... and have not been for some time. But then, here's another "scoop". During WWII, the US stripped out the armour from its one and only armoured division and sent the Shermans to the 8th Army. To win the battle of el Alamein, we were "forced" to rely on foreign tanks.

Shock! Hold the front page!

COMMENT THREAD

The home front

It is essential to stop Afghanistan becoming an "incubator for terrorism" and a launchpad for attacks on the UK and other countries says David Miliband.

The badlands of Afghanistan and Pakistan – that border area – have been used to launch terrible attacks, not just on the United States, but on Britain as well. Thus, he says, "We know that until we can ensure there is a modicum of stability and security provided by Afghan forces for their own people, we are not going to be able to be secure in our own country."

The thought is echoed by The Times which affirms that, "The campaign in Afghanistan is crucial," adding that, "It has been advanced by British servicemen of extraordinary courage and real heroism."

"The failures in the campaign have been on the home front: the British Government has been dilatory and uncertain in making the case for the war," it goes on to say. "Nor has it provided sufficient armoured vehicles for the troops already there or adequate and consistent numbers of troops on the ground to establish the security that is the foundation for building a new nation in Afghanistan."

The paper then states the obvious: "The campaign for Afghanistan must be won," adding the rider: "And it is time the Government started doing a better job of fighting for it at home."

Here, there are many problems, to add to the extraordinarily difficult matter of defining "victory". Presumably, when the land is covered with Ferris wheels, packed with happy Afghani wimmin, spinning to the beat of the latest Michael Jackson release, that will be considered to be one measure. Short of that, though, it is difficult to know what our rulers have in mind.

Of the other problems, surely the most intractable is that the "home front" does not actually care enough – or at all - about the Afghani campaign.

As long as "Our Boys" are not getting killed in excessive numbers – as defined by the media when it can be bothered to report events - most people are more concerned with running their own affairs and warding off the depredations of this pitiful government which, in its own way, seems more destructive than the Taleban.

And, while one might expect the political classes and their associated claques to be more interested in such matters than the great unwashed – in that condition as hidden inflation makes the price of soap an unreachable luxury – there is no evidence that this is the case.

If the British political blogosphere is any guide – and it probably does reflect the prevailing obsessions – not only does its relative silence speak volumes but the rare foray by Tory Boy Blog is struggling to compete, in terms of comment volume, with the later entry covering that stunning revelation that: "CCHQ downgrades oak tree logo." One is amazed that they are not live blogging on it.

The Times does have a point though. It is very hard to engage in an issue where the objectives are poorly defined, vague or so obviously unrealistic that they lack credibility, where there is no narrative or measure of progress – other than the mounting death toll – and where there is no significant discourse which will fuel an ongoing debate.

Thus we are supposed to rely on the current CDS, Jock Stirrup, who lied his way through the Iraqi campaign and its aftermath and, for all we know, is lying to us now.

This may be especially so in terms of his less than credible statement that, " ... the Taliban have rightly identified Helmand as their vital ground. If they lose there then they lose everywhere and they are throwing everything they have into it."

Operation Panchai Palang - and the parallel operations being conducted by US forces may – or may not be vital in the short-term, but it is far from the "game-changing event" that Stirrup would have us believe. The Taleban will simply regroup, recover what losses they have sustained and continue to prosecute their insurgency.

Here, one takes note of the fact that the attack which killed five troops was mounted out of the immediate operational area of Panchai Palang which indicates that the Taleban, even when under pressure around Lashkar Gah, still had the resources to attack elsewhere, with devastating effect.

We could, on the other hand, take the advice of Lt-Col Tim Collins (ret) who enjoins us to "support the judgement and experience of Brigadier Radford and his men. They are on the ground and we are not." Of course, we heard the same thing – or similar – of Iraq, where the "judgement and experience" and the military commanders of the time had our troops patrolling in Snatch Land Rovers, with effects which were predictable – it seems – to everyone but them.

Collins believes that, if we lose, it will be because we have defeated ourselves by a lack of nerve – that "home front" again - and if that happens the sacrifice will be in vain. "Keep the faith," he tells us.

However, in what should we keep our "faith"? Assailed by IEDs, our forces are struggling to deal with this weapon which the Taleban are using to such great effect. However, the emergence of this problem was flagged up in January 2007 by The Financial Times yet it was not until October last year that the MoD focused on buying the essential equipment to deal with this threat, in the "Talisman" project – with deliveries not to take place until next year, leaving the Americans to do the work.

This is a military that also fielded the Viking and the Vector, both of which vehicles could not meet the threat present in the theatre by the time they were deployed, and certainly are not up to the current challenge. It is a military that, in effect, has been behind the curve from the very start, and is struggling to catch up, reacting rather than pre-empting the Taleban's constant evolution of tactics.

If the military have feet of clay then, perhaps we could turn to Rory Stewart, soldier, diplomat and academic who has travelled extensively in Afghanistan and Iraq. He tells us that Afghanistan is "a war we cannot win" and, in a long and rambling thesis argues that the best Afghan policy would be to reduce the number of foreign troops from the current 90,000 to perhaps 20,000 – turning away from the idea of state-building.

Two distinct objectives would remain: development and counter-terrorism with the "good projects" allowed to continue in electricity, water, irrigation, health, education, agriculture, rural development – but not a single mention of roads. We should not control and cannot predict the future of Afghanistan, he says.

With such contradictory and unreliable advice, it is no wonder that we find it hard to engage in the issue – and retreat to the comfort zone of oft' repeated mantras. One can then only take comfort in the words of the MoD's own "spin doctor", Lt-Col Nick Richardson. He insists that operations in Helmand are achieving "a huge amount" and the soldiers had not died in vain. "It is fair to say that war is not risk free. We are taking the fight to the enemy," he says.

Even then one wonders, not least where the true enemy lies. More than the Taleban, the greatest threat to Afghanistan (and therefore our own security) could be the home front, here in the UK, bludgeoned into indifference by wholly unrealistic and ill-defined objectives.

COMMENT THREAD

The wrong debate

See also: Time to get this sorted

With its unerring instinct for getting it wrong, the BBC – in the persona of its defence correspondent Caroline Wyatt – is framing the debate over the use of the Viking and the deaths of Lt-Col Thorneloe and Tpr Joshua Hammond as one of "armour versus mobility", suggesting that there is "a fine balance."

To be fair, she is not the only one to get it wrong. This is the way much of the British military thinks, thus channelling the argument into a sterile comparison between the merits of the heavy but well-protected Mastiff and the lighter, more mobile vehicles such as the Viking and the Jackal.

As the military would have it - enunciated by Amyas Godfrey to the BBC and also to The Guardian - the choice of which armoured vehicle to use in any campaign is a question of balancing risks and benefits.

"It is all about getting the balance right between the need for armour and the need to be light and flexible, with the ability to go off-road," says Godfrey. "Mobility is a form of protection in itself, and with heavier armour, you sacrifice mobility for greater protection."

At that entirely superficial level, there is some merit in Godfrey's assertions. Roads are a natural target for terrorists and, as that picture above shows, one particular weak point is the culvert bomb, which is fiendishly dangerous and requires a great deal of manpower and other resource to thwart. The ability to transit an area avoiding the roads – and such devices – is therefore an obvious advantage.

However, one almost gets tired of the repetition here, having yet again to draw the distinction between design and weight. Godfrey, in common with so many of his ilk, equates protection with "heavier armour".

Such are the constraints on their own thinking that they seem incapable of understanding that mine/IED protection is not primarily a function of weight of armour but of design – the principles of which we elaborated recently. It is this complete failure of the military establishment to understand these fundamentals which lies at the heart of this sterile debate.

To that extent, as we have so often observed, mobility and protection are not mutually exclusive. It is only the sterile thinking of the British military which makes it so. It would be perfectly feasible – by design - to produce a tracked vehicle with the mobility of the Viking, yet with the inherent protection of a Mastiff. This should not add significantly to the weight or, more particularly, hamper mobility.

Those proponents of the Viking, who argue that its mobility has saved more lives than its lack of protection have lost, are therefore arguing from a false premise. Mobility and protection are not mutually exclusive – it is possible to have both.

There are, however, other issues to address, where the whole argument on off-road mobility falls apart. One of those is the "pinch" or "choke" point problem, which we have also discussed. No matter how good a vehicle's off-road performance might be, there are natural features in any terrain which restrict and funnel movement into predictable areas, and it is there that ambushes are so often mounted.

Even in wide open spaces, there are constraints. As Tom Coughlan writes in The Times of the Viking, "in the heavily irrigated fields along the Helmand river, room for manoeuvre is more limited, and churning up farmers' fields with its tracks will not help to win the support of the local populace."

This then leads to a paradox, where designers optimise for off-road performance and then, to deal with the occasional but deadly ambush, add armour to their vehicles. They end up – as they did with the Vector – compromising performance without significantly improving protection. The outcome is an off-road vehicle with less performance than a custom-design protected vehicle, from which stems the mantra that you cannot keep increasing weight.

Locked into this trap – yet under pressure to reduce casualties - they have nowhere to go but to develop bigger and stronger vehicles in order to carry more armour. This is precisely the line adopted with the Viking, where it is to be replaced by the Warthog – a vehicle with heavier armour but sharing the same design flaws.

However, Major-General Julian Thompson, who commanded 3 Commando Brigade Royal Marines in the Falklands conflict in 1982, makes a different point. He tells The Times - undoubtedly based on his experience in Aden and then Northern Ireland: "The question is not whether one vehicle or another is sufficiently armoured, it's about the lack of helicopters. We need more helicopters in Afghanistan to ferry troops in high-risk areas."


This is a good point. The ultimate mine protected vehicle is the helicopter. Unfortunately, as we pointed out earlier, the option of relying on helicopters is not available to the coalition forces, and not entirely because there is a shortage.

Unlike Northern Ireland, where the security forces were the main target of the terrorists, in Afghanistan the population in general is being attacked, particularly on the roads, which are needed to move large quantities of supplies. They are used heavily by Afghan security forces and civilians.

To abandon those roads to an enemy which is indiscriminately slaughtering civilians as well as the security forces is also to abandon any attempt at winning "hearts and minds". The military must maintain a strong presence on the roads and, therefore, will always be exposed to a risk that cannot be mitigated by the greater use of helicopters.

Nevertheless, there are limitations to the amount of protection that can be afforded, even in the best designed vehicle. To make that point - or something akin to it - Caroline Wyatt calls in aid the spokesman for Task Force Helmand, Lt-Col Nick Richardson.

He insists the Viking remains an excellent vehicle, telling us that, "Armour is the last resort in terms of defeating the threat. It is much better to be able to avoid the threat than to have to rely on the armour defeating the threat when it is initiated. He then states: "It doesn't matter how much armour you have - it can always be overcome if you make the charge big enough."

The "bigger bomb" threat is overstated, an issue we have promised to address in a separate post, and neither should "armour" (more properly, protection) be considered the last resort.

In their Bush War between 1962 and 1980, the Rhodesian Army found that it was impossible to ensure that the thousands of miles of unpaved roads were kept clear of mines and IEDs. Therefore, vehicle protection was treated as a routine precaution. (See this study by Franz J Gayl - 147 pages, pdf).


That notwithstanding, protection is by no means the only precaution. Route clearance – using basic devices such as mine rollers (pictured above) plus more sophisticated technical aids, and even sniffer dogs - route proving, surveillance, routine patrolling to deter activity, intelligence, interdiction of supplies and disrupting the bomb-makers are all part of the armoury which must be deployed to defeat the joint threat of the mine and the IED.

To distil the argument down to one of "armour versus mobility", therefore, is as facile as arguing that either armour or mobility is the answer. But there is no more facile an argument than to assert that "armour" – i.e., protection – must be sacrificed to mobility. That is the wrong debate.

COMMENT THREAD

Yet another triumph

The report that British soldiers have launched a major airborne assault on a Taleban stronghold in southern Afghanistan should, on the face of it, be good news.

The operation, codenamed Panther's Claw, involved more than 350 troops from the Black Watch who were dropped into Babaji, north of Lashkar Gah, just after midnight local time on Friday. Twelve Chinook helicopters were deployed, backed by a formidable array of airpower, including Apaches, a Spectre gunship, Harriers and UAVs.

The aim is to secure a number of canal and river crossings in the area to establish a permanent ISAF presence in what was previously a Taleban stronghold. Royal Engineers are now constructing checkpoints on the main routes in and out of the area, to be occupied by the Afghan National Police, established to hinder movement by insurgents.

The MoD is describing the operation as "one of the largest air operations in modern times" but whether it is the "Triumph for Brits" that the Daily Mirror is claiming remains to be seen.

Lt-Col Nick Richardson, spokesman for Task Force Helmand, is less extravagant, declaring simply that the operation has been achieved due to the arrival of extra US, which has provided ISAF with a massive increase in capability "which we believe will significantly change the balance in the province."

Nevertheless, such optimism were have heard before and a jaundiced eye therefore turns to an editorial in the New York Times headed "Afghanistan's Failing Forces". That piece certainly provides an antidote to the hyperbole of The Mirror, starting off with the bald statement, "The news from Afghanistan is grim."

Rehearsing recent events, it reminds us that, in the first week of June, there were more than 400 attacks in Afghanistan, a level not seen since late 2001. It applauds Obama's decision to send more troops and then observes that there can be no lasting security until Afghanistan has a functioning army and national police.

This happy situation, the paper notes, is very far from coming, setting out a catalogue of failure which is stark and damning. Washington, it says, has already spent 7½ years and more than $15 billion on failed training programs.

There have never been enough trainers, Afghan soldiers have not been paid a living wage, making it easy for Taliban and drug lords to outbid them for the country's unemployed young men, and there has been no proper control of weapons supplied to the Afghan forces. Tens of thousands have disappeared, sold to the highest bidders and, in some cases, used against American soldiers.

Perhaps most fundamentally, American war planners never seemed to understand that a more effective Afghan Army and a more honest and competent police force could help persuade civilians that the war against the Taleban was more their own fight and not just an American war being fought on their territory.

After all these years, therefore, so little progress has been made that the national police force needs to be rebuilt almost from scratch, a task hampered by unremitting corruption in Kabul's central government, reflected at local level where the police are equally part of the problem.

Leaving the paper to conclude with a statement of the obvious, that building an effective Afghan Army and police is critical to the war effort, with the injunction that there is no more time to waste, we move on to a report by AP which asserts that, in these recession-hit times, the Taleban and al-Qaida are bucking the trend.

Through a combination of extortion, crime and drugs, plus an inflow of money from new recruits, increasingly large donations from sympathisers and Islamic charities, as well as a cut of profits from honey dealers in Yemen and Pakistan, the insurgents' finances are considerably healthier than those of the coalition nations.

A significant proportion of the cash inflow comes from taxation of the opium trade, estimated to yield upwards of $300 million annually, enabling the Taleban to pay foot soldiers $100 and commanders $350 a month, far more than their security force equivalents in either Afghanistan of neighbouring Pakistan. On the other hand, they are paying bargain-basement prices for their IEDs which typically cost less than $100 each to make.

Clearly, the major task here is to deal with the drugs trade – which perhaps accounts for 90 percent of Taleban income. For a workable strategy, Allison Brown in Small Wars Journal is a good a source as any. But she offers no more than we set out last year, principles enunciated by so many scholars, and experts yet ignored by those who purport to be restoring this benighted country.

So, instead of progress, we get the Black Watch descending from the skies in phalanxes of Chinooks and thundering over the terrain, while the Mirror applauds another "triumph". Maybe it is, but not for common sense.

COMMENT THREAD