If the snow comes early

As we move into the next phase of the charade that is the Afghan presidential election, not a few commentators are pointing out that 7 November, the date chosen for the run-off, brings the country perilously close to the winter season, when many areas of the country could be socked in by snow.

Even without that, Ben Farmer in The Daily Telegraph points out that the run-off will be a "logistical nightmare". A fleet of 3,500 trucks will be needed to carry voting materials to the polling stations and 3,000 donkeys to get people to remote areas.

Afghanistan's 94,000 soldiers and 84,000 police, backed by 100,000 Nato-led forces, will be on duty to protect polling stations, but hundreds more will be judged too dangerous to open.

Tom Coghlan in The Times goes further, calling the run-off a "race against time", noting that the election organisers are "taking a big risk" that this year's snows will not arrive early – as indeed they have in Tibet. Typically, he writes, the upland areas of the country are frozen and snowbound by mid-November, though these are areas of low population density.

The 10,000-odd voters in the remote Wakhan Corridor — a finger of territory that reaches out in the north east to the remote Chinese border — are already under snow and cut off until the spring and the central highlands are also receiving their first snowfall.

Coughlan adds that, in the south the threat will be less from the weather than the risk from the Taleban, although even in the southern provinces there could be problems. Winter rains turn roads into quagmires, gentle steams become raging torrents and water-fed wadis turn into glutinous mud which defies the passage of even the most powerful off-road vehicles.

As problematical is the low cloud and the mists which descend on the mountains and hills, obscuring vision and, crucially, neutralising airpower and hampering helicopter transport and fire support.

By way of compensation, rebel mobility is also affected, particularly as snows clog the Pakistan infiltration routes – although they are less affected than the technology-dependent coalition forces.

However, if the weather may be problematical for the Afghani run-off, the situation Wazirstan for the Pakistani Army is altogether more serious. Having left their offensive very late in the season, the only hope of a decisive action comes with rapid progress, before the snows fall and bring campaigning to an effective halt.

With no media presence in that region, information is sparse, but already we are getting dark hints from the army command that progress is not as rapid as they might have liked. And one report suggests that the Pakistani Army, dominated by recruits from the Punjab, is ill-equipped for mountain warfare in snow-bound condition. "The present fight to finish must be really finished before the first fall of snow," it says.

Syed Saleem Shahzad of the Asia Times is also pessimistic, stating openly that the chances of a decisive military victory "remain remote".

Given the nature of the opposition and the tough territory, he writes, there is a high probability of extensive casualties in the army, with resultant desertions and dissent. There is also no guarantee that if the conflict drags on, the warlords with whom ceasefires have been agreed will not go back on their deals.

At the same time, he warns, there are signals that the Taleban in the Swat area are regrouping after being pushed back by the army this year. It is likely that by the time the snow chokes major supply routes, the Taleban will have seized all lost ground in the Swat Valley. He adds:

By marching into South Waziristan, the military has taken something of a gamble as it is highly unlikely to eliminate the militant threat. Indeed, the past seven or so years have shown that after any operation against militants, the militants have always gained from the situation. By the same token, the militants don't have the capacity to permanently control ground beyond their areas in South Waziristan and North Waziristan.

Shazad concludes that, in this situation, in which the militants and the military can't defeat one another, and if the fighting continues, a political crisis could be provoked. This would weaken the state of Pakistan and its institutions. Alternatively, he suggests, the authorities could accept the fact that Pakistan is a tribal society which always operates through bargains and deals, and move quickly to contain this conflict.

That, of course, it also the option available in Afghanistan. Any which way you look at it, the re-run is going to be an indecisive shambles, a charade played out for the benefit of the "international community" to which, largely, the Afghans themselves are indifferent. With or without western "assistance" the tribal society of Afghanistan will have to resolve the situation with "bargains and deals" but, for the moment, the man in the driving seat looks to be General Winter. He may well be calling the shots.

COMMENT THREAD

The limits of power

"The war to end Pakistan's woes?" is the offering from Mustafa Qadri, one of the many commentaries on the current Pakistani expedition into South Waziristan.

"Still the question remains, once the guns have been silenced will Pakistan take steps to cleanse the tribal areas of the extremist poison?" Qadri asks. In so doing, he posits a suggestion that has become current, that the Pakistan government should move in, once and for all, take control of the tribal regions and fully integrate them with the rest of the country.

The idea of a "war to end wars" is certainly being promulgated by the Pakistanis, their prime minister, Yousuf Raza Gilani, claiming that the army is poised to deliver a "decisive blow" against the "Islamist insurgents".

History, however, should tell us that this rugged land is never going to be subdued, and certainly not by the relatively modest force at the disposal of the Pakistani government, a mere 30,000 or so being one of the smaller "armies" that have sought to subdue even a fraction of the territory being currently assailed.

What, in effect, the Pakistanis are attempting – or being expected – to do is revisit the "Forward Policy " adopted by the British in 1849, one of active intervention in the region with an aim permanently of subduing the warring tribes.

This resulted in a series of costly military expeditions which met with very little success, leading to a more laissez faire revision, known as the "Close Border system" – one of containment, where the tribes were bribed to secure their good behaviour, and punished by punitive expeditions when they caused trouble – a policy known by its critics as "Butcher and Bolt", so-called because there was no attempt to maintain a permanent military presence.

By the mid-1890s, in a virtual replication of current event, a strategic debate was raging about the best line to take, summed up in a contemporary book written by H Woosnam Mills. On the one hand, he wrote, was the "masterly inactivity" party, which maintained:

Is it wise to deprive tribes of the independence which they value above all things and to impose an authority which can only be maintained by a large addition both in men and money? Their rugged country is of no strategic value to us ... is it expedient to advance from India on Central Asia and so increase our responsibilities?

On the other, there was the interventionist faction, which upheld the then existing policy. "What we are doing on the North-West Frontier is necessary," they said. "Anarchy and civilisation cannot march peacefully side by side. We are establishing our civilising influence gradually all along the Afghan border, and both from strategic reasons and to prevent our territory from being raided we are bound to continue in the course now taken."

The immediate debate was resolved – effectively as it is now – by a massive uprising of the Pathan tribes in 1897, with "the entire frontier line ablaze with armed men". It was of that period that Mills wrote, in respect of one of the tribes, the Mamunds, who had been left alone by British troops during an earlier campaign, "although they did much to merit severe punishment"

... they simply joined in the present disturbances from that pure love of a fight which is second nature to the Pathan and becomes additionally attractive when the feringhee or infidel foe is the objective.

Mills also wrote:

These tribesmen, it should be remembered, are all Muhammadans and fanatical in their faith and hatred of the infidel. Excepting in Baluchistan our government has never succeeded in taming them and to-day they are almost as irreconcilable as when we first mixed in frontier matters.

And, continued Mills, of the general uprising, with ominous implications for "hearts and minds":

... tribes with whom we had no possible quarrel, and whom we have treated with the greatest possible deference were among those who joined in the revolt.

At great cost, this revolt was suppressed – and only after savage fighting – but the Mashud tribe – focus of the current Pakistani action - was again in revolt in the summer of 1917 while British forces were otherwise engaged fighting in the First World War. This, however, was but a prelude to a further uprising by the Wazirs and the Mahsuds who in November 1919 launched a series of large scale raids in the administered areas, killing over 200 people and wounding a further 200.

Notably, in the subsequent British campaign, aircraft – having first been used in 1917 - were used on a number of occasions to suppress the tribesmen. Supplementing the ground war, the RAF systematically bombed Mahsud villages, actions which were claimed to have been instrumental in "temporarily subduing the Mahsuds".

However, it is also recorded that the RAF was surprised not only by how quickly the Mahsud tribesmen adapted to aerial attacks, but by the effectiveness of their rifle fire against the low-flying aircraft. One flying officer wrote that "their rifle fire … was uncomfortably like that of a machine-gun, and almost as effective."

Nevertheless, when the Wana Wazirs rose up in November 1920, driving out Brtish forces, they appealed for help from the Mahsuds, but still recovering from their earlier defeat, no support was forthcoming and the Wazir opposition faded away. On 22 December 1920, Wana was re-occupied.

From there, the RAF developed their doctrine of "air control", refined and honed in Iraq in 1921, when the principles were established as:

One objective must be selected–preferably the most inaccessible village of the most prominent tribe which it is desired to punish. All available aircraft must be collected at a base from which they can function with all their maintenance and repair facilities at hand. The attack with bombs and machine guns must be relentless and unremitting and carried on continuously by day and night, on houses, inhabitants, crops and cattle…. The objective may be changed if it does not spread quickly enough…. This sounds brutal, but it must be made brutal to start with. The threat alone in the future will prove officious if the lesson is once properly learnt.

This early use of airpower led to one of the most remarkable campaigns in the the Northwest Frontier, standing as the first (and only) time in history when air power alone was used to put down a rebellion.

Known as Pink's War after Wing Commander RCM Pink who commanded the operation which started on 9 March 1925 , Bristol Fighters and de Havilland DH9s from 5, 27 and 60 squadrons were deployed to the airstrips at Miranshah and Tank systematically to bomb and strafe mountain strongholds. So successful was the tactic that, on 1 May 1925, the tribal leaders sought an "honourable peace" bringing the short campaign to a close with the loss of just 2 men.

The action firmly entrenched the use of air power as a major weapon in controlling tribesmen in the frontier regions and, in September 1937, 5 and 20 Squadrons were again conducting operations in North Waziristan, this time in Westland Wapitis (pictured), flying 333 operational hours with four aircraft in eight weeks.

Between February 1941 and June 1943, it was the turn of Squadrons of the Indian Air Force, flying antiquated Lysanders (pictured), in a fully fledged combat role against the tribes in Waziristan. Offensive operations started on 1 May 1942 onwards, against the Faqir of Ipi's tribal warriors in what came to be known as the Datta Khel Operations.

By then, it appears, even the pilots of the Squadron were sceptical of the effectiveness of their sorties. During a temporary lull in the operations, one was instructed to receive and entertain to tea one of the tribal leaders and his entourage. The tribal leader, he said, appeared very confident and did not appear to be cowed downed by our air attacks. In fact he invited one of the young fresh looking pilots to his village.

However, on 21 May, the Lysanders beat back a major attack on a patrol at Miranshah, dropping 66 bombs, followed by 54 more two days later. On the 27th, a major action occurred when the 500-600 tribesmen besieged Datta Khel. Aircraft from Nos. 3, 4 and 28 (RAF) Squadrons attacked the tribesmen.

The dangers of the proscription sorties in the frontier were illustrated that day when a Lysander from No.28 Squadron force landed in the battle area and both the crew members were lynched by the frontiersmen, their bodies being recovered the next day by a ground party. On that day No.4 Squadron flew twelve sorties.

The Datta Khel sorties lasted till 19 August. Every day, aircraft from the Indian and RAF squadrons relentlessly flew sorties to attack the tribals. In the final reckoning, the detachment of No.4 Squadron at Miranshah flew over 170 hours in support missions in this short period.

In a lament that would be recognisable The Sun of today, it was noted that "the serviceability of the Lysanders was not good. There was a shortage of tyres for the Lysanders and No.4 Squadron was forced to improvise by using borrowed Audax tyres.

There were other technical problems as well. The bomb racks and stub wings used by the Lysanders were liable to fracture at root, and sometimes the 20lb bombs would fall off in a hard landing. The Station Commander complained that Lysander spares were very difficult to procure and that the aircraft was reaching "the end of its tether in India". Nevertheless, No.4 would continue to operate this aircraft for another nine months.

Eventually, the ageing Lysanders were replaced with Hurricanes and then Tempests, these then being operated from 1947 onwards by the newly formed Pakistani Air Force, which adopted an operational pattern very similar to that of the RAF and the IAF.

Now, over 60 years later, it is newly supplied F-16s of the Pakistani Air Force which are pounding tribesmen in Waziristan, augmented by helicopter gunships.

The technology may be more advanced, but the tactics would have been recognisable to the airmen of 1917 – not far short of a hundred years ago. And while Wing Commander Pink's sorties in 1925 may have been temporarily successful, there are no indications that airpower now is any more decisive than it was then. Similarly though, there are very real fears that the Pakistan government is playing with fire.

Says Roedad Khan, a former federal secretary of the Pakistani government, "We must also recognize the limitations of modern, high technology, military equipment in confronting highly motivated guerrilla movement in a treacherous terrain."

He adds that "We must also recognize that the consequences of large-scale military operations – against our own people – particularly in this age of highly sophisticated and destructive weapons – are inherently difficult to predict and control. Therefore, they must be avoided, excepting only when our nation's security is clearly and directly threatened. These are the lessons of history. Pray God we learn them."

Back in the early 1900s, a crusty British general, Andrew Skeen, wrote a guide to military operations in Waziristan. His first piece of advice: "When planning a military expedition into Pashtun tribal areas, the first thing you must plan is your retreat. All expeditions into this area sooner or later end in retreat under fire". It took us a century to understand the limits of our own power. It looks as if those same lessons are being re-learned.

Thus does Khan conclude by citing George Bernard Shaw, who said: "We learn from history that we learn nothing from history."

COMMENT THREAD

An intellectual quagmire

With all eyes on South Waziristan, Afghanistan - for a short while, one presumes – has become almost a side-show, even more so the machinations of that sad little tribal leader Hamid Karzai and his bid to stay on the gravy train.

However, the Karzai situation is coming to a head, with diverse reports recording that the UN-backed Electoral Complaints Commission (ECC) has pulled the plug on his vote-rigging supporters. It has downgraded his share of the vote from 55 to 48 percent, upping the share of his main competitor, Dr Abdullah, from 28 to 32 percent.

This means, according to the rules, there must be a run-off but, as might have been predicted, Karzai is digging his heels in and refusing to accept the result. Even though a run-off is the last thing his Western paymasters actually want, such is the fantasy land in which he and his supporters dwell that Mohammad Moin Marastyal, an Afghan MP and leading Karzai supporter, claims the commission has "twisted the facts" in a deliberate attempt to trigger a run-off vote.

This is not yet the last stage of this current drama though. Procedurally, the ECC delivers its report to the Independent Election Commission (IEC), a body notionally appointed Karzai as a sop to the idea that as president, he actually exercises sovereignty on behalf of the Afghan people.

In theory, it is the final arbiter of the election results and must declare a result. But the ECC has "ordered" the IEC "to invalidate a certain percentage of each candidates votes in six separate categories". The IEC is expected "to implement those orders with haste and move swiftly to issue the final certified results or the need for a run-off as required by Afghan electoral law," says Aleem Siddique, a spokesman for the UN in Kabul.

Where we go from here is anyone's guess but, whatever the final outcome – which looks a long way off – the whole electoral process is irrevocably tainted, and Karzai is holed below the waterline. Even in the unlikely event that he could rally the nation behind him, he has lost the trust of the "international community", whose money, troops and bodyguards have kept him in power.

Already, the shock waves are beginning to be felt in Kabul with White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel warning that president Obama is minded to delay a decision on committing up to 40,000 extra American troops to the conflict. He prefers to wait until the election crisis pans out and it becomes clear whether there is "an Afghan partner" worth fighting for.

Even if this does play into the hands of a president who is fast becoming known for his indecision, Obama does have a point. The whole concept of a counter-insurgency campaign rest on the fiction – honoured more in the breach than the observance – that the military is acting in support of the civil power.

With a tarnished and weakened figurehead, even the fiction is hard to sustain, framing the coalition military activities in their true light – a multi-national occupation force, bolstering a puppet government for its own ends. That is something the Taleban and the so-called "anti-Afghan forces" will be – and have been – quick to exploit.

How precisely we got ourselves into this mess is relatively easy to see – albeit that hindsight affords a certain clarity. Unwittingly, the Independent's Kim Sengupta puts his finger on it, writing in his "analysis" that the elections held in Afghanistan in August "were meant to show how democracy has taken root in the country since the overthrow of the Taliban."

The essential flaw was (and is) the delusion that "democracy" in any shape of form had taken root in Afghanistan, and thus the belief that this second presidential election could or would be a continuation and a strengthening of the process imposed by the international community when Karzai was first elected president in 2004.

Although the structures of a western democracy were imposed, giving Karzai the superficial appearance of a democratically elected president, he retained the mindset and mores of the man he had become, a tribal chief in what is essentially a pre-feudal society. And, in the traditional manner of such, he did what any tribal chief would do in power – he used the resources and apparatus of the state to strengthen his power base, rewarding his allies and forging new alliances.

Sengupta remarks of the current election round – apparently with some surprise – that "instead" (of following the model of a western election), "the polls became mired in massive fraud". Rather than the word "instead", however, he should have used the word "inevitably", as no tribal chief was ever going to give up power voluntarily or take the chance of losing it.

For our brave reporter then to suggest that "this reopened historic, ethnic and political divisions", is almost laughable for its naivety. Those divisions were never "closed" – they are there and have always been there, and are driving the political process, as they have been throughout Karzai's administration. To complete his fog of incomprehension, though, Sengupta observes that this has "led to questions about why Western troops are being sent to fight and die for a seemingly corrupt and cynical government."

Therein lies the core delusion. Karzai's government, in its own terms, is neither "corrupt" nor "cynical". As its president, Karzai has simply been following traditional precepts, acting in accordance with the mores and norms of his tribal society. And if he was to be "democratically" replaced tomorrow, his successor would behave in exactly the same way.

It is into this "quagmire", of course, that British and other coalition troops have been pitched, but what we are beginning to see is that the true "quagmire" is the intellectual swamp. It is that which has trapped the western powers into their current impasse. And, as we can see, their increasingly desperate thrashing is doing no more than suck them deeper into the cloying mud.

COMMENT THREAD

"Bloody criminally sad"

Asking a journalist to write an account of a series of actions in which his soldier brother was seriously injured does not seem the best way to ensure objective writing.

But such is the task of Miles Amoore, working for The Sunday Times, whose younger brother Jim, 24, a second lieutenant with 2 Rifles, was blown up as he walked through a compound door in Wishtan, near Sangin, to reach fellow soldiers hit by another explosion.

In a piece entitled "Carnage in Wishtan, 'the devil's playground'", Amoore claims to be the first reporter to reach Forward Operating Base (FOB) Wishtan and speak to those fortunate enough to have survived a series of bomb incidents which he describes, the drive from Sangin to the base taking him along "a dirt track known as Pharmacy Road".

Pharmacy Road is, of course, familiar to us, the subject of the famous report from Michael Yon, who dealt with the operation to clear the road, an operation which the MoD also described.

Amoore adds to these accounts, confirming something that we had worked out for ourselves – although never admitted by the MoD. "Until bomb disposal experts cleared this road," he writes, "the soldiers in FOB Wishtan had lived under virtual siege, supplied only by helicopter. The Taleban had placed a cordon of mines 50 yards from the perimeter walls of the base."

Previous accounts, however, refer to near misses, as helicopters delivering supplies were attacked. This, with Amoore's additional detail, further supports the contention that the base was effectively cut-off and that "Operation Flint", deploying 200 soldiers from 2nd Battalion The Rifles, was an emergency measure to break the siege and allow a supply convoy through.

These details are important as they illustrate the increased power of the Taleban, the perilous situation of British troops and, all importantly, the failure of the MoD – and indeed the media – in any way to convey how serious the situation really was.

Also supplied by Amoore is more detail of the Taleban tactic of laying multiple IED ambushes, with primary devices and secondaries emplaced to kill or injure personnel coming to the rescue of those caught by the initial blasts – about which we have written, in some detail as the tactic became apparent.

But what is lacking from Amoore's account is any sense of complaint or criticism, as he records soldiers – including his own brother – being sent out time and time again to patrol an area known to be seeded with IEDs. He simply records that, of the 120 soldiers who served at Wishtan in the past six months, one in three has been killed or injured, the vast majority - eight killed and 30 wounded, including Amoore's brother - caused by IEDs.

There are many reasons why one should be critical of the Army for allowing this to happen. The positioning of an isolated base, without the manpower or the equipment to keep the supply route or the patrol area safe, was asking for trouble. The failure of the Army to adapt its patrol pattern – or suspend patrolling altogether – once the new threat had been experienced, is unpardonable.

What is now also clear – from Amoore – is that there was plenty of warning. In April soldiers could patrol more than a mile from the base, carrying full kit and weapons. But as the poppy harvest came to an end in May, he writes, "the warning signs began to appear."

The Taleban blocked alleys with lumps of concrete, channelling the soldiers onto paths booby-trapped with IEDs. They mined doorways, forcing troops to enter compounds by blowing "mouse holes" in the thick mud walls. Then they mined those, too. "Everything started to tighten up. We knew it was coming," said 9 Platoon's Sergeant Jamie Moncho, a softly spoken soldier of Italian descent.

One prominent casualty, on 20 August, was Sgt Paul McAleese, killed as he tried to recover the body of Private Johnathon Young, the circumstances of whose death Amoore describes in detail.

With the benefit of the overview gained from piecing together the many disparate pieces written about Sangin and Wishtan, we have been highly critical of the failures, and had already argued for better solutions to combat the threats.

Despite what have been very obvious military failures, however, The Sun chose to exploit the death of Sgt McAleese as a tool to attack the government, illustrating perfectly the thesis enunciated by Paul Robinson.

In this case though there is criticism but it does not come from us. In a comment on Amoore's piece, James Duffield, who describes himself as "ex Sapper to Capt 1967-1988", asks: "Where were their Sappers in 'intimate' support? Where are the Explosive Detection Dog teams? Where are the officers demanding this support? Where is the UK in providing it?"

He may not be covering all the bases, but his final point does sum it up. "Bloody criminally sad," he writes.

COMMENT THREAD

The generals must share the blame

It says something for the media – and the general commentariat - that, years after we have been ploughing the solitary furrow, pointing out that the military should bear some of the blame for the current parlous state of our Armed Forces, and their lacklustre performance in first Iraq and now Afghanistan, only now does The Spectator pop up with an article headed: "The generals must share the blame".

The piece is written by Paul Robinson is a professor in the Graduate School of International Affairs at the University of Ottawa. Giving the Spectator the comfort blanket it needs, Robinson has also been a military intelligence officer in both the British army, as a regular officer, and the Canadian forces, as a reservist. Thus, he has the right credentials to say the words and get a hearing.

Says Robinson, while it is fashionable for the military top brass to attack politicians when things go wrong, many of the army's problems are of their own making. This, of course, we have said many times, with a particularly trenchant piece in April 2009, when we described the military, as currently constituted, as "a deeply dysfunctional organisation, not least evidenced by its state of denial over its performance in Iraq."

But while this blog has been a voice in the wilderness, alternately attacked and ignored, the professor is allowed to note that, while in recent years, failure to "support the troops" has become the ultimate political sin, reminding us that the Conservatives' soon-to-be defence adviser, Gen Dannatt, blasted Brown a few weeks ago, letting it slip that his brave plea for 2,000 extra troops had been ignored by our callous PM.

But, he asks, has Gordon Brown really "betrayed" the troops in the field? A good degree of cynicism is in order, he asserts, then coming up with an interesting thesis of his own.

In reality, Robinson says, both as chancellor and as prime minister, Mr Brown has given Britain’s armed forces a lease of life which they had no reason to expect, while the country's military leaders, including and especially Dannatt, must share the blame for the difficulties their troops have faced in both Afghanistan and Iraq.

Of course, while it is fashionable for the general to attack politicians, it is deeply unfashionable even to think of blaming soldiers for anything. But a McGonagall-like desire to help the ordinary serviceman or woman on the front line, says Robinson, should not serve as cover for the senior officers who lead them.

Nor, he says, should it prevent us from criticising the institutional culture in which they serve. One element of this culture is that professional soldiers tend to look at themselves as part of a select order, upholding the highest moral and professional standards, while seeing politicians as self-serving hypocrites. He adds:

As a result, when things go wrong, the natural tendency of many in uniform, especially the generals, is to blame the politicians rather than to look in the mirror. The combination of this self-satisfied culture and the moral elevation of the soldier in the popular imagination has led to a modern version of the infamous dolchstosslegende, the stab-in-the-back theory which encouraged Germans to believe that they had not really been defeated in the First World War.

Robinson recalls that the "sharks" at the Daily Mail led the way. "A shameful betrayal of our servicemen"; "Treachery, politicians, and the shameful betrayal of this man of honour [Richard Dannatt]", its headlines have screamed. Sensing blood, the rest of the press have joined the frenzy, not least The Sun in its current and ongoing campaign.

Thus, it is held, the army's humiliation in Iraq and its failure to bring peace to Helmand, are not its fault. Rather, the Labour party, and in particular Gordon Brown, "coldheartedly sent the troops off to die without the proper equipment and without the reinforcements which might have enabled them to achieve victory." If only they'd had the tools to do the job, our fine 'boys and girls' would have dispatched the Taleban long ago."

For the past two years, elements of the British press and the British army (with General Dannatt to the fore) have worked all out to propagate a similar myth. This is, of course, says Robinson, perfect nonsense. He adds:

One of the more galling sounds of the past two years, he says, has been that of Americans smugly observing that the British have been slow to learn the lessons of modern counter-insurgency. The criticism has been especially hard to bear because it is true. Many of the British army's problems have been of its own making.

As one officer participant has eloquently put it, the decision in 2006 "to scatter small groups of soldiers across the north of Helmand, in isolation, in an intelligence vacuum and with complete disregard for the most basic tenets of counter-insurgency was, quite simply, a gross military blunder." And even if it is true that this decision was the result of "political pressure" from London (which it was not), it was the responsibility of the generals to resist such pressure and to insist that the troops be used sensibly.

In the Second World War, Robinson notes, General Alan Brooke would argue all night with Churchill when he thought the prime minister was making absurd military judgments. In the same way, while politicians make the decisions on whether to deploy troops overseas, senior officers have a duty not only to ensure that troops are used in sensible ways, but to tell the politicians what those would and would not be. Alas, Britain's military leaders have failed to restrain the Labour government from its strategic follies.

According to Robinson, the reason why this situation came to pass stem from the late 1980s, when the British armed forces were orientated almost entirely towards the Soviet threat. The collapse of communism left them without a raison d'être but, rather than destroying Britain’s military, the Labour party saved it. The 1997 strategic defence review provided a new mission — expeditionary warfare to be a "force for good" around the world – which the top brass embraced with zeal. Their existence depends on it.

From there, however, the man then seems to go astray. He argues that these factors together mean that the armed forces are institutionally averse to recognising a fundamental truth - that the problems they have faced in Iraq and Afghanistan derive not from a lack of resources but from the very nature of the missions themselves.

Recognising, he says, this "would mean admitting that expeditionary warfare is not a good idea, and admitting that would cast the whole defence budget into doubt." Blaming Mr Brown provides a convenient way out of this impasse.

More specifically, the strategic defence review – and subsequent white papers – reconfigured the military for the rapid reaction concept, dedicated to early intervention with decisive force, enabling speedy task completion and short-duration deployments. Thus, the military was never equipped for the low-intensity, long wars which it has had to fight.

Nonetheless, Robinson's overall premise is not wrong when he asserts that, in 1997, the Labour government gave the country a new strategic direction, which has not worked out well. He thus concludes that if the Conservatives take power next year, they will inherit and complete the latest defence review. In the process, future defence ministers, including possibly General Dannatt, need to do more than merely juggle resources.

They need to re-examine fundamental strategic assumptions. The stab-in-the-back myth stands in the way. It maintains the pretence that the basic direction was all right, and merely the implementation went wrong, so that all can be solved with the application of additional funds. While this story may serve some narrow bureaucratic interests, says Robinson, it does the people of Britain no service at all.

COMMENT THREAD

Unravelling the unknowable

The current offensive Pakistani offensive in the South Waziristan tribal area can be reported on many different levels, the simplest being that projected by some analysts as "the mother of all regional conflicts".

That is one description offered in a remarkable piece in the Asia Times, written by Syed Saleem Shahzad, the Pakistan bureau chief, as a prelude to a long interview with Mohammad Ilyas Kashmiri, styled as an al-Qaeda leader who, according to American intelligence, is al-Qaeda's head of military operations.

Shahzad frames the conflict on the one hand as a Pakistani military operation against the Pakistani Taleban and al-Qaeda and – from the perspective of al-Qaeda – as part of its "game plan" in the South Asian war theatre, a continuation of its "broader campaign against American global hegemony that began with the attacks in the United States of 11 September 2001."

Al-Qaeda's target, we are told, remains the United States and its allies, such as Europe, Israel and India, and it does not envisage diluting this strategy by embracing Muslim resistances on narrow parameters. In this context, militant activity in Pakistan is seen as a complexity rather than as a part of al-Qaeda's strategy.

Complexity or not, al-Qaeda (if that is the correct description) seems committed to defending a territory of approximately 2,550 square miles which has, of the face of it, little strategic value, against Pakistani rather than US forces, risking substantial loss and disruption.

In that area, it is estimated (by the Pakistani Army) that there are about 10,000 "hardcore fighters", mostly members of the region's ethnic Pashtun tribes, augmented by about 1,000 Uzbeks, some al-Qaeda Arabs and even a handful of "militants" from Western countries. There are also said to be factions from other parts of Pakistan in the area, in particular from the south of Punjab province.

The military action now under way follows a spate of what might be termed "terrorist" attacks in the region. These have included an attack on the Indian Embassy in Kabul, when a car loaded with explosives rammed into the compound wall, killing at least 17 people. In Pakistan, there was an "audacious attack" on the Pakistani military headquarters in Rawalpindi, the twin city of the capital, Islamabad. Then, a suicide bomber detonated a bomb in market town in the Swat Valley region, killing 41 people and injuring 45 others.

These attacks, however, have been carried out by a kaleidoscopic mix of different groups which, to the causal follower of the conflict attuned to the idea that this is a Taleban conflict, present a bewildering variety of names. Not least, the Rawalpindi attack might have been carried out by Lashkar I Jhangvi, described as a "vicious Punjab-based sectarian outfit", which may or may not have links with the Taleban and al-Qaeda.

And so it is with the offensive in South Waziristan, where one is presented the Pakistan Tehrik-e-Taliban (PTT), the Lashkar al-Zil or the Shadow Army, another of al-Qaeda's fighting forces, the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan and, in the charge of Ilyas Kashmiri, the so-called 313 Brigade, a collection of jihadi groups, such as the Harkat-ul Jihad-i-Islami (HUJI), which has fought for many years against India in India-administered Kashmir.

If these are the foreign "players", the diversity of the local Pashtuns is doubtless even greater, with huge variations in the degree of commitment to the fight, the levels of equipment, the experience and the loyalties, both to other tribal groups and to the "cause". Although the Taleban is nominally led by Hakimullah Mahsud, a member of the Mahsud tribe, this is no homogenous "army", trained and equipped as a coherent fighting force, but disparate and fractured groups, each with their own agendas.

On the other side, there is the Pakistani Army, with its own agendas, loyalties and pressures, some domestic and some international, specifically from the United States which is looking to a greater involvement from against the elements holed up in the Afghan border regions.

Possibly, though, the domestic issues have been understated. Pakistan is very far from being a stable state, if indeed it can be called a state at all. One way of describing it is as a Punjab-based military oligarchy, occupying rather than ruling the territories of the domain, maintaining an uneasy and fragile peace by force of arms and brute oppression.

Recruited mainly from the Punjab, but with a significant component of Pashtuns in their ranks, the Army has a history of supporting the Taleban through the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, and loyalties forged then are still evident.

To what extent, therefore, there is a firm intention to destroy the Taleban, and to what extent this is merely an extension of the historic battle to contain border tribes, or to suppress groups which threaten the Pakistani state, is unknown. What the Pakistani Army declares as its objectives, and what they actually might be, are not necessarily the same things.

A particular issue here is the involvement of India – and it was no accident that the Indian embassy in Kabul was attacked, some say with the tacit (if not actual) support of Pakistan. India's support for the Afghan government is especially vexatious to the Pakistan government, which sees India's efforts as an attempt at encirclement, against which the natural allies of the Pakistanis are the Pashtun-led Taleban.

This dynamic is reinforced by Indian support for dissident groups in Baluchistan and Sindh Province, plus the never-ending dispute over Kashmir, which make for further complexities which are not always fully factored in to the analyses of the regional situation.

Especially relevant is Kashmir, and the involvement of the Pushtan tribes, mainly the Mahsuds who raised a tribal lashkar and invaded the briefly independent Kashmiri state after the British had withdrawn, leading its ruler, the Maharaja of Kashmir to call for Indian military assistance.

Following the first Indo-Pakistan war, with the Pashtun irregulars fighting alongside the newly-formed Pakistani Army, the outcome was that nearly 40 percent of the province is now under Pakistani control (the rest now split between India and China), with the India occupation hotly contested by Pakistan, which is supporting a separatist movement.

That movement is also heavily supported by Afghan mujahideen and by an increasing number of foreign fighters. Thus, a regional dispute has morphed into part of what is termed the "pan-Islamic global struggle" with al-Qaeda having established a wing in Kashmir.

We thus have Ilyas Kashmiri's 313 Brigade from Kashmir moving to support the dissident Mahsuds in Waziristan (effectively renewing the 1947 alliance), in what might appear to be the anomalous situation of their fighting against their historic ally, the Pakistani Army. Concurrently we see Pakistani troops being withdrawn from the Indo-Kashmiri border to take part in the operation in Waziristan, fighting against the forces they have formerly supported and are now opposing.

The point, of course, is that thus is indeed a highly complex situation, with local, regional and indeed global influences at play, some in seeming contradiction, the combination of which defy easy – or any – analysis.

And, at the edge of this power play, we have coalition forces in Afghanistan, who may or may not benefit from the suppression of dissident forces in Waziristan, if the Pakistani Army is successful. Alternatively, we may see massive displacement of undefeated fighters into Afghanistan, adding to the rebellion there, the strength of which is even now unknown, and about which there is no agreement.

Mohammad Ilyas Kashmiri, however, was at pains to tell the Asia Times that the aim of the current battle is "to bring the world's biggest Satan [US] and its allies into this trap and swamp [Afghanistan]." Afghanistan, he says, "is a unique place in the world where the hunter has all sorts of traps to choose from."

NATO does not have any significance or relevance, he adds. They have lost the war in Afghanistan. As a military commander, he told the Asian times, "the reality is that the trap of Afghanistan is successful and the basic military targets on the ground have been achieved." But his ultimate target is "to chop off American strength". His fight, he says, "was never the Pakistan army that was against me, but certain elements who branded me as an enemy to cover up their weaknesses and to appease their masters."

And so does the "game" play out – a man branded as a terrorist, leading fighters against an army he does not consider his enemy, embarking on a battle to the death, in a territory where his real enemy holds no sway, with an outcome which is as yet uncertain and which may resolve nothing.

It has been said of Irish politics, that if you think you understand what is going on, you haven't been listening. If anybody thinks they know what is going on in this region, they need a very powerful hearing aid.

COMMENT THREAD

A great deal of consensus

Yesterday, there was a defence debate in the House of Commons. It was scarcely, if at all, reported in the media. And you can actually understand why. Even with the strongest possible motivation, less time constraints, and the luxury of the full Hansard transcript, it is difficult to make any sense of it.

Occupying five and a half hours, producing the best part of 50,000 words, the transcript runs to about half the length of a sizeable novel. The great difference, however, is that while novels tend to have an identifiable plot, a manageable cast of characters and a coherent structure, this debate lacked all three.

This is partly the fault of the government, which decides on the specific subject of the debate, and the MPs themselves, who permit the government to do so. The problem here is that the subject was "defence policy", so wide and amorphous in its scope that it covers too much ground, and thus allows MPs too much lassitude in the issue they chose to address.

Following the debate is not like observing a tightly-scripted drama. It is more like sitting in a crowded room trying to make sense of multiple, disjointed conversations. Without even a motion on which MPs were to vote, which might have given the debate some shape, there was no discernable theme from which one could possibly assess the mood or "will" of the House.

Yet, in theory at least, this is the forum in which the government is held to account, its precepts challenged and its performance questioned. There was very little sense of an accounting from this performance.

As is the custom, the debate was opened by the Secretary of State for Defence, Mr Bob Ainsworth. He begged to move: "That this House has considered the matter of defence policy." It went downhill from there.

"Bumbling Bob" as he is often unkindly called, tried to shape the proceedings by confining his remarks to just two issues: "the delivery of our operation in Afghanistan" and, "how we are preparing our armed forces for the future, including procurement and acquisition reform."

In fact, we got a great deal of Afghanistan and very little of the rest and, when it came to the vexed issue of Afghanistan, the debate was killed before it even started. "I have looked closely at the statements and the speeches of Opposition Front Benchers", said Bob, "and have found that there is a great deal of consensus in what we say." No one demurred.

Thus, said Bob, "we agree that our forces are in Afghanistan primarily for reasons of national security. We agree that we operate in Afghanistan to prevent the Taliban from returning to power and, again, giving al-Qaeda free rein. We agree that our approach must be regional and that our strategy must focus on Pakistan".

"We agree that, unlike Pakistan, Afghanistan does not yet have the capacity to resist the Taliban-led insurgency on its own. We agree that building Afghanistan’s capacity to do that will mean that, over time, we will be able to reduce our military commitment, which is why we agree to focus on the training and the partnering of the Afghan security forces."

"We agree that the security space provided by NATO operations must be used to build and develop Afghan governance in order to give the Afghan people a stake in their own future and to help them to turn their backs on the Taliban-led insurgency. We agree that military and development operations must be backed up by a political strategy that bears down on the insurgency and begins the process of reconciliation."

"We agree that the consequences of failure in Afghanistan would be disastrous: it would be seen as a victory for the violent extremists, increasing the threat of terrorism back here at home; it would destabilise a particularly sensitive region, including nuclear-armed Pakistan; it would seriously undermine NATO, which has been the bedrock of our defence for the past 60 years; and it would damage the reputation of Britain's armed forces and call into question the ability of the UK Government to project power in the future."

The opposition front benches were silent, the only dissent coming from backbencher Tobias Ellwood (Bournemouth, East) (Con). As far as the Conservatives were concerned, support, he said, extends only to the support given to the armed forces.

Time and again, he asserted, we have suggested that the Government are adopting the wrong strategy in Afghanistan. That has now been proved by Admiral Mullen saying that we need to change - General McChrystal said the same in his report.

Thus did Ellwood ask: "What does the Secretary of State say about that now? How will things change in Afghanistan, given that in his report General McChrystal is quoted as saying: ISAF is a conventional force that is poorly configured for COIN. What will happen in respect of British troops so that we change and adopt a new strategy?"

Ainsworth had an immediate counter. The reason he had read out the list of agreements, he told the errant backbencher, was "to prove that what the hon. Gentleman says is not true." The list was an analysis of statements made by his own Front-Bench team and by the Front Benchers of other parties over time. It proves that there is widespread agreement on our strategy for Afghanistan.

Inevitably, Ainsworth went on, people will have a political view and some Back Benchers will disagree with their own Front-Bench team and with the Government Treasury Bench team on particular aspects.

People should hold the Government to account, he said, but all I ask is that when dealing with a situation this serious, where 9,000 people are deployed in a very dangerous environment, we should not pretend that we disagree about things that we do not disagree about.

And nobody did disagree about things they did not disagree about. There was indeed a great deal of consensus, and no one disagreed with that either. If there is to be a strategic debate on the conduct of the mission in Afghanistan, the House of Commons is not the place to go for it. All you will get there is agreement.

In fact, so much "agreement" was there that very few MPs found it necessary to turn up (pictured). They, like the media, had better things to do.

COMMENT THREAD

A Gray day

Almost since we first started writing this blog, I have been making the same point about defence spending. The message has been simple, direct, and to the point - "underfunding" is not the issue.

Not only is the MoD is pouring money down the drain, the systemic defects are so profound that merely giving it more money would simply enable it to waste even more money at a faster rate.

The trouble is, I wrote in February last year, that "none of the commentators are prepared to do their homework, to develop their understanding or address any of the real issues in the Armed Forces."

I continued: "Therefore, they are unable to focus criticisms and then ensure that the money that is made available is well spent, and that the machinery exists for ensuring future funds are also properly used." Thus. I wrote:

What evades them is the thesis that we have so often offered on this blog that, to throw more money at the Armed Forces is akin to bankrolling a drunk because he has spent all his money on booze. If the MoD is misspending much of its funding, giving it more money will simply allow it to misspend on a larger scale.

And now, much delayed, we finally see the Gray Review of Defence Acquisition and there we find:

Simply granting the MoD more resources cannot ... solve this problem. More resources will probably lead to more military output, but since the ambitions will also expand and the behaviours have not been changed or controlled, the same problems of delay and cost overruns will reassert themselves at the higher level of funding.

In particular, we pointed this out in May 2007 when the cries for more defence spending were particularly loud. Yet, two months earlier, I had been writing:

What does emerge from this is that money is not always the issue, and despite claims to the contrary, the Armed Forces are not actually short of money for equipment – buying better ... can also mean buying cheaper. Getting in the way though is the determination of the military to buy those increasingly expensive and complex "toys". For the UK to afford to go to war - and win - this process must be reversed.

I then finished off the piece by quoting Ed E. Heinemann, designer of the B-26 Invader, the A-1 SkyRaider and the A-4 SkyHawk. He had said:

The obstacles to any simplification may seem insurmountable, and the reasons for more complexity are many and powerful. But if we permit this Frankenstein of complexity to continue to work at its current plodding, insidious rate, it will slowly overwhelm us to impotency.

Now we see Gray write that, such is the nature of the procurement system that each of the Services feel "a moral obligation to specify the best possible solution given that they will be taking people into harm's way." The result, though, is that each of the Services has an incentive "to bid for as many different capabilities, at the highest level of specification, that it can."

These "powerful motivations" are encouraging each of the Armed Forces to overbid for equipment and underestimate the cost. Equipment plan construction is dominated by a 'bottom up' aggregation process, which makes it hard for 'top down' strategic guidance to control the balance of investment. Effective forums do not currently exist to allow top down guidance to control the evolution of the equipment programme."

He then tells us that, with each force bidding for the highest specification product as a result of the system incentives, "there is insufficient clarity over which systems need to be the most technologically advanced, and which could be used sensibly with an '80 percent solution' that would field a certain capability that could be grown over time."

That and much more, you can fillet from the 288-page report, but the underlying message is the same as that conveyed by Heinemann. We are being overwhelmed to impotency. That you could already have read on this blog. Very little of finds its way into the current media reports, the main focus being on the "estimated budget overrun of £35bn".

That allows Lib-Dim defence spokesman Nick Harvey to observe that the "devastating" findings would have a major effect on future defence policy. He says: "The government has presided over a decade of overstretch and spiralling costs without being straight with the public about the consequences."

No one who had read the report could possibly have come to that conclusion, and no journalist who had done their homework could have accepted that as a sensible or useful comment, but it goes in the BBC report without a hint of criticism.

Tomorrow, of course, the news reports will be history, and all that will survive in the collective memory with be the "£35 billion deficit". The "underfunding" mantra is far from slain, and soon enough, like some ancient order of monks, the chatterati will be resuming their chants, untouched by reality. The "Gray day" will leave no lasting impression on them.

COMMENT THREAD

Bribing our way to victory

Much shock and indignation is attendant on the revelation in The Times that Italian forces in charge of the Sarobi area, east of Kabul, had been "been paying tens of thousands of dollars to Taleban commanders and local warlords to keep the area quiet."

This has come to light after the incident last year when ten French soldiers were killed in an ambush by Afghan "insurgents" in what was thought to be a relatively peaceful area.

It is reported. however, that the Italians hid the existence of these payments from the incoming French forces. Thus, no further payments were forthcoming after the departure of the Italians. Haji Abdul Rahman, a tribal elder from Sarobi, recalls how a benign environment then became hostile overnight. But, with the French unaware of what had been going on, they made a "catastrophically incorrect threat assessment", sending out lightly equipped patrol into the area, with the tragic result recorded.

What is perhaps best demonstrated by this affair, however, is the fact that the Italians were able to "buy" peace in the areas under their control, and that this was maintained for as long as, but only for as long as, the payments were forthcoming.

So, while The Times is reporting that, once the US discovered that payments were being made, they made a diplomatic protest to Silvio Berlusconi's government in June 2008, this was perhaps entirely the wrong reaction. A more intelligent response might have been to investigate how, and under what circumstances payments were made, and then to replicate what seems to have been a highly successful pacification strategy.

The use of bribes or "allowances" has, in fact, been a long-standing instrument of political control in this region and, indeed, we made reference to its use in our earlier piece, where we recalled the insurrection led by the Faqir of Ipi.

Author Milan Hauner noted that the British had paid allowances in cash to tribal maliks which for the year 1940 amounted to nearly one million Rupees for the whole Tribal Territory spanning what is now the Afghan-Pakistan border. While these payments were theoretically for services rendered, Hauner notes that Wazirs and other Pathan tribes came to the conclusion that the shortest cut to lucrative allowances was not through loyal service, but by occasional demonstration of their nuisance value.

The thrust of this observation was picked up recently in another piece in the context of contemporary suggestions that bribing the Taleban could again bring peace to the region. Author Martin Parsons noted that the Pushtun (Pathan) tribes had been given muwajib - an "allowance" - to live peacefully. They accepted the allowance, claimed Parsons, then a year or so later rose up against the government until they received another allowance.

Parsons may, however, be misunderstanding the position, and certainly the nature of the mawajib allowances. It is certainly the case that ad hoc payments had very little lasting effect, but it also appears that the system of payments did continue and became highly formalised – to the extent that, on partition, it was adopted by the Pakistani government and became one of the primary mechanisms of control in its Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA).

According to this source, there was a structured system which comprised in the first instance the maliki. This was a hereditary allowance to the head of a tribe, paid subject to "good conduct" of the heir of the Malik (head of the tribe), and approval of the government.

There was also the lungi, a personal allowance for individual service, which could be modified on the death of the lungi holder, and then there were the mawajib allowances which were paid to the entire tribe biannually. In other words, these were continuous payments, the purpose of which was "to maintain amicable political relations with the tribes, to bind them to the government of Pakistan by excluding other 'influences' and hence outside interference in the area."

Interestingly, the maliks and elders who received allowances for a tribe/section were perceived as the political medium and were required to restrain and control their tribesmen from committing any act hostile or subversive to the state – exactly the purpose for which the Italians paid their "bribes" to the Taleban.

To a very considerable extent, this system seems to have been successful up and until the Soviet invasion of 1979, before which the threat had been neighbouring Afghanistan. Its governments had been hostile to the creation of Pakistan and were blamed for assisting and abetting Pukhtan (Pashtun) demands for a separate homeland for which the term "Pukhtunistan" had been coined. Thus, the Pakistan government sought to counteract Afghan propaganda and influences with the help of those who received allowances, namely the maliks and elders.

What appears to have broken the system was the Soviet invasion. Quite how devastating the breakdown was is recorded in great detail in a PhD thesis by a Pakistani researcher, available from the Pakistan Research Repository. The effects were later to bring Dr Christian Tripodi, writing for RUSI to conclude that the colonial model of laissez faire administration no longer had any lessons for us.

The flood of radical elements into that region during the Afghan-Soviet war since 1980, he wrote - a trend that has only accelerated since the coalition invasion of Afghanistan in October 2001 - and the increasingly ambitious political agenda of certain of those elements has only highlighted the weaknesses of what is to all intents and purposes the British colonial system, in the face of a radically changed strategic environment.

Even more recently though, Fred Kaplan has reactivated the debate, asking whether we can bribe our way to victory. For certain constituents, he writes, such as officials and tribal chiefs, a barrelful of money fits the bill - and could ease the path for letting us, or the central government, pursue more broadly appealing programs, such as building roads, providing jobs, and sowing crops other than poppies.

The idea, he notes, may seem outrageous, until one considers that we're currently spending about $4 billion a month on this war. A discreet and well-planned bribery program would cost pennies on the dollar - a mere rounding error in a calculation of the budget.

Outrageous it may seem, but what might one ask are the subsidies paid by the UK government to the outlying regions of Wales and Scotland, and the massive payments made to Northern Ireland, if not "bribes" by any other name?

It is difficult to find any firm evidence of a structured system of allowances or "subsidies" paid in the main areas of Afghanistan, although this report suggests that allowances of the nature suggested by Kaplan have long been a central part of the governance of the country.

And, with our own government recently announcing a £12-million scheme to fight working-class "extremism" in Britain, it might not be untoward to suggest that the Italians, in spending a somewhat smaller sum to counter "extremism" in their own sector of Afghanistan, were not altogether misguided. Their only mistake, it would seem, was in not telling the French.

COMMENT THREAD

AFPAK in the House

For those that might otherwise complain about the parliament in Westminster being marginalised, prime minister Gordon Brown did at least reserve the official confirmation of what had been widely forecast – an increase in force levels in Afghanistan – for an official statement in the House.

In what is going to have to be a series of posts, we will first summarise the statement in this post. In another post, we'll look at the media response and then we'll pick up on how the politicians responded, in and out of the House.

Starting with the statement, Brown also took the opportunity to give a broader overview of the mission and its progress: about the work with the government of Pakistan to counter the terrorist threat from al-Qaeda and the Taleban; our priorities for Afghanistan in "the next stage" of the work our armed forces and civilians are undertaking there; and the conditions set for that stage, including for the best possible protection of our troops, especially against the growing threat of IEDs.

Before so doing, he reiterated the reason for all this endeavour: to prevent al-Qaeda launching attacks on our streets. Three-quarters of the most serious terror al-Qaeda plots, he said, have roots in the border and mountain areas of Afghanistan and Pakistan. Sustained pressure on al-Qaeda in Pakistan combined with military action in Afghanistan was having a suppressive effect on the organisation.

However, he told us, if we limit ourselves simply to targeting al-Qaeda, without building the capacity of Afghanistan and Pakistan to deal with terrorism and violent extremism, the security gains would not endure. So we were seeking to build and support the Afghan army and police and to work with the Pakistan security forces. As an overarching objective, we are also seeking to promote a peaceful and stable Afghanistan. That would be a strategic failure for al-Qaeda.

The strategy, therefore, is dedicated to counter-insurgency and then to "Afghanisation" of the mission.

To help out Pakistan, we are giving another £10 million, to add to the £22 million already provided for humanitarian assistance for areas recently liberated from the Taleban. Then, in Afghanistan, the "strategy" which starts with training, mentoring and partnering the Afghan army and police would be speeded up. The more that the Afghans can take responsibility for security, the sooner our troops will come home. The immediate target is to build up the Afghan army to 134,000 by next October.

The Afghans are to set up a corps headquarters in Helmand and British forces will be ready to partner 5,000 of the 10,000 Afghan troops being trained by the coalition in Helmand over the next few months. This is not just a case of embedding mentors with Afghan units, as has been done in the past, but working integrally right up to the top of the command chain. In future operations, the protection of populated areas must be the shared responsibility of Afghan and coalition forces.

To meet the changing demands of the campaign, which require greater concentration of our forces in central Helmand, the regional battle group for southern Afghanistan (500 troops) will be redeployed from Kandahar and the new force level has been agreed at 9,500, subject to three conditions.

The first is that a new Afghan government demonstrates its commitment to bring forward the Afghan troops to be trained and to fight alongside our forces. The second is that every soldier and unit deployed to Afghanistan is and must be fully equipped for the operations they are required to undertake. The third is that the international coalition bears its fair share of the burden.

As to the elections, the process in train must be allowed to run its course but, when a new government is formed, the international community, including Afghanistan's neighbours, must develop a contract with the new government that includes the commitment to growing the Afghan army; tough action on corruption; a more inclusive political process, including reaching out to the reconcilable elements of the insurgency; and stronger Afghan control of local affairs.

A better future for Afghanistan, with its village and rural population, Brown then averred, can only be forged if there is stronger governance right down to district level. To that effect, the number of civilian advisors has been doubled. Furthermore, they are supporting not just Governor Mangal, but district governors and village shuras. The Afghan government is now functioning in nine out of 13 districts, compared with five last year, and we are supporting community councils to consult with thousands of local people.

An extra £20 million for the stabilisation work in Helmand is already being disbursed - to increase the number of Afghan national police in Helmand by 1,000 a year for each of the next three years and to build a new police training academy and new facilities for district governors. We are also working with coalition partners to extend such support to the 34 provincial governors and 400 district governors right across Afghanistan.

And, to complete the package, Brown told us that British aid will continue to help to pay the salaries of teachers and doctors, and we are also ready to fund and partner the first Afghan teams sent for stability purposes from Kabul to work alongside us in Helmand.

In short, apart from the troop uplift, there is very little in the package that we had not heard before and, as we noted, even the extra 500 troops had been widely signalled. Clearly expressed, though, was the "conditionality". The Army is not being given a blank cheque. However, with the redeployment of the theatre reserve into Helmand, that will eventually put two extra battlegroups at the disposal of Task Force Helmand.

How the media have responded in general, we'll look at in another post, but it is worth noting that The Guardian is reporting a suspension of hostilities between the politicians and the military. CDS Sir Jock Stirrup and the CGS, Gen Richards, have both "enthusiastically endorsed" the package.

"Our objective, as part of the 42-nation coalition in Afghanistan, is to reduce the terrorist threat to the United Kingdom," says Stirrup. "We do this by assisting the Afghans to spread enduring governance to parts of their country that have in the past, and would in the future if abandoned, harbour and provide support to terrorist groups." Richards, on the other hand, says: "This is the right decision and it reflects the … advice the prime minister has received since the summer."

If the package works as well on the Taleban and al-Qaeda as it does our own military, we might just get somewhere.

COMMENT THREAD

Operational art

When the Strategic Studies Institute, part of the US Army War College, publishes a paper saying that the military have gone too far in the prosecution of war, and it is time to bring politicians back in the loop, it is time to sit up and take notice.

The paper, under the slightly whimsical title of "Alien: how operational art devoured strategy", is written by two Australians, Brigadier Justin Kelly and Dr Michael Brennan. It deals with what might seem to be an arcane subject – known as "operational art" - but this is a mainstream and important issue which strikes at the very root of the relationship between politics and the military, with direct and immediate relevance to the mission in Afghanistan.

The term "operational art" is almost certainly unfamiliar to those outside the narrow community of military theorists but is defined by the paper authors as the "thoughtful sequencing of tactical actions to defeat a component of the armed forces of the enemy." It relates to the development of inter-related and sometimes complex military actions, all designed to achieve a single effect, but, as the authors point out, the term has become misunderstood and mis-applied, with serious consequences.

The confusion, they argue, is in the similarity with a wholly different concept, the one carrying the much more familiar name of "strategy". That, narrowly defined, is the science and art of military command as applied to the overall planning and conduct of large-scale combat operations and, given the obvious similarity with what is meant by "operational art", it is unsurprising that confusion has crept in.

What has happened, argue Kelly and Brennan, has been that the term "operational art" has come to cover not just local tactical actions, battles or sequences of battles. It has been expanded to apply to campaigns and – in the "small wars" that tend to dominate modern warfare - the general conduct of those wars.

Consequently, they state, the term – or its application - has marginalised the role of politics in the direction of war. In particular, the idea of the campaign has come to overwhelm that of strategy, the former lying within the province of the military, the latter primarily of political concern, albeit developed as part of a "conversation" with the military.

Rather than meeting its original purpose of contributing to the attainment of campaign objectives laid down by strategy, operational art - practiced as a "level of war", has assumed the responsibility for campaign planning. In so doing, it has reduced the political leadership to the role of "strategic sponsors" and widened the gap between politics and warfare. The result, say Kelly and Brenna, has been a well-demonstrated ability to win battles that have not always contributed to strategic success, i.e., "a way of battle rather than a way of war."

The relevance of this issue is evidence from the recent behaviour of General Stanley McChrystal in offering what he termed a new "strategy" for the campaign in Afghanistan, then orchestrating a publicity campaign aimed at pressurising president Obama into providing the resources deemed necessary to implement it.

One sees, therefore, a general seeking to define strategy, with an attempt to relegate the politician to the role of passive "provider"- the "strategic sponsor" - taking no active part in formulating strategy but simply ensuring that such means as are demanded are made available.

A similar dynamic has been seen on this side of the Atlantic. Here, diverse military figures – most notably General Sir Richard Dannatt – have been demanding of the government more resources and increased troop levels. Yet they have not been willing to specify clearly the use to which they will be put, resisting what they argue is political interference in "operational" matters, which lie exclusively within the military sphere.

Against this artificial division – redolent of trades union demarcation disputes - Kelly and Brennan call in aid Clausewitz and his view of war as an extension of politics - "a chaotic process involving competing personalities (whose individual actions may indeed have a rational basis), chance and friction, and popular emotion." In a war, they argue, the actions of all of the protagonists are determined by this interaction of policy and politics. To isolate one from the other is to ignore a critical part of the whole.

The political leadership of a country, they say, cannot simply set objectives for a war, provide the requisite materiel, then stand back and await victory. Nor should the nation or its military be seduced by this prospect. Politicians must necessarily be concerned with the minute-to-minute conduct of war and today's plethora of military actions.

Thus political considerations are "influential in the planning of war, of the campaign, and often even of the battle." Clausewitz is then invoked once again, with his caution that multiple points of view - administrative, military, political - cannot be a basis for planning wars. The political perspective must be given precedence over everything.

What the authors of this remarkable paper do not deal with – and nor did they set out to do so – is the other side of the coin. While, through the mechanism described, the military have come to monopolise the strategic direction of war, quite deliberately excluding politicians where they can, to a certain extent this is also because the politicians are permitting it.

The increasing technology of war, the proliferation of jargon, the impenetrable acronyms and the emergence of the technocratic, professional "warrior class" on the one hand intimidate politicians - many of whom have had no military experience. On the other, the complexities of modern government and competing demands on time make it convenient to leave the war to the "generals", allowing the politicians to exercise a "hands-off" supervisory function.

Thus, if the application of military theory, expressed as "operational art", has had the effect of isolating politicians from the detailed management of war, politicians have themselves have contributed to the process. While Kelly and Brennan may argue that "the political perspective must be given precedence over everything", there is no evidence that the politicians are prepared to engage, to the extent that they are prepared to provide the political leadership.

That much may explain David Cameron's enthusiasm for appointing Gen Dannatt as his military "advisor" – soon to become defence minister – seen in the context of the absence of any original thinking from the Conservative party on how to conduct the mission in Afghanistan. Furthermore, the political retreat from strategy is being reinforced by the popular media which is taking the view that ministers should give the generals what they ask for. It is not for them to question, much less challenge "military advice".

Kelly and Brennan in fact refer to the aphorism that "strategy proposes but tactics disposes", considering it "valid", but remind readers that the strategic direction of a war needs to be intimately sensitive to the details of the warfare being conducted so as to ensure both that it is making realistic demands, and that the military action remains in keeping with the wider conduct of the war.

Where politicians are defining strategy, therefore, that requires of them an appreciation of the nature and utility of tactics employed, and a capacity to enter into a meaningful "conversation" with the military, most often in the glare of media scrutiny. Few contemporary politicians have demonstrated that capacity. Yet, devoid of political input, we end up with tactical action without strategic purpose. And that, observe the authors of the paper, is merely "senseless violence".

When a defining moment in the Afghan mission came with the announcement that British troops had expended a "million bullets" – and since have expended many more millions – without any indication that the mission is being successful, we are left with the impression that that is all we are achieving.

As we observed earlier, for things to change – if that is possible – the generals need to be put back in the box marked "tactics" and the politicians need to reclaim strategy from the grip of "operational art".

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We have been there before

With Pakistani forces poised to launch a major military offensive deep into the heartlands of the Waziristan tribal region – once more to tackle the growing threat of Taleban and al Qaeda fighters - it is fair to ask whether they will be any more successful than last time, and the time before that, and the time before that.

This is by no means the first time they have attempted to suppress the tribal regions of Waziristan. They have been there before and, before them, British armed forces have tried repeatedly to do the same thing, with absolutely no success. We need to learn from history and, in particular, from the little known campaign on the eve of and during the Second World War.

During that period, Waziri tribesmen, the ancestors of the group we currently call the Taleban, were mounting what amounts to exactly the same campaign against the British occupiers. And, in case anyone believes there is anything at all new about the current situation, they too were following a fundamentalist Muslim leader. The only difference is that he went by the name of the Faqir of Ipi.

The story is told in fascinating detail by historian Milan Hauner, originally published in the Journal of Contemporary History in January 1981 and since reproduced on Khyber.org.

During the period, the Faqir of Ipi (pictured) evaded upwards of 40,000 British and Indian Army troops, in a campaign which has eerie similarities with current events. So striking are the parallels that it should be compulsory reading for everyone engaged in the military campaign in Afghanistan, up to and including president Obama.

The Faqir writes Huaner, was the most determined, implacable single adversary the British had to face. As a guerrilla leader he was uncompromising, unyielding, obstinate and unscrupulous in the choice of combat methods against his opponents. These included traditional methods of tribal warfare such as ambush, kidnapping and mutilation.

The decision to attack was always his own; like the truces which he decided when his casualties had passed the accepted norm and it became necessary for him to retreat once again into the inaccessible hideouts of Waziristan. There he would wait for another opportunity to open hostilities, thus keeping the British army on the North-West Frontier fully mobilized.

At one point nearly 40,000 British and Indian troops were reported to be in the field trying to capture him, while he remained elusive as ever, always succeeding in evading the tight net put around him.

And yet, his own force of armed tribesmen probably never exceeded one thousand men, armed with rifles and a few machine-guns, and occasionally one or two pieces of antiquated cannon; he was always short of ammunition, had no radio communication, and relied for all his intelligence on the traditional network of informants and messengers. The British on the other hand had modern artillery, tanks and aircraft.

Huaner's account, written at the time of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, in his own terms, "opens the back door to an amazing story of guerrilla activities against a major power" against the background of events from which the Second World War emerged – in which the agents of fascist Germany played a small part.

Yet, writes Hauner, from the Faqir's Islamic fundamentalist view of the world, terms like fascism and anti-fascism must have been utterly irrelevant. The Pathan tribesmen in Waziristan simply occupied "one of the few regions in the world whose inhabitants have cherished a strange anarchic independence from the constraints of 'civilized' governments."

These people, as is the case now, had never accepted a state authority above them. Nor were they anxious to form a government of their own. They were simply carrying on their centuries-old struggles for tribal independence, to keep their valleys free from foreign occupation. And, in pursuing their "rebellion" the Waziris accepted the Faqir as their supreme religious authority. Whether Hitler or Stalin were about to conquer the rest of the world, or the British about to quit India, did not concern them in the least.

The futility of British attempts are chillingly recounted by Hauner:

Even when the British succeeded in forcing their way through almost every tribal valley, they were never able to administer the tribes, let alone to disarm them. Although the British established many fortified outposts in the area, improved communications by bringing railways and roads closer to their cantonments, appointed political agents who were capable of conversing fluently in the local languages with the tribal maliks (chiefs) and mullahs (priests), this brought no permanent solution.

Earlier attempts by Lord Curzon, Foreign Secretary between 1919–24 to bring the Frontier under full control gradually had been implemented by means of he called his "Close Border Policy". Startlingly similar to General McChrystal's "take and hold" policy, followed by handing over the area to Afghan security forces, it consisted of replacing the permanent British military presence in the Tribal Territory by local militia, thereby leaving it as a sort of "marshland" to go its own way.

However, Hauner informs us, this policy was no more successful than the previous "Forward Policy" of conquest, as it did not prevent the tribesmen from raiding across the administered border.

Hauner cites Sir Kerr Fraser-Tytler, who served during this period as a young subaltern in a Frontier Cavalry Regiment, and later during the crucial years of 1935-1941 as British Minister in Kabul. He recalls his frustrating experience in fighting the tribes:

And always there were the raids, the sudden alarm, the long dust-choked ride through the stifling heat of a July night, clattering out on to the stony glacis of the frontier hills, and away forty miles before dawn only to find as often as not that the birds had flown, leaving a trail of death and destruction behind them.

The grievances of the border tribes were believed to be essentially economic - though from the tribesman's own point of view the motivation would be translated into their fundamental moral codes (Pukhtunwali), which imply retaliation and blood feud (Badal) in settling old disputes. And retaliate they did.

The Pathan hill tribes rightly complained that the British, by pushing their control closer and closer to their areas, cut them off from their traditional recourse to raiding in the fertile valleys running down to the river Indus in the administered districts, which were populated mostly by the people who spoke the same language - Pashto (Pukhtu).

Because the hills were too poor to maintain their inhabitants and, if there was no alternative source of income, their only choice was to carry out raids or to starve. Following the established practices of the Mughal and Afghan governments, the British first satisfied themselves by paying allowances in cash to the tribal maliks, which for instance for the year 1940 amounted to nearly one million Rupees for the whole Tribal Territory.

Theoretically, these were paid for services rendered, such as road and camp protection by the local tribal levies called khassadars. These were untrained men, many either young boys or old men in the last stages of decrepitude, selected by their local maliks.

They were used alongside with other irregular or auxiliary forces such as the Frontier Constabulary or the Scouts, before the military were called in. The khassadars, however, proved unreliable, "more often than not keeping out of the way of the raiding gangs they are supposed to deal with", complained a British intelligence officer.

In a passage that could be taken straight from contemporary accounts (substitute Afghan "security forces"), we find that they were distrusted by the military who almost invariably insisted on the withdrawal of all khassadars from any area in which military operations took place.

Then we learn that, as a result of their dealings with the authorities on both sides of the Indo-Afghan border, the Wazirs and other Pathan tribes had, rightly or wrongly, come to the conclusion that the shortest cut to lucrative allowances was not through loyal service, but by occasional demonstration of their nuisance value. In particular the Wazirs, in the barren and inaccessible country athwart the Durand Line, were in an admirable position to play this game.

That "game" is still being played out today, as a new generation of troops come to terms with the realities of the Frontier, the tribesmen no more amenable to their blandishments than were their forefathers.

Of that earlier period, Hauner writes that it is certainly no exaggeration to describe the Pathan tribes as the largest known potential reservoir of guerrilla fighters in the world.

At the time, the British statistics of fighting strength and armament among the trans-border tribes in the Frontier area, as of 1 April 1940, produced 414,000 fighting men armed with 233,562 breech-loading rifles or carbines. Thus, on paper there were more modern rifles among the tribes and certainly more fighting men than in the entire Indian Army of the period.

So protracted and routine became the fighting in the areas that Hauner observes that, between the two world wars the Frontier offered practically the only combat experience to young and adventure-seeking British officers facing the boredom of a monotonous service in India. It was the Frontier, he recalls, where the young Churchill had gained his first experience of direct fighting during the 1890s.

Sending troops on punitive expeditions against rebellious villages and bombing them from the air developed into something of a favourite sport, which received the full support of strong military commanders in India. And even then, the policy was criticised "for giving undue preference to the military over the civilian point of view."

Nothing much has changed and, as McChrystal calls for an extra 40,000 troops, aiming to cover the whole of Afghanistan with coalition forces which would then number no more than 150,000 it is as well to recall that, at the outbreak of the Second World War the Indian Army formed the largest segment of British imperial troops: 187,000, of which 140,000 were Indian.

And with 40,000 deployed just in the small area (by comparison) of the Frontier, little effect will be gained from the few Brigades he will be able to spare for that area.

Nor will US airpower come to his aid – when he allows it to be used. The campaign in the late 30s became the test bed for the use of aircraft, with troops routinely sent on "punitive" expeditions against rebellious villages, while they were bombed from the air.

Even after the Second World War, though, the "rebellion" continued, when high-performance Tempest fighter bombers were used by the RAF, right up until 1947 and partition, when the Royal Pakistani Air Force using similar equipment (pictured) took on the task. With the names changed and a few minor details added, accounts of the operations of that period could easily be mistaken for contemporary accounts.

Eventually, the Faqir "rebellion" petered out and by 1954 it was considered to be over, although the Waziris were undefeated and ungoverned, even after huge expenditure of blood and treasure spanning decades. Not thirty years later the tribesmen were again rebelling, this time against Soviet occupation – with similar results.

Compare and contrast an account of an action in June 1937 when the rebellion had spread to the whole of Waziristan. A British convoy of 200 heavy vehicles, escorted by six armoured cars was ambushed and wiped out in a narrow defile at Shahpur Tangi. As the Soviets later found, the tribal forces avoided pitched battle and would quickly disperse into the mountain shelters after an attack.

Now, more than 60 years after British troops were fighting their fruitless battles, the Waziris spanning the Afghan-Pakistan border are "rebelling" again, this time against US-led coalition forces. On the Afghan side, the Ghilzhai Pushtans are also mounting an insurrection, as they are wont to do from time-to-time, and have been doing since time immemorial.

Nothing changes – not even the outcome, which is all too predictable. In 1955, when the Faqir was still alive and fighting, the Afghan Prime Minister Prince Daud, who was known as a strong advocate of a united "Pushtunistan", received official backing for his policy from the visiting Soviet Premier Bulganin and Party Secretary Khrushchev. The Kremlin leaders then referred to Pushtunistan and overtly stated that the Soviet Union stood for a "just settlement of the problem".

In the 1979 invasion of Afghanistan, the Soviets were in a position to put that "just settlement" into practice and there were claims that Frontier problem was closer to a solution than at any time in its history. However, Hauner then cautioned us not to forget Lord Curzon's dictum: "I do not prophesy about the future. No man who has read a page of Indian history will ever prophesy about the Frontier."

McChrystal, president Obama and the many other "actors" in the currently unfolding drama may think they are writing the pages of history. In fact, they are simply adding new names to an account that has been written many times before. As long as we are not prepared to re-visit the history of the region, we are doomed to do that again and again, leaving behind our blood and treasure, in exchange for the bones of our soldiers.

Montgomery's first rule of warfare was "never invade Russia". For contemporary generals, the rule should be "never invade Afghanistan". This is "one of the few regions in the world whose inhabitants have cherished a strange anarchic independence from the constraints of 'civilized' governments." Leave it alone.

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