48 | the world today | october & november 2017

Afghan post mortemRobert Fox on an attempt to make sense of Britain’s Taliban misadventure

Review

the drug and smuggling hub of Sangin were, by 2011, hardly being reported. The 3rd Battalion the Rifles lost 30 in action within six months, which, including the wounded, meant an attrition rate of one in five.

The third question is why commanders, diplomats and policy-directors could not change direction when policy, tactics, technique and procedures were clearly not delivering? Unwinnable gives few clues. Increasingly the book is less about the plight of British forces, but American leadership − particularly the much-vaunted approach to counter-insurgency preached by the charismatic General David Petraeus.

This focused on ‘population-centric’ tactics − defending the people first

Unwinnable: Britain’s War in Afghanistan 2001 – 2014 Theo Farrell Bodley Head, £25.00 Twice as many books have been written about British activities in Afghanistan this century than about the parallel misadventure in Iraq. Some have been superb, Patrick Hennessy’s The Junior Officers’ Reading Club at the top of the pile. Poignant and significant beyond their authors’ intent are the small unit memoirs such as Richard Streatfeild’s Honourable Warriors and Johnny Mercer’s We Were Warriors.

Iraq has led to four government inquiries and reports, while the more bloody and significant engagement with Afghanistan since 2001 has prompted nothing of similar weight. It should have done, not least because the involvement is continuing, and in the present climate of historical denial in Whitehall the mistakes of the past 16 years are sure to be repeated.

The gap left by this lack of inquest has been filled by Theo Farrell’s Unwinnable: Britain’s War in Afghanistan 2001-2014, which began as a government-commissioned work, but ended as a more personal essay and critique. It is a hybrid of history, journalism and anecdote − a combination that is both a strength and weakness.

The title sets out its stall. The UK’s strategy made the mission to bring order to

Afghanistan, to rid the economy of its drug dependency and to marginalize the Taliban, a ‘Mission Impossible’. Yet the author is vague about how British involvement could have achieved success.

Britain went into Afghanistan following the 9/11 Al-Qaeda attacks in America. It was part of the package of George W Bush’s global War On Terror, which Farrell rightly credits with having more sense at the time than remote commentators such as military historians Sir Michael Howard and Hew Strachan wanted us to think. The aim was to destroy the Osama bin Laden command cell and turf out the Taliban regime, its host in Kabul.

The Taliban were defeated, but not beaten. Bin Laden escaped through Tora Bora, allegedly on a donkey.

A huge mistake was made by not inviting any form of Taliban involvement in the December 2001 Bonn conference called to discuss the future governance and reconstruction of Afghanistan. The Taliban had survived the American-led onslaught, largely because of their deeply embedded presence in Afghan rural society and politics. By 2004 the movement, in its many groupings, was reforming militarily, though few in the international support force ISAF understood what was going on.

This led directly to the huge misjudgment of expanding ISAF’s activities across

Afghanistan, which took British forces to the great opium garden called Helmand. So much of the premise on which forces were sent to Helmand was gross miscalculation. For instance, the commanders of the Task Force, which in reality boasted little more than 1,400 combat soldiers out of a declared force of 3,300, were told they would fight a Taliban strength of 640 at most.

Accordingly troops were distributed in mini-garrisons or ‘platoon houses’, where handfuls of men would fight through the summer of 2006 as if defending a string of Afghan Alamos.

Through the years, the overall strength of UK ground forces ramped up to the 10,000 mark. Attrition rates of up to a fifth in places such as

A British soldier photographs heroin poppies in Helmand Province

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before attacking and defeating the enemy. Of course, reality was very different.

Petraeus and his allies went in for a war of capture-or-kill operations against the Taliban and its middle level commanders. Taliban notables were to be fingered by informers − a dubious proposition in such a tribal society, where family feuds are rife. Special Forces were used in various guises, of a nature and scale hardly hinted at in this book. There are now three inquiries into these actions, the most serious in Australia. The complexity of the drug economy, which became central to Helmand life after the serious droughts of the past 20 years, are touched on only lightly – so too Britain’s disastrous involvement in a narcotics eradication programme.

The detail of much of the story is fascinating, but a lot is left out. Too many of the footnoted sources are the usual suspects from The Times, Telegraph and Guardian, and there are too may references to interviews with ‘anonymous’ allied military and Taliban commanders − making their testimony hard to evaluate.

There are some odd omissions, too. There is no mention of Ahmad Wali Karzai, the president’s half-brother, a source of so much corruption across southwest Afghanistan from his seat in Kandahar, including the somewhat squalid delivery of Hamid Karzai’s presidential re-

election in 2009. The author recalls his own attempts at negotiation with the Taliban with his friend Michael Semple, yet mentions nothing of the more extensive activities by the commentator Ahmed Rashid.

Strangely, Farrell omits any consideration of the impact of the arrival of mobile phones, which had a huge effect on communications throughout Afghanistan.

Among the sources are some extraordinary studies about Helmand and the British. Two stand out: a long essay about local negotiations by Julius Cavendish; and a thesis on establishing a local ceasefire in 2011 in Sangin by Mark Beautement, who served there for a year as political officer. Both authors show how local ceasefires with tribal village bosses and the Taliban could be effective, though in three cases at least, according to Cavendish, the deals were undermined by the corrupt Karzai interests or the Americans.

Locally and temporarily, perhaps, peace and stability were winnable − in a very Afghan way. Farrell does not appear to pay attention to the conclusions of either author, though he supervised the Beautement thesis. His book is fascinating and valuable, but its distinctly journalist turn at the end lets it down. There is a lot more to be said about this tantalising and important subject.

Robert Fox is Defence Editor of the Evening Standard

Afghan post mortemRobert Fox on an attempt to make sense of Britain’s Taliban misadventure

Review Reading list: Venezeula

Oil and exploration

Hugo Chávez: The Definitive Biography of Venezuela’s Controversial President Alberto Barrera Tyszka and Cristina Marcano Random House£5.00Written towards the start of the Chávez era, two Venezuelan journalists paint a complex picture of the man who has determined the country’s trajectory. Drawing on in-depth interviews with those closest to the president, this authoritative biography unpicks the personality behind the politics.

Venezuela: Hugo Chavez and the Decline of an ‘Exceptional Democracy’Steve Ellner and Miguel Tinker Salas Rowman & Littlefield£18.00Moving from the man to the movement, this edited volume places Chavismo in its historical context and shifts focus from institutional politics to popular and social movements by exploring the social and economic rifts that are key to understanding the current crisis.

The Magical State: Nature, Money, and Modernity in VenezuelaFernando Coronil University of Chicago Press£24.73Venezuela’s oil revenues – its resource curse – have defined the development of the nation. Coronil’s classic study explores how oil has been exploited, politically and symbolically, by the Venezuelan state throughout the 20th century. This is essential for understanding

modern state-formation and the complex relationship between the country’s periods of democratic and authoritarian rule.

Personal Narrative of a Journey to the Equinoctial Regions of the New Continent Alexander von Humboldt, Penguin Classics£14.99In 1799, the German naturalist and explorer Alexander von Humboldt made an unplanned landing in northern South America, later travelling along the pre-independence Venezuelan coast and Orinoco River. This travelogue recounts the expedition of this visionary scientist.

Francisco de Miranda: A Transatlantic Life in the Age of Revolution Karen Racine Rowman & Littlefield£4.07While Simón Bolívar is celebrated as the great liberator of Venezuela, Francisco de Miranda was his revolutionary ‘precursor’. Participating in the American, French and Spanish American revolutions he was a truly transnational citizen, who married a farmer’s daughter from Yorkshire. This biography draws out the transatlantic links in the formation of the independent Venezuelan nation.

Dr Cherilyn Elston is a lecturer in Latin American Cultural Studies at the University of Reading

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