A Better Way?

 “When you're wounded and left on Afghanistan's plains, And the women come out to cut up what remains, Jest roll to your rifle and blow out your brains, An' go to your Gawd like a soldier. Go, go, go like a soldier, Go, go, go like a soldier, Go, go, go like a soldier, Soldier of the Queen!”

The Young British Soldier

Rudyard Kipling

Soldier of the Queen 

May 17^th, 2021. For many men and women who served on or near the ‘spear tip’ in Afghanistan or Iraq ‘strategy’ is a dirty word - a very long and often dysfunctional screwdriver that put them in harm’s way and for thousands proved fatal.  A screwdriver in the hands of a few leaders thousands of miles or kilometres from some lonely foxhole or isolated slit trench who had little real idea about the ends they ordered to be achieved, refused the means needed to realise such ends, or had no idea about the best ways to apply them.  Political leaders who too often simply willed success or mouthed ‘strategy’ that bore little relation to the real challenge on the ground, or the tactics that were needed to meet such a challenge.  Politicians for whom too often ‘strategy’ was in reality an extension of their own grubby political ends, leaving the Soldiers of the Queen or Presidents, Prime Ministers, Chancellors et al to sort out a mess of their own making.  If there are two over-arching lessons from Afghanistan and Iraq they are these: do not go to war with a peacetime mind-set; and do enter in a long war whilst trying to cut defence budgets.

 The price of such politics is a heavy one that every citizen should understand. Ghastly images of the death and suffering of comrades in arms that will be seared on the consciousness of Veterans for life. The transparent miasma that is the burning, glowing skin of the dying friend that will never be washed away from a Veteran’s soul.  An indelible, insidious, never-to-be washed away smell that is as much of fear as of flesh and once experienced can never be expunged from those sweat-induced moments during restless nights.  The 5G seared image of shot comrades as the mortal cold of death creeps across bodies watching them desperately fighting to stay awake before they fade into shock and then slide into death surrounded by their own life force bleeding out.  It is the sound of the post-battle which is rarely one of screaming, although there are those who scream, but rather the hum of those groaning under the weight of their injuries, their courage and their fear, as morphine patches reduce breathing, blood pressure and over time a last desperate hope. 

Even those who pass the life and death test of triage and are medevac’d out ‘just in time’ to some remote field hospital still leave parts of themselves in that desolate place, whilst that desolate place comes ‘home’ with them.  A home that can never quite be home again. A more-than-memory of the obscene and desolate beauty of a place far, far away about which they knew little of which they almost became eternally part.  A ‘beauty’ that can be triggered, strangely and perversely, by the sight of a bird, the sound of sheep or cattle, the rustling of crops in a field of wind, or the smell of grass.  Indeed, often such beauty is a constant companion in the midst of their own desolation and that place that travels with them and from which no traveller can ever really return.

Walking among the rest of us today are thousands of such people, our Veterans, who are here but not really here, part of us but yet separated from us by a valley as deep and wide as any in the Hindu Kush.  Veterans who suffered for a strategy designed on our behalf, about which few of us ever bothered to understand, and even fewer these days care.  Never has the gap between defender and defended been so wide in democracies, and never has the gulf between those who risk their lives on our behalf and the rest of us been so deep.  Some compensate by seeking the company of those who shared the experience.  Others, broken by it, retreat first into isolation and then hopelessness unable to live in the desolate place and the ‘home’ place at the same time. Some simply endure a lifetime of angry detachment from the silly slights and perceived injustices of civilian life.  Is this for what they fought and for what friends died?  Who are these people so familiar and yet so distant who whinge and wail?  For them, our Veterans, the greatest courage is in the forbearance to live with the impossible lightness of being others.

A failure of strategy? 

Make no mistake, historians will look back on the twenty years post 911 as a failure of strategy. If planning, as Moltke the Elder once said, fails upon contact with the enemy, strategy too often fails upon contact with politics.  In that light, the Biden administration’s decision to withdraw from Afghanistan marks not just the end of the post-911 era, but also the true end of the post-Cold War era during which in theatres as far ranging as Bosnia to Afghanistan ‘strategy’ too often involved hard pressed commanders with relatively small forces and often inadequate resources too often trying to generate big change in distant complicated places at the behest of too often only partially interested political bosses.  Bosses who too often wanted to ‘win’ in places where winning and losing is meaningless. Bosses whose very idea of limiting cost was as much about their own political skins as those they ordered into such places. Bosses who too often talked in the soaring slogans of the grand macro about liberal humanitarianism and its ilk, whilst young men and women tried to make it happen in places where there is only ever a myriad of micro realities.  The grand political architects of Grand Strategy who could not properly explain what they really mean even to themselves and who all too easily retreated into false mantras and false metrics to explain progress where little or none was really apparent on the ground. 

Changing lives forever in ancient complicated places was to be achieved by new joined up, coalition warfare reinforced by whole of government efforts in which the civilian and the soldier would be forged into a ‘comprehensive approach’ that would see ancient Afghanistan and Iraq transformed into something if not irredeemably modern then no longer a threat to itself or others.  Instead, a ghastly ‘alliance’ emerged between the irredeemably pre-modern and the chaotically post-modern.  Sadly, the comprehensive approach was never quite comprehensive enough as diverse bits of foreign real estate were placed under the very different control of very different countries with very different levels of commitment and completely different ‘rules of engagement’. Shared risk is the very ethos of any coalition.  The risk was there, but it was never equally shared.  Even those ‘PRTs’ under the control of the major powers suffered from interminable turf battles between civilian and military agencies with many of the former back in national capitals proposing projects and investment that had little to do with campaign design in theatre and everything to do with domestic politics. And all of the above swathed in a never-ending and ever-changing tsunami of often meaningless acronyms.

Yes, those predicting disaster in Afghanistan might be premature, as Stefano Stefanini and I suggested in a piece last week.  Equally, whatever now takes place in Afghanistan and Iraq there can be no excuse for failing to properly understand why so many of the political objectives set for the respective campaigns went unrealised.  That would not only be delusion, but denial and deceit for the massive majority the blame (and it is blame) lies at the political level, with people too many of whom spend their life seeking reward without risk.  The military level?  Too often very able commanders were also forced by the constantly changing political landscape above them to become oven-ready politicians. Yes, mistakes were made, sometimes egregious mistakes, but from my experience the majority of commanders in the field were good people trying valiantly to find a way to close the gap between the ends, ways and means imposed upon them.  The armed forces will doubtless learn lessons with a view to becoming better at what they do, although whether they are the right lessons is open to question. 

The politicians? Ultimately the use of force is always for political ends and no commander, however brilliant, can succeed in a political vacuum in which the ends are willed without either the means or the ways.  In the wake of COVID 19 there is also the danger that the political class across much of an eternally and strategically lukewarm Europe will now lurch to the other extreme of strategic pretence by convincing themselves they will have the discretion to only fight ‘wars of choice’, and then choose not to fight any wars at all, be they of choice or no choice. The maintenance of democratic peace, like it or not, needs democracies with teeth.  Otherwise, the ‘free’ simply become prey for the predatory autocrats of the ‘unfree’.

The better way…

Make no mistake, the West, Europe in particular, is at a strategic tipping point between future peace and future war.  The consequence of the last twenty years is a profound crisis in Western policy precisely because of a failure of Western strategy, and yet it is now that future peace needs to be forged.  The temptation for many leaders will be to retreat into the abstract and the academic and talk endlessly about big but meaningless ambition, of ‘grand strategy’ and ‘strategic autonomy’.  No. If we, the democracies, are to collectively secure and defend ourselves in the face of all the threats we face then together we must have the courage to properly face up to what went wrong in those large faraway countries to which we sent our young men and women in uniform on our behalf and about which we should have known far more and far better.  The courage to undertake such a review can only come from the political top and for once it would be nice if it could also be politically honest.  No whitewash will suffice. 

The better way? 1. Choose carefully where and when we invest force and resource in pursuit of our collective national interest. 2. Have a clear understanding when designing a campaign between vital interests and desired values. 3. Do not pretend that any such venture will be cheap or quick or that we have all the answers at the outset. 4. Have the political imagination and structure that can adapt to change.  5. Create multinational and national civilian and military systems that are really joined up by building relationships across stakeholders before a crisis, not during it.  6. Create an information brokerage that can capture and fuse good intelligence and good ideas from all expert sources so that strategy and tactics are in a constant process of development. 7. Create a culture of ‘metrics’ which measures what needs to be measured and not what political leaders want to hear. 8. Do not use armed forces as a solution for the failure of others across the security-stabilisation-reconstruction-governance spectrum. 9. Own a campaign at the highest political level for its duration. 10. Treat citizens as adults and explain the costs of any such venture undertaken on their behalf. 11. Do not enter into such ventures with any form of hubris and recognise the limits of what is possible. 12. Do not embark on such ventures often and understand the risk of tying down a large amount of force and resource in one place for a very long time. 13. Unity of purpose and effort is critical.  14. Do not allow any nation to join a coalition if they are not prepared to share risk.  15. If none of the above, don’t bother.

Above all, have the political and bureaucratic courage and resilience to really learn the lessons of warfare in places like Afghanistan and Iraq and have the courage to implement them, even if that means listening to people who do not think or look like us. The greatest challenge of all will not only be our willingness to learn but to avoid that most ‘democratic’ of reactions and simply turn and walk away. For at this tipping point in world affairs, for that is where we have arrived, we the democracies face a crisis of both strategy and conscience.

 

At the going down of the sun…

 

You see, those young men and women who died often lonely deaths ‘out there’ did so for us all and no amount of indifference or ignorance can relieve any of us of that responsibility, which is why we should also at least try and understand.  Kipling’s young British soldier dies in Afghanistan because he was merely at the sharp end of a 9000 mile long imperial screwdriver. Then, now, and into the future, and whatever the war to end all wars, there will be always more ‘politics’ and endless talk of ‘strategy’. However, in the end the fight always comes down to a few good men and women placed in great danger on our behalf.  The rest of us owe them not only a profound debt of honour and gratitude but the courage to look squarely at our own failings and our failures so that we become better at what strategy for democracies should be all about – the preservation of a just and secure peace.

To finish, let me play fast and loose with Siegfried Sassoon. Good-morning; good-morning!’ the Politician said, When we met him last week on our way to the line. Now the soldiers he smiled at are most of ’em dead, And we’re cursing his staff for incompetent swine. He’s a cheery old card,’ grunted Harry to Jack, As they slogged up to Arras with rifle and pack. But he did for them both by his plan of attack.

So, do ‘we’ have the courage to face the next test and really looked at what worked and, above all, what has not these twenty years past?  Will we ever learn? 

 

At the going down of the sun…

Julian Lindley-French