Losing Small Wars: British Military Failure in Iraq and Afghanistan

308 Pages·2011·2.01 MB·English

by  Frank Ledwidge

Copyright © 2011 Frank Ledwidge
The right of Frank Ledwidge to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance
with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

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Set in Minion by IDSUK (DataConnection) Ltd
Printed in Great Britain by TJ International Ltd, Padstow, Cornwall
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Ledwidge, Frank.
Losing small wars : British military failure in Iraq and Afghanistan / Frank Ledwidge.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-300-16671-2 (cl : alk. paper) 1. Iraq War, 2003—Participation, British. 2. Iraq War, 2003—
Campaigns–Iraq–Basrah. 3. Afghan War, 2001—Participation, British. 4. Afghan War, 2001—Campaigns–
Afghanistan–Helmand River Valley. 5. Strategic culture–Great Britain. 6. Great Britain–Armed Forces–
Management. 7. Great Britain–Military policy. I. Title.
DS79.765.G7L44 2011
956.7044'3341–dc22
2011012024
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
2015 2014 2013 2012 2011
Contents
Cover
Half Title
Title
Copyright

Acknowledgements
Introduction

PART ONE
Chapter 1 ‘Ridiculous Expectations’
Chapter 2 ‘Defeated, Pure and Simple’
Chapter 3 ‘Where's Helmand?’
Chapter 4 ‘A Bleeding Ulcer’

PART TWO
Chapter 5 Dereliction of Duty: The Generals and Strategy
Chapter 6 Cracking On: British Military Culture and Doctrine
Chapter 7 ‘Tactics without Strategy?’ The Counterinsurgency Conundrum
Chapter 8 Doing No Harm? The Question of Force
Chapter 9 Civvies
Chapter 10 Bad Influences
Chapter 11 Opening Networks

Conclusion
Abbreviations and Acronyms
Notes
Select Bibliography
Index
Acknowledgements
I have spoken with, and taken up the time of, many dozens of people in the
course of researching and writing this book. It is always difficult to do justice to
everyone, but here goes.
Above all, many serving and retired veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan –
ranging from private soldiers to three-star generals (or civilian equivalents) –
have given me their time to discuss what to them are immediate and personally
vital issues. I am particularly grateful to my former comrades in the units with
which I have served. They know who they are. Similarly, I have had the
privilege of hearing the views of an equally wide range of serving diplomats,
civil servants and police officers. Between them, these soldiers, sailors, airmen
and civilians have hundreds of years' service in conflict zones. It has been a
pleasure and a great privilege to have had the benefit of their individual and
accumulated wisdom.
My Afghan friends still resident in the country would, I think, prefer not to be
named for now, but they have been invaluable in providing the Afghan
perspective. Bob Churcher was kind enough to read and comment on several
drafts. His rare combination of many years as a military officer, followed by a
decade or so of assisting in reconstruction in Afghanistan, put me right on a
whole raft of matters; his help was invaluable. Similarly, Brigadier Richard Iron
has patiently fielded many questions and provided wise guidance. David Loyn
has helped and encouraged me in writing this book from the start.
Those other incredibly brave journalists Jean Mackenzie and Stephen Grey
have spent many hours outlining the view from outside the wire – which is to
say the reality of life in Helmand. Bijan Omrani, an expert on the history of the
country, has kindly given me the benefit of his deep scholarship on Afghanistan
and has put British involvement there firmly in context. To provide a robust
critique of the civilian aid effort, one could ask for no more informed or
experienced a view than that of Dan Jarman.
Martin Bayly, an emerging scholar, and Colonel David Benest, an established
one, have given me the benefit of their research into and knowledge of British
counterinsurgency history; David Betz and David Whetham, wise supervisors
both at King's College, London, have patiently listened to my often unformed
views and corrected them, as have the dean Dr Joel Hayward, lecturers and
cadets at the RAF College Cranwell. Professor Anthony King of Exeter has
provided remarkable encouragement and a fascinating, informed conceptual
angle.
Other friends and colleagues who have given of their time and patience
include, but are not limited to, Cynthia Alkon, Dr Sigurd Berven, Toby
Bonthrone, Professor Theo Farrell, James Fergusson, Dr John Gearson, Lara
Griffith, Richard Jermy, Commodore Steven Jermy, Dr Robert Johnson, Mary
Kaldor, Matthew Kypta, Walter Ladwig, Major General Andrew Mackay,
Gabrielle Rifkind, David Ucko, Harry Verhoeven, Stephen Weiss, Colonel John
Wilson.
Of these friends and colleagues I would like to single out Dr Michael Finn and
Alex Donnelly, who have endured many days of discussion of the dilemmas
thrown up in writing a book such as this.
Some (or all!) of these impressive individuals may not agree with my
conclusions; whether they do or not, I trust they will accept that we share a
dedication to ensuring that the mistakes of the past inform but do not infect the
future.
The librarians of the Joint Command and Staff College Shrivenham and RAF
College Cranwell have been particularly kind and efficient. I can summarize
their assistance by stating that they are at the top of their profession.
Thanks also to Phoebe Clapham, my editor at Yale, who has patiently fielded
my endless questions as to structure and content. One could ask for no better
agent than the ever patient and courteous Andrew Lownie, without whom this
book would not have seen the light of day.
Special thanks are due to my wife, Nevi, and my son, James, who have had to
endure my immersion in recent military history. I hope to be able to make it up
to them.
Introduction
Now that it was dark we were led out onto the tarmac, formed two files and
trooped into the hold of the C-130 Hercules, its engines already running. We
were directed, as always, to sit along the sides of the aircraft. One of the last to
board, I took my place towards the back. The RAF loadmaster, like some
camouflaged flight attendant, went around offering us all foam ear defenders for
the flight to offset the constant roar of the engines. Ready now, he stood just
opposite where I was and pressed a button for the great rear ramp to lift. As it
slid into place, the aircraft began to move. The loadmaster turned the already
dim interior lights off, leaving us in complete darkness. As we took off steeply
into the Afghan night, I can safely say I have never felt more at home in my life.
This was where I wanted to be, on my way to serve as a civilian justice adviser
alongside my comrades in the British armed forces, in what I believed to be a
just and winnable war.
The next day, after an exhilarating white-knuckle ride, low and fast in a
Chinook over the Helmand valley, I arrived at the fort in Helmand's capital
Lashkar Gah which housed the ‘Provincial Reconstruction Team’, or PRT, and
was swept up into the urgency and immediacy of the war in southern
Afghanistan. The months I spent in Helmand were the most interesting of my
life, as well as the most revealing. I had arrived there a believer in the mission.
This was not like the war I had fought in Iraq as a military officer four years
before. I had arrived in Basra with the mission of finding the much-touted
weapons of mass destruction (WMD). It did not take long to realize that the
dozens of missions we were running all over southern Iraq were really nothing
more than an occasionally dangerous hunt for moonbeams, and that the British
mission as a whole was losing its way. The war in Helmand was different, I
thought. It was a struggle against a well-defined enemy; and not only our enemy
but the enemy of the Afghan people. While I had few illusions about the role I
could play – typically it takes decades for the results of justice development to
become apparent – I was confident when I arrived that the British military forces
had the measure of the enemy.
It took a few weeks for the doubts to take root. I began to suspect that the
constant briefings we were receiving (and indeed giving) represented the war the
army would have liked to have been fighting, rather than the one in which it was
actually involved. There was constant talk of operations and strikes. PowerPoint
presentations gave an account of development that I did not recognize from my
own daily meetings inside and outside the wire with Afghan officials. There was
talk of ‘inkspots’ of development, spreading (as they supposedly had in the
Malaya campaign in the 1950s) from one ‘secured’ area to another within an
‘Afghan Development Zone’ that, as far as I could see, was entirely illusory –
and indeed turned out to exist almost entirely in the minds of those PowerPoint
briefers. It was luminously clear from the daily reports that British forces
controlled only the area a few hundred metres from the barrels of the machine
guns guarding our beleaguered bases.
It also struck me that this was very much a military campaign. Despite the
rhetoric, the army ran the show; civilians – Afghan and British alike – were
ancillary at best. While the civilian effort limped along with relatively tiny
amounts of money and resources, the army literally blasted away millions of
pounds per week in munitions, over and above the £400,000 it cost to keep each
British soldier in the country for a year. Far from the ‘comprehensive approach’
of full cooperation between civilians and military that I had been brought to
expect, this was a campaign unequivocally led and conducted by soldiers.
The dysfunctional local government we were there to support was totally
corrupt and distrusted. The Afghan army, so Afghans told me, was useful
primarily for protecting them from a drug-addled police force, with whose work
I became very familiar. A thriving, obscenely wealthy narco-culture existed
around us and in parallel both with the virtual world of constant progress we
advertised to the many visitors to the PRT and with the real world of squalid
poverty in which most Helmandis lived. It was little wonder that, among the
Helmandis I spoke to, there was no enthusiasm at all for our presence. After all,
why should there be? The constant ‘collateral damage’, in the form of
slaughtered civilians, of refugees and of towns devastated by battles between
British forces and the Taliban, did nothing to remove the impression that all this
was rather too resonant of our own little Vietnam. Then there were our
casualties. Every week brought its own ‘ramp ceremony’, when the bodies of
ordinary, but quite extraordinarily brave, soldiers caught up in this war were