Yon is wrong

A new piece from Michael Yon is usually followed by a rush of e-mails in my inbox, alerting me to the fact. On this one, however, there has been something of a hush. Perhaps it is because Yon writes:

Having just spent another month with British forces in Helmand, today I am on my own in the same province. During the last month, our great allies the British lost dozens of soldiers who were killed or wounded. Cooperation from locals is almost nonexistent in many places. Interaction between civilians and British soldiers was nearly zero. The British treat the civilians very well, but being polite and respectful is not enough.

Without significant reinforcements, the British likely will be defeated in Helmand within a couple of years. My respect for British soldiers is immense. I have been in combat with them many times in Iraq and Afghanistan, including during the last couple of weeks and would go into battle with them today. Yet it must be said that the average British soldier has practically no understanding of counterinsurgency.

It is that last sentence that is the giveaway. Yon is allowed to applaud British soldiers – which he has been doing, wholeheartedly, awarding them fulsome praise. But he is not allowed to criticise them.

Correspondence with an expert watcher of the British Army on this elicited the comment that, "The problem is of course not so much British soldiers have no understanding of counter-insurgency but, disastrously, neither do their officers - even very senior ones. And that is why we are losing Helmand".

To that, I would substitute, in the phrase "even very senior ones", the word especially, and I would also include the Americans. No insurgency is the same, and counter-insurgency tactics must embrace the particular circumstances of each conflict. In that, it has often been said that Afghanistan is not Iraq. But we are seeing some of the same ideas which have been applied in Iraq being advocated for Afghanistan. They will not necessarily work.

Neither, incidentally, is Afghanistan the same as Northern Ireland, nor Malaysia, nor Oman – or even Rhodesia in the 1970s. There may be common principles that can be applied, but they will only have effect within the context of a well-structured strategic framework. And that is what is missing.

Afghanistan is primarily an agricultural country. Upwards of 80 percent of the country relies on the rural economy. Michael Yon, with the authority of "being there" characterises the country as "one of the most backward, violent places on Earth". He thus declares that it "will require a century before a reasonable person can call Afghanistan a 'developing nation'."

Yon is wrong. He is deceived by appearances, which can be and are misleading. Afghanistan is in fact, a complex and highly sophisticated country. For sure, there is grinding poverty and the country is dealing with the devastating effects of the Communist takeover in 1978 and the 30-years of unrest that followed it, but the vestiges of the societal and economic structures remain.

Principally, the agricultural economy remains and in coping with the turmoil and lack of security, the collective responses of the farming community have been both rational and remarkably sophisticated – far more so than the economically illiterate blundering of the Western powers and the aid agencies.

In Helmand, a province that was noted in pre-communist times for its wheat and cotton – and a wide variety of other products – farmers have adapted to the new crop of opium and, in a space of a few years, have not only broken productivity records but developed and sustained a multi-billion dollar industry in the face of official disapproval and multifarious incentives to discontinue it.

Furthermore, this "backward" nation has taken on the richest, best armed and militarily sophisticated nation on earth and is running it ragged, at the same time maintaining its own propaganda effort – on a shoestring – the like of which would be the envy of Madison Avenue, if it was harnessed to commercial ends.

As to our conduct of the counter-insurgency, Rupert Smith describes this activity as a "war amongst the people", with the prize being the people themselves. But, who are these "people" in Afghanistan?

In round terms, of course, the "people" are farmers. And it is my thesis that farmers are farmers throughout the world, whether Pashtuns, East Anglian barley barons or Japanese beef farmers. Their calling transcends nationality, ethnic background and religion. They are "wired" differently from the rest of us - they have their own universal "ethos". Treat them like farmers and they will respond.

The Pashtuns are farmers. And therein lies the problem. The Army doesn't understand farmers. Difid and the FCO do not understand farmers. And if they don't understand farmers, they are not going to win "hearts and minds". The counter-insurgency programme is going nowhere.

Here, though, the greater problem is that a little bit of something is not better than nothing. Everything the coalition powers do in Afghanistan makes the situation, on balance, worse. And the harder they try, the worse they make it. The campaign breaches the primary rule of warfare: "don't lose".

In his latest piece, Yon says the Afghan war is one we can't afford to lose. There, he is right. But we are losing it and, as it stands, with billions of dollars draining into the sand to no effect – and worse – we can't afford to win it either. Urgently – desperately urgently – we need to find a way of winning, at a price we and the Afghans can afford. And the answer, as has been said before, lies in the soil.

COMMENT THREAD

A grasp of economics

For all the false optimism about the reduction in opium production in Afghanistan this year (see video below), there is one writer who has got the point. This is Simon Jenkins, who writes in The Guardian:

"The Afghan poppy crop is largely a function of the price of poppies compared with that of wheat ... The crop has shrunk because the wheat price has risen and the recession has dampened European demand. It will rise again."

This is exactly as we wrote a few days ago, and Jenkins is absolutely right. Market forces have a far more powerful effect than anything our pitiful efforts might achieve.

Furthermore, the situation is even worse than that. The UN faithfully trots out statistics on the number of provinces in Afghanistan that are "opium free" – i.e., no longer grow poppies – as if this actually meant something.

Particularly fêted is the apparent success in the northern provinces, which used to be the heart of drug-producing territory but which are now largely poppy-free. But to claim this as a "success" is completely (and perhaps wilfully) to miss the point.



With growers of Helmand and Kandahar provinces (with production in the latter having increased) moving into the market, northern growers, who can produce only about 10 kg of opium per hectare, simply cannot compete with average yields of 56 kg/ha which can be obtained from the more fertile soils in the south.

Thus, the northern growers have done exactly that which happens in every other sector faced with a similar challenge. They have moved into "added value". Instead of growing poppies, their main economic enterprise is converting the raw opium into the much more valuable heroin, and acting as a conduit for the thriving export business (as well as serving the growing domestic market).

During the rule of the Taleban, much of the "added value" processing was done outside Afghanistan, in Tajikistan and elsewhere. Now the value remains in the country, while Tajik and other businessmen have compensated for the loss by expanding their arms-trading and other nefarious enterprises.

And into this mix do we blunder. Clearly, since one of the major control mechanisms on opium growing is the price of wheat, our interests are best served by keeping the wheat price high. This can be done be a variety of market intervention mechanisms, principally either by intervention buying (as in the EU) or by implementing a minimum-price guarantee, topping-up farmers' incomes if the wheat price falls.

These options, however, have apparently been blocked by the US – it seems on "ideological" grounds, although it is difficult to pin down exactly where and why there is this blockage. If this is the case, then we are looking at mass hypocrisy, with US grain growers benefitting from some of the highest subsidies in the world.

Without a support scheme, things are bad enough – but we seem intent on making it worse. With Brown's much-favoured "wheat not heroin" scheme, we are giving away free seed wheat and fertiliser to Afghan farmers, while much of the aid is directed towards improving irrigation.

The net effect of these initiatives is substantially to improve wheat production. In the absence of a developed marketing infrastructure, this leads to local surpluses and crashes the price of wheat, thereby altering the economic balance in favour of growing opium, issues we have explored in depth here and here.

Our policies, therefore, are actually achieving the precise opposite of what we intended. We are thus paying huge amounts of money and putting soldiers' lives at risk, escorting seed convoys and distributing seed and fertiliser, to make the situation worse.

Of course, no discussion about opium-growing in Afghanistan is complete without bringing up the issue of forcible eradication. Forget the economics, some continue to say – just burn, grub up or poison the illegal poppy fields.

However, bearing in mind that coalition forces control perhaps less than ten percent of the area in the southern provinces of Helmand and Kandahar, ground intervention might be difficult.

Aerial spraying is an option but then, there is no better way of driving hundreds of thousands of Afghanis into starvation, forcing them into the arms of the Taleban. The current level of insurgency would be nothing compared to what it would be.

In the long run, though, the economic solution would work. It has worked on a small-scale in Afghanistan and has been successful elsewhere in the world. But nowhere, ever, will any policy succeed when it flies in the face of the very fundamentals of economics, which is what we are trying to do in Helmand. We might just as well try to re-write the laws of gravity.

COMMENT THREAD

Why we're getting it wrong

Following on from Stephen Grey's critique of the campaign in Afghanistan, sociology professor Anthony King offers his own observations about the capabilities of the British Army, in a piece entitled "Why we're getting it wrong in Afghanistan".

King is an interesting observer, having carried out several studies of the British military, and he is thus better qualified than most to contribute to the ongoing – albeit limited – debate about the performance of the Army.

In framing his own critique, he picks up on Grey's identification of the role of the institutional culture of Britain's armed forces: "cracking on" - the unshakeable determination of Britain's troops. Says King, the British army's determination to "crack on" in Helmand may be brave, but foolish.

Grey is right, according to King, in asserting that the ethos of "cracking on" is the army's greatest quality; effective armies require fortitude and morale in order to endure the losses that they will inevitably suffer. Yet, as he notes, it may be the army's greatest weakness too.

King tells us that he has worked with the British armed forces for the last five years, watching them on operations in Kabul and Basra. From that experience, he says, it has become clear to me that the culture of "cracking on" may not mean merely that British troops from the Somme to Sangin have dutifully enacted orders which they know to be poor but, more seriously, it affects operational command itself.

Rather, he observes - as Grey notes - British commanders have blithely conducted missions in Helmand despite a woeful lack of intelligence about the theatre and knowingly inadequate military resources for any realistic chance of success.

Now follows King's analysis, which is more than a little illuminating. During their initial training at Sandhurst, he notes, army officers are taught to retain the initiative: when they are confronted by the immediate presence of an enemy, it is better to do the wrong thing decisively than to do nothing at all. Passivity almost always leads to defeat, while determined, concerted action - even if initially implausible - can often unhinge opponents.

Thus, on recurrent exercises primarily based on conventional warfare, the centrality of activity, of tempo and offensive action - of cracking on - is repeatedly emphasised to trainee officers. At the tactical level, this prioritisiation of action and initiative is surely correct, imbuing a robust work ethic in Britain's armed forces which is appreciated and valued by their allies, like the US. From the Balkans to Afghanistan, multinational commanders have looked to British troops to carry out tasks that other nations have been reluctant to perform.

The trouble is though that the same ethos of action is evident at staff college where officers are trained for operational command. Although the concept behind Britain's Joint Service Command and Staff College (created in 1997) was innovative, the institution was imbued with traditional British military culture. It was and remains a testament to "cracking on."

Giving students little time for thought and independent reading and research, the college seems to replicate a conventional military exercise in which the speed and quantity of output is prioritised over quality - and potentially incorrect action over cautious contemplation. The result is that Britain's operational commanders feel the need to act and impose themselves on any situation.

More worrying still, says King, British commanders often have a narrow concept of the ideal form of military action. Despite well-worn claims to expertise in counter-insurgency, the British army actually regards conventional military combat as the ideal - and indeed ultimate - test of their professionalism. Like Clausewitz's military genius, British officers today want to test themselves under "the most murderous fire."

This encourages the premature and excessive use of violence despite wider the political situation. In June 2008, Brigadier Mark Carleton-Smith judged the Taleban insurgency to have been defeated (at least temporarily) as a result of a series of decapitation missions by special forces he had commanded. But by the end of the tour in October, he took a rather different line, arguing that this was a campaign which could not be won by the very military methods which he had advocated only months earlier. British commanders are prone to confusing local tactical superiority with operational success.

Even now there are inadequate numbers of troops in Helmand. However, rather than tailor the campaign to their resources, commanders have consistently "cracked on"; seeking to dominate the whole of Helmand, a hostile province the size of Wales, with just a few thousand troops, and dispersing their forces across the province into small, isolated platoon and operating bases.

Even in the Sangin Valley, King observes, where there are several significant positions, the British bases cannot mutually support each other; they are too far apart, while Musa Qaleh is some twenty miles away to the north. As British commanders in Sangin have themselves noted, troops in these locations "sit in a bubble," and this inevitably means they are engaging in numerous firefights.

Institutional factors within the military establishment seem to have further encouraged this preference for "cracking on." Never easy, tensions between the services have become increasingly strained over the last decade as a result of declining defence budgets and, as they approach the future defence review in 2010, these frictions have reached a crisis point. Each service is desperately seeking to protect itself from cuts; furious and bitter arguments have been reported, with each service trying to undercut the other.

And intense tactical activity in Helmand has become a potent tool in this competition: it is very difficult to cut regiments that have fought hard and suffered numerous casualties in Helmand. Budgetary pressures, then, have actually precipitated a preference for high-intensity war-fighting in Helmand - a pathological institutional reaction to chronic under-funding, ministerial mismanagement and poor governmental guidance.

So, King asserts, a new Afghan strategy is essential - and the announcements from US General McChrystal and Gordon Brown at the end of August recognise this. However, their new strategy in Helmand also requires a reformation of Britain’s armed forces themselves.

The success of General Petraeus in Iraq rested finally on a common recognition by the US Army and Marine Corps that the way in which they trained, planned and conducted military operations required profound revision. In short, operational success demands institutional reform at home.

While valuable at the tactical level, the culture of "cracking on" needs to be expunged from operational command. The armed forces, the ministry of defence and government need to develop more mature criteria on which to assess the performance of commanders - judging them by their political contribution to the campaign, not by the number of air assault operations they have conducted.

There is some evidence that the British armed forces may be capable of this change, says King. In previous campaigns in Malaya and Northern Ireland, the British recognised, after false starts, that the key to success in counter-insurgency campaigns was the slow suppression of insurgency through intelligence, negotiation, the presence of adequate security forces and cross-governmental coordination.

The British now need to relearn these lessons very quickly. The alternative is that their commanders in Helmand will continue to disperse their forces in futile and blunt demonstrations - ensuring that they crack on to defeat not only in Helmand but at home, in the arena of public support, as well.

And that is the view of an academic, but one with a profound knowledge of the military. Rarely do I find myself reviewing a paper and ending up repeating it almost word for word. But with such a taut analysis, there is little "fat" and much to think about.

King's analysis, added to Grey's, and much more – including the recent observations in the British Army Review - all add up to the singular fact that the British Army is failing to perform.

While some less perspicacious observers prefer to direct their attention to the political management of recent campaigns, even the military seems to concede the need to rethink its operations, while the evidence mounts as to the scale of the failings.

COMMENT THREAD

Brown on Afghanistan

"I want to take head on the arguments that suggest our strategy in Afghanistan is wrong and to answer those who question whether we should be in Afghanistan at all."

So said Gordon Brown yesterday, in a widely trailed speech to the International Institute for Strategic Studies, under the general heading of "Afghanistan - National Security and Regional Stability."

Addressing the issue of why we should be in Afghanistan, Brown chose to make a limited pitch. Not from him was there any suggestion that we should be there to support the United States, such an activity in support of our most powerful and steadfast ally being very much in our national interest.

Such an argument would invite such a torrent of vitriol that it has to remain unsaid. Thatcher might have got away with it, but it is not a sentiment that any Labour prime minister could articulate.

Thus, all we heard from Brown was the well-worn and oft-repeated claim that our intervention with America and other allies - on behalf of the international community as a whole - helped to remove from Afghanistan a regime which enabled al Qaeda to plot terror around the world, and which culminated in the attacks on 9/11.

That is fair enough, but our continued presence depends on his thesis that al Qaeda relocated to the remote mountains of Pakistan. A new crucible of terrorism has emerged, the present threat coming mainly from the Pakistan side. But, if the insurgency succeeds in Afghanistan, al Qaeda and other terrorist groups will once again be able to use it as a sanctuary to train, plan and launch attacks on Britain and the rest of the world.

And since al Qaeda retains some contacts and provides limited support to the Afghan insurgency, and continues to view Afghanistan as fundamental in the establishment of a pan-Islamic caliphate, a peaceful and stable Afghanistan would be a severe propaganda blow and strategic failure for al Qaeda.

Whether you agree with that or not, the real test though is whether a "peaceful and stable Afghanistan" is achievable, given the current strategy. Brown, therefore, devotes some time to this issue, outlining a four-pronged strategy "for accelerating the Afghanisation of the campaign."

First, he says, we will now partner a growing afghan army presence in central Helmand. Second we will strengthen the civilian-military partnership, including on policing. Third, we will support the governor of Helmand by strengthening district government - backed by targeted aid - and a more effective, cleaner government in Kabul. And fourth we will build on the success of the "wheat not heroin" initiative which I discussed with Governor Mangal - extending it to thousands more farmers.

As to the first prong, we must move from simply mentoring the Afghan Army to what we call "partnering" with them as they take more responsibility for their country's security. This, we are told, means that when we clear an area of Taleban, it is the Afghan Army and police who must hold that ground and prevent the Taleban from returning.

Thus Britain supports faster growth both of the Afghan National Army and police, going for a more ambitious target of 134,000 by an earlier date of November 2010 - which would mean increasing the rate of training to 4,000 per month. By November 2010 Brown envisages up to a third of our troops partnering Afghan forces.

The second prong of the strategy is strengthening the security of and support for the local population by the strongest possible civilian-military partnership, including on policing. This, it would seem, involves maintaining a fully joint military-civilian headquarters, doubling the number of our civilian experts on the ground and such initiatives as the "focused district development programme".

Brown also states that we need to go further in tackling problems of illiteracy, drug abuse and corruption - and logistical problems like ensuring police are paid adequately and on time, without which progress on tackling corruption will be impossible.

The third prong is the strengthening of local and district government - a vital part of any counter-insurgency strategy - and of countering the shadow governance of the Taleban. Our stabilisation experts will work with Shuras in more villages and districts in Helmand - and right across Afghanistan, and priority must be given to the training and mentoring of the 34 provincial governors and almost 400 district governors.

The fourth is moving the economy of Central Helmand over time from heroin to wheat and to diversify even further. This, Brown believes, was the key to the reduction in heroin in Helmand by 37 percent. With the support of the British military and civilian experts, wheat seed was delivered to 32,000 afghan farmers - combining an alternative to poppy with protection from Taleban intimidation in a secured area of Central Helmand.

The British will help Governor Mangal to expand this programme next year - and also help set up agricultural training college. Over time, Brown avers, we want to see Central Helmand restored to its former position as the breadbasket of Afghanistan.

And that is the core of the strategy. There are more bits that Brown adds on, but we have essentially, more responsibility devolved to the Afghans, a stronger civilian-military partnership, strengthening local and district governance, and swapping opium for wheat. Thus does the man say, as in the Cold War, achieving our objective depends not just on armies and treaties. It depends on winning hearts and minds.

Getting to grips with this is like trying to bottle smoke. We cannot even say it sounds good. Not one element or "prong" answers the question of how the British forces intend to achieve the security that the Army argues is the necessary precursor to any and all of this activity.

Certainly, even at the first hurdle, the strategy falls as no one but the wildest optimist would assert that the Afghan security forces will be able to take the load for many years to come – if, indeed, in the foreseeable future. The question that must be answered, therefore, is that essential element – the nature of the military strategy for clawing back the land from the control of the Taleban.

On that, Brown is utterly silent – as is the military. We seem no further forward than when we started.

COMMENT THREAD

War porn

On 14 August 2009, AP photographer Julia Jacobson was with a US Marine patrol in southern Afghanistan when it walked into a Taleban ambush. The clash resulted in the death of 21-year-old L/Cpl Joshua Bernard, hit in the legs by an RPG.

The dying soldier was photographed by Jacobson, the picture subsequently published by AP, despite the objections of the boy's father, a decision which defence secretary Robert Gates objected to "in the strongest terms", calling it "appalling" and a breach of "common decency." This is, of course, the same AP which reveled in publishing pictures of dead babies at Qana.

Justifying its decision, AP has constructed from the reporting of Alfred de Montesquiou, the photos and the written journal kept by Julie Jacobson, and the TV images of cameraman Ken Teh, a report entitled "Death of a Marine," claimed to be a narrative of the clash, "offering vivid insights into how the battle was fought, and into Bernard's character and background."

However, it has to be said that the definitive account, carrying the joint by-line of Montesquiou and Jacobson, does not match the label on the tin, serving more as an ex-post facto attempt to justify the indefensible.

Rather than "offering vivid insights into how the battle was fought", it actually records a tiny microcosm of the overall action, strongly focused on the "human interest" aspect of that one small episode where L/Cpl Joshua Bernard was killed, seeking to put his death in the context of "responsible" war reporting.

Yet, of the 1800-word report, more than a quarter is taken up with biographical detail of Bernard, including an interview with his parents, who are found "Down a rural dirt road in New Portland, western Maine." There, we are told, John and Sharon Bernard sat on their porch and talked about their son. Joshua. He loved literature and showed early interest in the Bible and Christianity. "He had a very strong faith right from the beginning," his mother said.

There can be no complaints about what AP chooses to report – it is their money and their staff who are in the field, taking the risks, and theirs is privilege of deciding what goes into the public domain. They were not breaking any rules in publishing the photograph. But we can take exception at their claim to be "offering vivid insights into how the battle was fought", using that as a justification to publish photographs of the dead and dying.

Strangely though, some "insights" do actually escape into the narrative, not in the main report but in the journal kept by Julia Jacobson. She tells us that the operation started early Wednesday morning in Dahaneh, a Taleban-controlled town a few miles south of Now Zad.

But she then complains that Alfred (Associated Press writer Alfred de Montesquiou), and Ken (AP Television News Cameraman Ken Teh) were put on an assault helicopter which landed outside the compounds they intended to raid. Jacobson, bemoans the fact that she was "stuck on a 7-ton truck with ANA (Afghan National Army) soldiers, an NPR reporter and another American guy, who is a civilian military adviser."

Yet this experience, even if she does not know it or even begin to recognise its importance, gives us one of the better clues as to "how the battle was fought". Now Zad and district, as we know, has become a bitter battleground. Furthermore, there is almost complete stalemate as the Taleban have emplaced IEDs on an "industrial scale", effectively robbing US forces of their tactical mobility and giving rise to a steady attrition, as soldiers are killed and maimed by these weapons.

The effect of the tactic is well recorded in an account of the death of Private Robbie Laws in June as he took part in Operation Panther's Claw. Laws was attached to a squadron of the Light Dragoons which were operating Scimitar light reconnaissance tanks, part of a four-man "dismount" team carried in a Spartan armoured personnel carrier.

His and his comrades' task was to carry out mine/IED sweeps on foot, using hand-held detectors, ahead of the armoured vehicles, whenever their commander suspected a possible trap. With such a slow, primitive and dangerous procedure, the advance was painfully slow, as Laws and his comrades painstakingly cleared the route with their detectors.

We saw similar techniques being used in the battle for Pharmacy Road, where we learned that over 200 troops had to be committed to re-opening a road sown with IEDs. The road is less than a mile long and it takes over 24 hours, with the largest piece a plant available being a commercial JCB.

It was then that we began discussing seriously, the role of armoured bulldozers as an effective counter to IEDs, restoring tactical mobility at minimum risk and with economic use of manpower.

With that background, we then read of Jacobson's complaints, where she tells us that: "We left at 2:30 a.m., a long, long convoy of military vehicles with a bulldozer on tank tracks leading the way and basically creating a new path for us to follow. His job was basically to clear our path of IEDs all the way to Dahaneh. It was a slow drive over maybe five miles, lasting four hours."

And there we learn, for the first time in Afghanistan, that the US – probably learning from Israeli experience – is using bulldozers tactically, as a means of clearing IEDs. Thus Jacobson arrives safely and the five-mile journey only takes four hours.

But such is "girlie" Jacobson's limited knowledge that she describes "a bulldozer on tank tracks", not realising that, by definition, a bulldozer is a tracked vehicle. And she does not even begin to understand the tactical significance of what she sees.

Therein lies a crucially important demonstration of the inadequacy of the media. We have written endlessly about the strategic importance of IEDs in Afghanistan, and the effect on the all-important tactical mobility, to say nothing of the steady flow of casualties arising from these weapons, which are eroding public support for the campaign.

If these weapons are going to be defeated, it is going to be through the application – in part – of technology, and equipment, not all of it high-tech, as we see with the pioneering use of bulldozers.

Further, it is public (and political) understanding, conveyed by the media, that is going to push the military into using the right equipment, by highlighting successes and bringing to public attention the deficiencies and limitations of the kit that is actually used.

But the media is not up to the job. The average journalist is profoundly ignorant about military equipment and very few bother to find out. An "expert" in the media is one who manages to tell the difference between a tank and a tracked APC.

More to the point, the media is not interested. The feminised, "human interest" agenda has taken over, where the only copy fit to print is emotive, gushing, human suffering stories, which emphasise the pain of war and (with only a few honourable exceptions) tell you nothing about how the war should and could be won, thus abolishing the very pain about which the media professes to be so concerned.

Worst of all though is AP's probably genuine belief that it was "offering vivid insights into how the battle was fought" when the product actually delivered was more akin to "war porn", dressed up in the gushing, emotive prose that passes for journalism. This is where our problem lies. Too many journalists have completely lost the plot, yet are driving the political agenda with their emotive, yet sterile fare.

COMMENT THREAD

Hollow power?

On the day that The Guardian was complaining of "Hollow power in Helmand", almost to prove its point, two more British soldiers were reported killed in the province.

The Times ran with the story, noting that both of them had died in the town of Babaji, focus of the five-week offensive, Operation Panther's Claw, where only 150 Afghans had voted in the election on 20 August. Ten British soldiers died in that operation.

One soldier, from the 2nd Battalion The Mercian Regiment, serving with The Light Dragoons battle group, died of gunshot wounds after a Taleban insurgent sprayed a foot patrol with rounds from a Kalashnikov while it was going through Babaji.

The day before, a REME soldier was killed by an IED while riding – according to The Daily Telegraph - in a Samson armoured recovery vehicle (close relative to the Spartan APC in which another REME soldier was killed in early August).

The latest two deaths bring the total number of fatalities since 2001 to 212 - all but five of them since 2006. The Times reports that 83 percent of the 75 British soldiers killed in Afghanistan this year have died from IEDs. And, since April, 60 soldiers have been killed and more than 208 have been wounded in action.

The threat from roadside bombs in Afghanistan is now so overwhelming, we are told, that the Army has restructured its recruit training programme to ensure every soldier becomes an "expert" in IEDs, although defence sources admit that insurgents have learnt how to overcome technological and tactical changes introduced by British and other coalition troops in Helmand.

This tenuous position leads The Guardian to declare that we are manning a series of Potemkin settlements in Afghanistan. The territory that US and British troops are holding, the paper says, shows no signs of being filled by a state which Afghans can trust.

Furthermore, the forts that dominate south Helmand are proving to be every bit as hollow – for the purpose of state-building – as the theatrical sets that Field Marshal Grigori Potyomkin had built along the route Catherine the Great took, to persuade her that Crimea was being civilised by Russian rule.

Continuing with this theme, the paper then declares that, like the Russian empress, Barak Obama and Gordon Brown could have an inkling that the glowing fires are fake and that there is nothing behind the sandbags and dugouts. They may have already realised that they are only buying time before an exit strategy can be realised, before domestic expectations can be reduced and before a deal is done with the Taleban – but they are not saying it.

Scorned is poured on the idea that Afghan troop numbers can rise to 134,000 by next year, 12 months ahead of schedule, and to 240,000 by 2011. Those who believe this can happen are dreaming. "How can British troops possibly deliver in a year what US troops failed to do in seven, at a cost of billions of dollars?" the paper asks.

The legitimacy of the campaign is also questioned after the election debacle, where complaints of ballot box stuffing and electoral-register fraud have turned into an avalanche. Demonstrations against Karzai now could easily degenerate into ethnic violence, giving the Taleban every incentive to continue the fight. They have victory in their sights, not talks.

Thus, does The Guardian declare, what this situation needs is not 14,000 more combat troops, which will suck Mr Obama deeper into a war he did not launch, but a fundamental rethink about how stability can be achieved.

This, concludes the paper, will be messy and involve large and hitherto unacceptable amounts of compromise – tribal peacemaking solutions which weaken the enemy rather than destroy him. It is this prospect that Gordon Brown should address. He should be leading us away from the land of delusion, not further into it.

Strangely enough, the Washington Post completely disagrees, arguing that if Obama provides adequate military and civilian resources, there's a reasonable chance the counterinsurgency approach will yield something better than stalemate, as it did in Iraq.

The Taleban insurgency, it says, is not comparable to those that earlier fought the Soviets and the British in Afghanistan. Surveys show that support for its rule is tiny, even in its southern base. Not everything in Mr. Karzai's government is rotten: US officials have reliable allies in some key ministries and provincial governorships, and the training of the Afghan army - accelerated only recently - is going relatively well.

This paper's view is that stabilising the country will require many years of patient effort and the pain of continued American casualties. Yet the consequences of any other option are likely to be far more dangerous for this country.

That view is almost exactly sahred by the Wall Street Journal which has Max Boot tell its readers that, to pull the plug on our operations now, when our troops are only beginning to fight in earnest, would be even more foolish than it would have been to short-circuit the surge in Iraq in 2007 - as so many who are freely offering advice on Afghanistan today once advocated.

Also pitching in to support the war is US defence secretary Robert Gates, who has now openly declared that the war is worth fighting and signalled for the first time he may be willing to send more troops.

Gates also is urging patience, saying that efforts by Obama - including ordering an additional 21,000 US troops to Afghanistan this spring - are "only now beginning" and should be given a chance to succeed. "I don't believe that the war is slipping through the administration's fingers," he adds.

Against all that though, is the futility of those mindless patrols, so graphically described by Lieutenant Mark Evison, the wasted effort in keeping the outlying bases supplied, and the tenuous hold on those "Potemkin settlements" while we pay for our own destruction.

The power may be there, and there is certainly a new determination being expressed in the corridors of power to see this thing though. But, as both Karzai and the Taleban mock our pretensions, is it, as The Guardian suggests, just hollow power?

COMMENT THREAD

Rats and sinking ships

In what has been described as a "major embarrassment" for Gordon Brown, Eric Joyce, the parliamentary private secretary to defence secretary Bob Ainsworth, has resigned over the Afghanistan campaign.

An ex-Army officer serving with the Adjutant General's Corps, Joyce joined parliament in December 2000 after winning a by-election for Falkirk West. He recently gained the unenviable reputation for being the most expensive MP in the House, having claimed £187,334 in allowances and expenses in 2007-8. He was cited as the first MP to have claimed £1 million in expenses, and accused of evading capital gains tax on house sales.

Now, in a letter to the prime minister, he has called for an exit strategy for British troops in Afghanistan, writing that Britain needed to "make it clear that our commitment in Afghanistan is high but time limited". He added: "It should be possible now to say that we will move off our present war-footing and reduce our forces there substantially during our next term in government."

Joyce also warned: "I do not think the public will accept for much longer that our losses can be justified by simply referring to the risk of greater terrorism on our streets," going on to say that he did not think "... we can continue with the present level of uncertainty about the future of our deployment in Afghanistan."

He also criticised the contribution of other Nato countries in Afghanistan, adding: "For many, Britain fights, Germany pays, France calculates, Italy avoids."

The resignation comes ahead of a major speech by Brown at the International Institute of Strategic Studies on Friday, when he will seek to reinforce Britain's reasons for being in Afghanistan as opinion polls continue to show hesitant public support.

This is not the first time Joyce has broken ranks, however, having narrowly escaped a court martial in 1997, after publicly attacking the "snobbery and elitism" in the officer corps in an unauthorised article written for the Fabian Society.

The article also called for the setting up of an independent professional association for services personnel and an end to the recruitment division between officers and lower ranks. He then further provoked anger among the top brass by speaking publicly again, when specifically told not to - regarded by fellow officers as disobeying orders.

He was dismissed from the Army in 1999 after accusations that he was being protected by ministers. More recently, he escaped another sacking as Ainsworth's aide, having criticised the MoD for appealing against compensation awards for two servicemen, describing the action as "politically bonkers".

Reputed to be extremely unpopular in his own constituency, he is believed to be at risk of losing his seat at the general election, with some pundits suggesting his current motivation is more geared to personal survival than any great upwelling of principle. Brown's "embarrassment" may, therefore, be short-lived.

COMMENT THREAD

Protection money

The easy assumptions made by so many commentators that the opium crop is the prime source of Taleban income – or, indeed, that eliminating opium would rob the Taleban of funds – are given another knock by a long feature article by Aryn Baker in Time Magazine.

It opens with an account of on IED attack in the northern Afghan province of Kunduz, which destroyed a US Humvee, killing four soldiers, their interpreter and a bystander. The makeshift bomb was assembled with goods from the local bazaar. The man who placed it was probably paid the going rate of $750 but, writes Baker, the cash very likely came from money donated by the international community to rebuild Afghanistan's roads, bridges, clinics and schools.

The narrative builds on our earlier piece, developing a strong evidential base to support the thesis that a major element of Taleban funding comes from protection rackets.

In respect of the IED explosion which Baker describes, he recounts how, a week before the incident, a local businessman subcontracted by a local firm working for the German government to build a road in Kunduz, handed some $15,000 in cash to a Taleban middleman to ensure that his project would not be attacked.

This is but one example of how substantial amounts of aid money from many countries - including the US - have made its way, directly or indirectly, into the Taleban's coffers. "Here we have internationals and Afghans turning a blind eye to the fact that we are paying off the very Taleban that we claim to be fighting," says an adviser to the Afghan Ministry of Interior. "It becomes a self-sustaining war, a self-licking ice cream."

Therein lies the rub. While the escalating costs of the war are straining the taxpayers of the coalition and donor countries, a Western official estimates that the Taleban is making more than it is spending, "and I don't want to even think about where the rest of that money is going." And as long as the money continues to flow, the war will go on.

Baker takes on what amounts to the "myth" that the bulk Taleban funding derives from opium, citing David Cohen, the Treasury's assistant secretary for terrorist financing. "The Taliban obtains revenue from a variety of sources, including extortion of funds from both legitimate and unlawful activity," he says.

Maj-Gen Michael Flynn, senior military intelligence official at ISAF stresses Mafia-like activities such as extortion and kidnapping for ransom. He notes: "I would say that there is more money going into the pockets of local leaders [of the insurgency] from criminal activities than there is from narcotics money."

Drug money, says Flynn, is more likely to go to national leaders of the insurgency, like Mullah Omar, who provide guidance and training for local groups. Local commanders, on the other hand, "absolutely raise their own funds through criminal activities to pay for food, IEDs, weapons and salaries" says Flynn. The billions of dollars spent on reconstruction projects are far too tempting a target to pass up.

Then we have Ahmad Nader Nadery of the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission. He asserts that the nexus between the Taliban and crime is becoming dangerously entrenched in Afghan society. "The Taliban are acting like a broad network of criminal gangs that enables them to utilize different sources of income," he says.

The consequences of not paying protection – or paying the wrong people – are expensive. Baker tells us that the contractor who paid the $15,000 to the Taleban still lost a bulldozer and 12 trucks, torched by the Taleban. Two of his drivers were held for ransom. What probably happened, says Abdul Wahid Omerkhil, district governor of Char Dara, is that the contractor paid off the wrong people. "It usually happens like that. You pay one group and you don't pay the other, and they will burn you."

However, it is not just the big foreign-aid projects that get hit. Local businesses are victims too. Baker tells us of a businessman in Kandahar who builds towers for mobile-phone transmitters, he estimates that 20-30 percent of total costs go to protection payments. The going rate to protect a transmitter tower runs about $2,000 a month, he says. "You have no choice but to pay these guys. You don't want to do it, but there is no government in these areas, no security, so you have to do what you can to protect your business."

Sargon Heinrich, a Kabul-based US businessman in construction and service industries, attests that some 16 percent of his gross revenue goes to "facilitation fees," mostly to protect shipments of valuable equipment coming from the border. "That is all revenue that will ultimately be shared by the Taleban," he says.

US and Afghan government officials, Baker says, are fully aware of the scale of the rackets. Afghan Deputy Minister of Public Works Mohammad Rasooli Wali freely admits that the contractors hired to help build the multibillion-dollar ring road around Afghanistan - funded by the World Bank, USAID and other nations' development programs - probably pay off the Taliban to protect their sites and equipment.

Col Thomas O'Donovan, the departing head of the Army Corps of Engineers in Afghanistan, which is responsible for about $4 billion worth of US government contracts a year, admits that there is little the Corps can do to stop subcontractors from paying the Taleban. "If we catch them, then they are done. But how do you catch them? It's not like the Taliban give receipts."

As to dealing with the rackets, Flynn thinks the laissez-faire attitude toward protection money has got to change. One answer is seen as providing a secure environment in which contractors can work, and so far neither coalition forces not the Afghan security agencies have been able to do this.

Flynn's solution is to encourage local participation. "If you want a school, then make the locals build the school. You want a road, bring in local labour. It might be more convenient to pay off the Taleban, and it might be faster. But the community will protect what the community has built."

That may also be a tad optimistic as the Taleban are capable of intimidating local communities and if they are freely able to "tax" local enterprises, then skimming off funds from community projects should not present them with insurmountable problems.

Baker thus opts out. He relies on a weak conclusion, saying that a thriving - and legal - local economy will turn off the Taliban's faucet. To bring him to this point, he cites a US Treasury official who tells him: "If you have people making more money in a criminal organisation than they can [make] working for the government or in the private sector, it is an indication that we need to do a lot more to create a viable Afghan economy."

Correct, says Baker, adding, "and sadly, not something likely to be put right anytime soon." But what he does not add is that, in the short term, if the contractors and businesses cannot be protected and must therefore pay protection to the Taleban, then the war continues and the Afghan economy fails to prosper.

He cannot see the obvious answer – that the coalition military, as the only forces immune to Taleban threats, must do the primary development themselves.

COMMENT THREAD

The same old mistakes

The Times ignores the obvious irony that, on this day of all days – the 70th anniversary of the declaration of war on Germany – it should come up with a headline: "The Army is making in the same old mistakes Afghanistan, say soldiers."

The irony is there in plenty as the first phase of the war against Germany was characterised by the Army making the "same old mistakes", starting with the disastrous campaign in Norway, the chaos which led to the retreat at Dunkirk, the shambolic Greek campaign, the unnecessary loss of Crete and the sequence of defeats in the Western desert, remedied only by el Alamein in 1942 when the 8th Army, fortified by huge stocks of US materiel, managed to prevail against a German force which had over-reached itself.

From a historical perspective, it is probably fair to say that we did not win the Second World War so much as Hitler lost it, not least by his determination to invade Russia, thus tying up 150 divisions which, had they been deployed in Northern France in 1944, would have thrown us back into the sea.

Almost – but not quite repeating history - in Iraq in 2003 – a victorious British Army, having so easily won the war – went on to lose the peace, not having learned, or retained the lessons of previous campaigns, culminating in our abject retreat from Basra and the expulsion of British forces earlier this year, the final act of which has yet to be played out. As before, only the timely intervention of the Americans saved us from a more humiliating rout, which has enabled us to pretend that our occupation actually achieved something.

But now, seeping into the public domain is the slow recognition by the Army that the occupation of Iraq was not "a glowing success, as some within Whitehall and PJHQ [the MoD’s Permanent Joint Headquarters] may try to claim."

That is the view of Daniel Marston, a former senior lecturer in war studies at the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst, articulated in the current edition of the British Army Review, a "Restricted" magazine that is not published openly but which Michael Evans of The Times has managed to obtain and report upon.

Thus does he convey the essence, that the Britain Army is failing to learn from the "military mistakes" made in Iraq in developing ways to defeat the Taleban in Afghanistan, according to a series of critical articles published in an internal army journal.

Dare we say it, but that is exactly the thesis we offer in Ministry of Defeat which, from the limited review that Evans offers us, goes far beyond that which the Army is yet ready to admit.

We do get from Marston, though, that "Observers expected that the British forces going into Afghanistan and Iraq, given their history of success in counter-insurgency, would automatically be better suited to waging wars among the people than their American counterparts."

But then he says that: "The British Army, in practice, appeared to be losing its way in terms of practical application of key facets of COIN [counter-insurgency] ... Many officers and NCOs ... were apparently unaware of important operational and strategic aspects of COIN. The British Army cannot turn its back on a difficult campaign and disregard lessons, some of which are admittedly very tough to swallow ... ".

We also learn from Evans that there is condemnation in the journal of Britain’s strategy in Iraq, particularly the decision to withdraw troops from Basra in September 2007, leaving the city to be taken over by extremist Shia militia. This, we are told, echoes criticisms made by senior American commanders at the time, which were rejected by the Government.

But, if that is as far as the criticism goes, then they are not there yet. As we never tire of saying, the strategic rot started with the decision to abandon al Amarah in 2006 (the picture is from 2005 in Alamarah), which set the pattern for the retreat which continued into Basra. Yet so few people – even amongst the troops who were in theatre at the time – knew what was going on that it is unsurprising that the full implications of that decision are not yet fully understood.

Even with the limited and highly controlled criticisms in the journal, however, Gen Dannatt admits in a foreword that the articles "make uncomfortable reading" but, we are told, "he welcomes the debate." Of course, the debate has barely started and, if it was that welcome, the brave General might have done more to promote it while he was still in office.

He does "reveal" though that a review of doctrine applied in Iraq and Afghanistan, called "Operation Entirety", has already helped "to focus the Army on the enduring campaign in Afghanistan". That review will be published soon, we learn.

Yet this is the review that has been six years in the making and, to judge from the lacklustre strategy being applied in Afghanistan, by no means all the lessons from Iraq have been either acknowledged or learned. But since it would appear that only now is the Army beginning to allow muted criticisms in a "Restricted" document, it has a long, long way to go before we get to the bottom of the failures in both Iraq and Afghanistan.

With historians still chewing over the entrails of the Second World War, it may be some time yet before we get to grips with the extent of those failures, leaving Trooper David Maddock in the current journal to put down a marker.

He declares: "British forces in Afghanistan today are fighting an asymmetric war, a war we have fought many times before in Arabia, Malaya, Northern Ireland and Iraq ... If we have such a vast amount of experience, why are we not implementing the lessons learnt by those who have fought and died before us?"

But the last word has to go to US Colonel Peter Mansoor, who says that, "Only through a thorough appreciation of the mistakes it made in Iraq can the British Army turn defeat into victory as it fights the untidy wars of the early 21st century. It should not ... gloss over its recent experience in Iraq ... Although the conditions [in Afghanistan] are different, the lessons of Iraq are still relevant."

"The British failure in Basra was not due to the conduct of British troops, which was exemplary. It was, rather, a failure by senior British civilian and military leaders to understand the political dynamics ... in Iraq, compounded by arrogance that led to an unwillingness to learn and adapt, along with increasing reluctance to risk blood and treasure to conduct effective counter-insurgency warfare ... ".

That arrogance is still there, in spades, and all we are seeing is the smallest of cracks in the edifice. But it is a start, even if it risks being too little, too late. We cannot afford 70 years before we finally admit that mistakes were made. And nor can we afford the luxury of dwelling on those events all those years ago, while ignoring the present.

COMMENT THREAD

Hard times?

Putting two entirely different items together, on the one hand, we see from The Independent that the price of Kalashnikovs has doubled in Afghanistan and weapons are now fetching $600 apiece.

On the other, according to the latest UN report, wholesale (farm gate) prices for opium in Afghanistan have fallen by a third in the past year: from $70/kg to $48/kg for fresh opium; from $95/kg to $64/kg for the dry variety while, in 2009, opium cultivation in Afghanistan decreased by 22 percent, from 157,000 hectares (ha) in 2008 to 123,000 ha today.

This might suggest that the Taleban, in continuing to finance its insurgency, is facing hard times. Not since 1990 has the opium price been so low and, caught between the classic squeeze of increased costs and declining income, the effect of these prices must, on the face of it, be significant. The arms trade is most often financed by opium sales.

As to the price-hike in Kalashnikovs, Kim Sengupta tells us this is a cause of some surprise. A surge of demand is blamed, with a steady stream of weapons said to be heading for the north to the Tajik constituency of Abdullah Abdullah, the presidential candidate who claims the election is being stolen by Karzai.

Sengupta adds that the arms shipments are a source of alarm in a country where political stand-offs have often been settled at the point of a gun. Few Western diplomats claim there is an immediate danger of civil war but tensions are mounting after the recent election which have been mired in bitterness and recrimination.

However, it is difficult to reconcile Sungupata's intelligence with a recent report in The Guardian. Firstly, that confirms our understanding that much of the arms trade takes place in Tajikistan, on the northern border with Afghanistan, so the flow of weapons would be southwards, not "heading for the north" as Sungupta indicates.

Secondly, the Guardian reporter, Ghaith Abdul-Ahad – with a dateline of 18 August - puts the price of a Kalashnikov at $400. These weapons, though, are not in great demand. The preference is for the "Kalakov", the Afghan name for a new model of Kalashnikov that is lighter and uses smaller calibre rounds (presumably the AK-74 ). This, it appears, is much favoured by the Taleban as the rounds can penetrate body armour, attracting a premium price of $1,100 – up from $700 a year ago. Against that, even the inflated price of $600 for a Kalashnikov seems modest.

Ghaith Abdul-Ahad also gives some idea of how the drugs trade works. With the farm-gate price of opium at $64/kg, and a conversion rate of 10:1 to turn it into heroin, a kilo of heroin in Afghanistan is worth $2,500; in the Tajik capital, Dushanbe, it is worth $5,000 – nearly ten times its original value. By the time it gets to London, even at current depressed prices, it is worth $100,000 on the street.

Much is being made of the reduction in opium cultivation, particularly by the MoD which takes pride in the report that in Helmand alone, cultivation declined by a third, to less than 70,000 ha.

This "major" drop in Helmand corresponds to the entire national decline this year of 34,000 ha. The dramatic turn-around here, says the UN, can be attributed to an effective mix of sticks and carrots: governor leadership; a more aggressive counter-narcotics offensive; terms of trade more favourable to legal crops; and the (related) successful introduction of food zones to promote licit farming.

The overall loss tends to reinforce an argument that the insurgency is under financial pressure, while the downturn in Helmand suggests that the counter-insurgency is beginning to show some, albeit modest, successes. Certainly, the UN supports this argument, recording that, in the first half of 2009, military operations destroyed over 90 tons of precursor chemicals, 450t of seeds, 50t of opium, 7t of morphine, 1.5t of heroin, 19t of cannabis resin and 27 laboratories.

It concedes that this has knocked out only a fraction of the Afghan drug economy but believes that the military action has increased the risks of drug trafficking, and created a deterrent for the future. Farmers are increasingly wary of retaliation, trading has become more discreet, and stocks are now buried underground. The risks/rewards balance is starting to tilt against drugs, says the UN.

However, this may be an over-optimistic assessment. While cultivation are has decreased by 22 percent, opium production is only down by 10 percent to 6,900 tons, as farmers increase their productivity. Traditional growers have only been able to produce about 10 kg of opium per hectare, while growers this year yielded a record 56 kg/ha – a 15 percent increase over last year’s already high figure of 49 kg.

And although the UN notes that the 800 tons drop in overall production has a notional retail value of around $8 billion in consuming nations, this is not a real loss. Afghanistan has been over-producing for some years and considerable quantities have been withheld from the market.

Furthermore, there are more powerful reasons for the drop in production. On the one hand, over-supply at the source – with the opium harvest still twice the size it was in the late 1990s - lower market penetration in user countries and greater competition from a wider variety of "recreational" drugs are pushing heroin and thus opium prices down.

Another important factor is the high price of wheat in the region, which has forced poppy farmers in many areas to switch to wheat so they could feed their families, as income from the opium yield was insufficient to buy enough grain.

A Canadian development expert notes that, "It makes sense to grow wheat to the point of self-sufficiency," but then warns that 2010 may be a very different story. "We already see wheat prices starting to fall," he says, in which case, many farmers will return to opium growing. Perversely, the coalition handing out free wheat seed (pictured) and fertiliser, without taking any market regulatory measures, may be reinforcing this dynamic.

That notwithstanding, a recent disturbing article by Jean MacKenzie in the Global Post suggests that the contribution made by the drugs trade to Taleban funding may have been considerably over-estimated. One of the richest sources is the foreign assistance coming into the country, extorted from contractors carrying out development works, as a form of protection money.

To that extent, international donors, primarily the United States, are to a large extent financing their own enemy, a process that goes beyond mere protection money or extortion of "taxes" at the local level. It is reported that very high-level negotiations take place between the Taleban and major contractors.

Even at the local level, there are multiple reports of licit crops being taxed while Michael Yon reports on the bizarre situation where British troops protect the electricity generation station at Kajaki but are unable to protect the transmission lines. The Taleban, therefore, control the supply and are able to charge users for the electricity.

Nothing, therefore, in the current UN report or Sengupta's record of spiralling weapons prices would support a contention that the Taleban are under financial stress. In fact, despite the downturn in drug prices and the drop in production, it would seem that the coalition forces will run out of money far sooner than their enemy.

COMMENT THREAD

Stop fighting wars!

The Armed Forces exist primarily to buy increasingly expensive equipment in order to keep high-paid industrial workers in jobs and to keep arms dealers (aka the defence industry) in the luxury to which they have long been accustomed.

That much seems ever-more evident with the latest initiative from the Defence Industries Council (DIC) which is today launching a high-profile campaign seeking an increase in defence spending.

The particular focus of attack, however, conveyed via The Guardian, is to complain that, as commitments in places like Iraq and Afghanistan have grown, the financial resources have not grown to the same extent.

Now, says Mike Turner, chairman of Babcock International and the DIC, "there is the danger that because the government has to meet commitments for Afghanistan, in five years' time there is not enough money left over for other projects."

Ian Godden, chief executive of the Society of British Aerospace Companies, admits that in today's economic climate defence was a "socially unacceptable" word, which for many people made a far less deserving case for public spending than education and health. "Politically it has not been a priority despite the fact we are fighting wars."

He adds that industry had been slow to fight its corner. "We have been too quiet as an industry," he said. "If we did speak out we would be criticised for looking after [our] own interests. Industry has realised it's time to talk about this."

However, the real agenda is more than transparent when Turner declares that, if spending is cut, British defence manufacturers would have to scale back their UK operations and imports of military hardware would rise. Once "Our Boys" start driving around in US-made tanks or flying French fighters, "you also lose public support for spending on armed services" and spending is cut further, warns Turner, "you're into a catch-22."

Somehow, though, one feels the media have not quite understood Turner's message. ITN runs the report, showing a picture of a US-built AC-130 (which is not on the British inventory), Sky News shows a picture of a US-built Blackhawk and the BBC shows a picture of Mastiffs – also US-built – under the headline "Defence industry 'vital for UK'". And not to be outdone, The Daily Telegraph and The Guardian both show pictures of Chinooks, built by the giant US defence contractor Boeing.

With British troops firing rifles built by a company now owned by Germany, with Belgian-built machine guns, driving Swedish-made Vikings (soon to be replaced by Warthogs, made in Singapore), patrolling in Italian-made Panthers, their way cleared by Israeli and US-built UAVs, while they await their new US-built Ridgebacks and their supplies are delivered in Austrian-built MAN trucks, brought to theatre in US-built C-17s and C-130s, one might feel that Turner, whose company builds the Jackal, is on a losing wicket.

With all that foreign kit being used to fight real wars, though, one gets the impression that DIC's main concern is that we should stop fighting these messy little wars so that we can get back to spending the defence budget on "proper kit" - British, of course - for the defence chiefs to play with, and to keep our boys and girls in the factories fully occupied.

COMMENT THREAD

When means now

As another two British soldiers die in Afghanistan, killed by an RPG - bringing the grand total to 210 – the coalition powers are now paying the price for grossly over-selling the Afghan presidential election.

Thus does The Times report today that "West faces losing battle over Afghan poll fraud", retailing an admission from "Western and Afghan officials" that that widespread and systematic fraud during the elections has tarnished the legitimacy of any future government and undermined the Nato campaign.

Cited also is David Kilcullen, "one of the architects of Nato's anti-insurgency campaign". He says that the failure of the Afghan Government to provide basic services in many areas was allowing the Taleban to establish its own courts, hospitals and security. "A government that is losing to a counter-insurgency isn’t being outfought, it is being outgoverned," he adds.

As to the election, one international election observer pulls no punches. He states: "The pattern is of systematic and widespread fraud, which really does call into question the legitimacy of the election. This is large scale and it is across the country." Ahmad Nader Nadery, head of the Afghan Free and Fair Election Foundation, agrees. He concedes that said the scale of the vote rigging was "serious".

Perhaps even more serious is a report from James Hider - one of the more reliable journalists – which tells us of "hundreds of angry tribal elders and local officials from southern Afghanistan" who gathered in Kabul today to protest against what they dubbed "massive electoral fraud that robbed entire districts of their votes and allocated them to the incumbent president, Hamid Karzai."

Writes Hider: "In a string of searing testimonies, community leaders told of how villages that had been too terrified to vote because of Taleban threats, of mysteriously produced full ballot boxes, and with most of the votes cast for Mr Karzai, often by his own men or tribal leaders loyal to him."

Abdulkayam Balets, "a grey-bearded and turbaned elder who had been in charge of a polling station in Shurawaq", in Kandahar province, speaks for the many. He said no ballot boxes reached his facility. They were instead sent to the district office, where they were stuffed with votes for Mr Karzai by members of his party. "We want Karzai to resign and an interim government installed, then we can have a free election that he can't manipulate by force," he says.

Sentiment that is driving increasingly voluble protest in Kabul is rippling around the world, with Michael Boyle in The Guardian accusing the US and UK of "flying blind" in Afghanistan, pouring blood and treasure into a war that looks increasingly senseless as the days go by.

He calls for a re-examination not only of our strategy but of the unconditional support we have afforded the Afghan government. The Afghan government has been the recipient of billions of dollars in aid, yet almost every ministry lacks basic capacity. It has 134,000 police and 82,000 soldiers, few of whom can operate independently of foreign forces.

Worse still, writes Boyle, the Afghan government has scored domestic political points by blasting the US and UK and ignoring their demands. We can no longer pretend we are partnering with a government when it does not govern or see itself as a partner. It is time, he concludes, to admit that unfettered support from the west may be undermining the efforts to fix the strategy in Afghanistan.

More worrying for the Obama administration is the op-ed in today's Washington Post, which declares unequivocally: "Time to Get Out of Afghanistan".

Written by George F. Will, it notes the death of two Marines, and observes that the war already is nearly 50 percent longer than the combined US involvements in two world wars, where "NATO assistance is reluctant and often risible".

Will questions the strategy of "clear, hold and build," pointing out that which has been obvious since day one, that the Taleban forces can evaporate and then return, confident that US forces will forever be too few to hold gains. Hence, he writes, nation-building would be impossible even if we knew how, and even if Afghanistan were not the second-worst place to try: The Brookings Institution ranks Somalia as the only nation with a weaker state.

US forces, Will goes on to note, are being increased by 21,000 to 68,000, bringing the coalition total to 110,000. About 9,000 are from Britain, where support for the war is waning. Counterinsurgency theory concerning the time and the ratio of forces required to protect the population indicates that, nationwide, Afghanistan would need hundreds of thousands of coalition troops, perhaps for a decade or more. That is inconceivable.

Instead, Will concludes, forces should be substantially reduced to serve a comprehensively revised policy: America should do only what can be done from offshore, using intelligence, drones, cruise missiles, airstrikes and small, potent Special Forces units, concentrating on the porous 1,500-mile border with Pakistan, a nation that actually matters (a strategy known as "offshore balancing").

To conclude, Will cites de Gaulle recalling Bismarck's decision to halt German forces short of Paris in 1870. Genius, he said, sometimes consists of knowing when to stop. Genius, says Will, is not required to recognise that in Afghanistan, when means now.

COMMENT THREAD

Progress of a kind

It is ironic that, on the 70th anniversary of the German invasion of Poland, we should be reviewing an article in Der Spiegel which catalogues a tale of woe concerning the dire state of the German military in Afghanistan. How the mighty have fallen, one might observe.

In a dreadfully familiar litany, we hear that "German Troops Bemoan 'Critical' Deficits in Training and Equipment", with "damning reports" emerging from the forces in Afghanistan, claiming that cooperation with civilian agencies is abysmal, equipment is lacking and training is insufficient.

All very familiar to is the apparent complacency of the German defence minister Franz Josef Jung. He is known for his anodyne expressions of confidence, repeated so often that, as Der Spiegel observes, they now have "little to do with reality": German soldiers are "well-trained and well-equipped" while collaboration with civilian agencies has been so successful that Germany's "networked approach" has even been "adopted in its entirety by NATO."

Back in the real world, troops serving in Afghanistan complain about the severe lack of vehicles, weapons and aircraft as well as about the paucity of supplies and replacement parts. They lament the "deficiencies" in military training and bemoan the fact that the much-praised collaboration between the military and civilian reconstruction agencies is actually functioning "pretty terribly".

Even some of Germany's pet projects in Afghanistan are failing. Whether it's civil reconstruction, developmental aid or training police officers, none of it is working. Collaboration with the BMZ, the German ministry responsible for development, is proceeding "not so successfully." The "implementation (of aid) … continues to be inflexible" and that BMZ projects "are still invisible to the local population."

Damningly, officers quoted in an internal report say that these failings tend to undermine "the credibility of Germany's involvement." They add that "starving people are much more impressed by food than they are by pamphlets."

Yet, while Jung is reticent about criticising fellow ministers and party colleagues, German officers are not shy about criticizing the numerous other players - including US soldiers, shady private security firms, the EU-launched police-training mission EUPOL, as well as German police officers and military police - for allegedly working alongside, rather than with, each other. "When it comes to this matter," says one officer, "we need some sort of coordinating element."

But if external agencies are creating problems, the Bundeswehr has plenty of its own. In particular, there is a "non-functioning logistical supply system" forcing troops to wait months for urgent supplies, creating a "permanent administration of scarcity."

Roughly 700 armoured vehicles in theatre are undeployable owing to "missing replacement parts and insufficient repair resources." Many "Dingo" and "Wolf" armoured vehicles are thus unused "sometimes for several weeks." Likewise, the vehicle fleet is judged "inadequate" on the whole, many lacking drivers trained for handling them off-road.

Top-mounted machine guns on Dingos can only fire "in the direction in which the vehicle is driving" - and only long as the soldier operating it is strapped into the seat, which he is obliged to do under the rules governing the peacekeeping operation in Afghanistan. As a result, it is impossible to engage enemies attacking from the flank or rear. Unsurprisingly, one Bundeswehr report states: "Weaponry that should, in principle, be useful is actually purely for show and can give the soldiers a false sense of security."

Then, there are not enough Fennek armoured reconnaissance vehicles and, after a number were lost to enemy action, the budget committee of the German federal parliament agreed to order new machines: 10 units, €39 million – but with a delivery date of 2011.

And the weapons the Germans have at their disposal are not particularly well-suited to their mission. If a soldier is wearing his flak jacket, he cannot aim his standard G36 automatic rifle. "Targeted shooting is either not at all possible or is restricted."

Aircraft are no better. Maintenance resources for the 40-year-old Transall cargo fleet are "in bad shape." With a lack of spares, many have to "cannibalized" to keep the rest flying, a process disguised in heavy officialise as "controlled disassembly", limited only by the lack of "qualified" mechanics. At least that is better than the "uncontrolled disassembly" which has stricken two of our Chinooks recently.

The Germans, though, have their own helicopter problems. Relying of the ageing CH-53 helicopters is described as "like rolling the dice" and – in common with UK forces, the military has been calling for more helicopters for as long as it has been deployed. But two more helicopters added to the fleet of six changed nothing, the reason, as one person commented rather dryly: "The staffing level was not adjusted to the number of aircraft."

Alarmingly, though, these are not just local difficulties but reflect systemic stresses in the military. Expenditure on foreign missions, pensions and personnel continue to rise, which, in the context budgetary constraints mean less for spares, repairs and training.

The results are described as "shocking". While flight crews should receive 180 hours annual training, German crews log 70 at most, far too few for combat readiness. Thus hardly any CH-53 pilots are certified to make "dust landings", to fly in high mountains, at night or in adverse weather conditions.

This "state of emergency" will soon affect Transall crews as well. Many of the pilots have retired and migrated to civilian airlines, perhaps because they were unable to take off in the Luftwaffe.

Luna UAVs – rather like the British Phoenix – cannot function in summer temperatures that usually reach 40°C and "attempts to cool down the aircraft using air-conditioning units before flights have not been successful." Tornado reconnaissance aircraft, on the other hand, deliver "excellent quality" photographs, but they take three days to process. "That is not at all sufficient for timely operational support," it is noted.

Furthermore, "operational awareness" is also regarded as a "key deficiency". Commanders complain they had no "comprehensive view of the situation… particularly when it came to the identities, locations and intentions of opposing forces operating in a concealed manner," - i.e., the Taleban.

This is not helped by a shortage of interpreters who can speak local dialects and secure telecommunications. Soldiers are forced to use insecure mobile phones while the computer network lacks the correct level of encryption so "secret" information from ISAF's HQ cannot be passed on to operational bases - even when lives are on the line.

In an attempt to overcome some of the deficiencies, it is now suggested that high-ranking guests should not be transported in camouflaged SUVs but instead moved in "civilian vehicles with analogue security systems," to allow them to remain inconspicuous. No one has explained how this stratagem can assist uniformed soldiers.

Needless to say, calls are now being made for "urgent improvements" in the protection available to soldiers, a need which is becoming increasingly urgent as Obama is set to demand more troops from Germany.

On reflection though, the scenario facing the Germans would not be unfamiliar to the troops of Army Group Centre, stalled outside Moscow during that dreadful winter of 1941-2. At least now, with 'elf 'n' safety dominating the new Bundeswehr, the troops in Afghanistan are well clothed, even if their weapons, vehicles and aircraft do not work. After nearly 70 years, that could be described as progress.

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