A decade of failure

by FRANK LEDWIDGE



After a decade of military operations in Afghanistan — the anniversary of the 2001 incursion falls this week — colossal expenditure and a rising death toll, the British are no nearer victory over the Taliban. Nor can they claim to have brought good governance and security to the region.

As I saw during a tour in Helmand as a civilian adviser, the British forces are now widely hated in Afghanistan because of this blood-soaked mess. Among Helmandis, Britain is largely viewed as a destructive foreign invader rather than the benign liberator of fashionable political rhetoric.

Even the Russians, who undertook the notorious invasion of Afghanistan in the 1980s, are far less despised than the British.

Afghan Policemen carry a wounded British man at the site of a suicide attack outside the British Council in Kabul, Afghanistan.

After decades of Ministry of Defence chiefs telling us that they run the finest military in the world, the twin failures of Afghanistan and Iraq should have come as a rude awakening to them.

But instead of honestly facing up to the weaknesses of their leadership, senior officers have resorted to a mix of self-delusion, spin and buck-passing. For example, they claimed that the campaigns in Helmand and Basra were not defeats but glorious successes. It is all just a matter of presentation.

Echoing his generals, David Cameron this week used his party conference speech to declare the Afghan campaign ‘a success’. But this is just a fantasy. The truth is that the British Army has inflicted huge amounts of damage, including the deaths of hundreds of civilians — while also sacrificing 382 of our own brave soldiers.



Our troops have suffered more than 5,000 injuries, yet despite all the courage of our frontline soldiers, there was never any sense that the British Army has been in control. As one SAS major put it to me: ‘We hold these tiny areas of ground in Helmand and we are kidding ourselves if we think our influence goes beyond 500 metres of our security bases.’

Members of The 40th Regiment The Royal Artillery in a snatch Land Rover during a patrol in Lashkar Gah, Afghanistan.

When not resorting to wishful thinking, the generals like to put the blame elsewhere. Of course, politicians are a favourite target. It cannot be denied that both the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were launched during Tony Blair’s premiership, partly out of an almost neurotic determination to uphold the special relationship with Washington.

However, senior figures in the British Army had their own reasons for supporting military action in Afghanistan — battered by the humiliating British retreat from Basra in 2007, they saw the war in Afghanistan as means of restoring their tarnished credibility, especially with their disillusioned U.S. allies.

But the country’s military chiefs failed to subject the political policy to any real scrutiny, nor did they carry out any effective post-war planning.

Equally aberrant was the failure to ensure that the necessary numbers of troops were provided for operations. What’s more, it was delusional to think that Helmand could be held with a force of 3,500 while all reliable estimates of the minimum needed for a region of that size and population was 50,000 troops.



Our troops have suffered more than 5,000 injuries, yet despite all the courage of our frontline soldiers, there was never any sense that the British Army has been in control.

And of those 3,500 initially deployed, only 168 would actually be on patrol duties.

The mismanagement went far beyond mere numbers. As someone with a relatively wide range of experience in the Armed Forces, I have been appalled at the lack of real strategic thinking in these two conflicts. In place of hard analysis and planning, there has been the usual attitude of just ‘cracking on’, even when the strategy is not working.

Within the top brass there is often a feeling that any sort of action is preferable to doing nothing. So patrols are sent out or targets attacked without any real productive purpose, but just to give the illusion of progress.

One classic example of this approach was the operation to transport a huge single electric turbine through 100 miles of hostile territory to the Kajaki dam on the Helmand river, ostensibly to provide electricity for the region.

The task, involving 4,000 mainly British troops, was accomplished, but the turbine was never installed, partly because there was no local skilled labour to operate it, partly because no cables existed to transmit the electricity from the dam to southern Helmand. As one soldier said to me, the exercise was ‘a complete waste of time’.

Despite squandering their manpower on such ridiculous plans, the generals often cite a lack of resources, particularly in regard to equipment such as helicopters and armoured vehicles, as the reason for their failure to achieve targets in Afghanistan.

But this was just a distraction from the real problem: a lack of any coherent military strategy. A huge increase in the number of armoured vehicles and helicopters would have done little in Basra or Helmand against the anti-Coalition insurgents.

An Afghan National Army soldier, right, carries his wounded colleague as U.S soldiers carry another wounded Afghan National Army soldier to a medevac helicopter.

Moreover, though Dannatt and his colleagues are fond of blaming ministers, those really responsible for procurement in the Ministry of Defence are senior officers themselves, who are supposed to have a unique insight into the needs of the military.

Yet procurement in their hands has been an absolute scandal, with tens of billions wasted on flawed projects. Eager to boost its own sense of self-importance, the top brass prefer big, high-tech, advanced new pieces of equipment rather than just the basics.

The price of five Eurofighter Typhoons, retailing at about £120m each (we have 56 with another 160 on order,) dedicated to the care of veterans would ensure that no wounded soldier would have to fight for proper life-long care again.

This cocktail of egotism and misuse of resources can be found on an even bigger scale in the bloated, top-heavy structure of our three armed services. The scale of senior hierarchy graphically exposes the fallacy, so sedulously cultivated by the generals themselves, that our military is underfunded. The statistics of this bureaucracy are truly astounding.

Today, there are more generals in the Army than helicopters or operational tanks, while the Royal Navy has more admirals than ships and the RAF has three times as many senior officers as there are flying squadrons.

There are three times more senior officers than Apache attack helicopters which have played a vital role in Afghanistan. In the Army, we have only 10 deployable brigades, yet there are at least 170 brigadiers, 20 more than in 1997.

Smoke and flame rise from burning NATO supply trucks after they were attacked by armed militants on the outskirts of Quetta.

Similarly, we have just two armoured fighting divisions that could be put into the field (albeit with a great deal of notice,) yet the Army feels it necessary to employ no fewer than 37 major-generals. We have just a single army corps, yet enough lieutenant-generals to command 17 of them.

The absurdity of structure is made even more clear when it is compared to other armed forces. In America, for instance, the mighty U.S. Army has 302 generals compared to the British Army’s 255.

Furthermore the 210,000-strong U.S. Marine Corps, larger than all our three services combined, has just 84 general officers, eight times less than the number of generals in Britain.

The contrast with Israel, which has one of the world’s most formidable defence force, is striking. Though its armed services are roughly similar in size to Britain’s, 170,000 men and women, Israel has just one Lieutenant-General, 12 Major-Generals and 35 Brigadier-Generals.

This obsession with swelling the top ranks reflects a love of empire building, where chiefs tend to judge the strength of their authority by the number of senior staff they have under their command. But there are a number of serious consequences to this culture of hierarchical excess.

One obvious one is that there is less money available for the front-line troops, sailors and airmen. Another is that there are simply not enough operational jobs for senior officers, so they end up in a host of administrative and staff positions which could easily be filled by lower grades.

Even worse is the diffusion of accountability, because chains of command are so confused in the sprawling hierarchy. In the event of setbacks, the chiefs can now find safety in numbers to avoid direct blame.

The British Army used to be superb at rewarding success and punishing failure because responsibility was clear, but that tradition has been crushed under the weight of the hierarchy.

It is telling that at the Chilcot inquiry into the UK’s involvement in Iraq, no fewer than 31 generals of two star rank or above gave evidence, that figure in itself an explanation of why the mission failed.

Determined to look after their own, like so many professional vested interest groups in the public sector, the top brass have ensured that not a single officer has been sacked or disciplined over Basra or Helmand.



Not only is no one held to account, but promotion is almost routine. ‘For far too long, we have celebrated mediocrity,’ says Colonel Tim Collins.

The two wars were a microcosm of this bloated system. In Basra, at least 14 Brigadier and 14 Major-Generals served in command roles, again weakening the focus of responsibility.

Many more worked as staff officers. The same is true of Helmand, which has involved ten Brigadiers and at the very least four Major-Generals. What was particularly striking for me was how, in both theatres, a vast bureaucracy accompanied each British force, making a mockery of all the complaints about resources.

At Basra, the headquarters near the airport was a massive air-conditioned complex, full of offices, computers, administrators, managers, liaison personnel, communications staff, cookhouses, media operations, planners, and even a logistical office which effectively amounted to a travel agency.

The support operation was so big that the front-line was almost an irrelevance. Astonishingly, out of almost 8,000 troops, only 200 would be available for patrol on any given day.

Other factors in the Army’s culture have led to failure, like the practice of six-monthly tours for personnel, which undermines continuity, promotes short-termism and encourages futile but dramatic gestures, like the transport of that turbine to the Kajaki or ‘signature’ battles such as the retaking of a village.

The structure of the Army has been driving the campaign, the very reverse of what should be happening. Just as disturbing has been poor intelligence and lack of cultural awareness bred of ignorance.



In one classic case in Basra, an entire battle group of 600 soldiers were used to arrest several car dealers who were suspected to be insurgents.

But it was soon found that they were entirely innocent. The so-called intelligence had actually been supplied to the British Army by a rival bunch of car dealers.

Part of this complacency has bred an excessive reliance on the supposed lessons of the counter-insurgency campaigns in Malaya in the 1950s and Northern Ireland during the Troubles between 1972 and 1994, both of which were ultimately successful in halting terror campaigns.

In fact, American officers in Afghanistan grew sick of their British colleagues harping on about Malaya and Ulster and would roll their eyes when another British officer began a lecture about patrolling the streets of Belfast.

Neither place really had an relevance for Basra and Helmand, where, unlike Malaya and Northern Ireland, there was no stable government, no functioning civic structure, no effective police forces and precious little support from the civil population.

The insistence on living in the past was all too indicative of how badly the Army’s commanders have lost their way. Much as our top brass might not like it, the American military has proved less inflexible and bureaucratic, and more resourceful and imaginative.

Our senior officers should stop being so defensive, so concerned to protect their elaborately constructed closed shop and admit that all is not well.

Otherwise we will be heading for more failures in the future.

Losing Small Wars: British Military Failure In Iraq And Afghanistan by Frank Ledwidge is published by Yale University Press at £20. To order a copy at £17 (p&p free), call 0843 382 0000.