Magnificent young men are ready to die for us, but that doesn’t mean we should let them

14 May 2011

I’m in Dallas, Texas, for a Heritage Foundation conference when who should march into my hotel but a battalion of US marines, ahead of their deployment to Afghanistan.

It ought to be obvious, that, you’d have thought. War is hugely costly in blood and treasure. The very last thing you’d want in return is one of those scenarios — Basra, anyone? — where your credibility is shredded, your armed forces humiliated, and your only net gain is a juicy book contract for Sergeant Dan Mills. (Great book, mind.)

Hence my scepticism about our involvement in Afghanistan. (Libya too, come to that.) It’s not that I can’t envisage a world in which it would be a good idea to be there. Just that the world doesn’t currently exist. We’d need around 500,000 troops, minimum (current coalition levels stand at around 130,000); we’d need to run the place on Roman lines, with well-maintained roads and watchtowers every few miles. And within a century, hey presto, every village in Afghanistan would have a working ferris wheel, possibly even a girls’ school where the girls don’t get acid chucked in their faces every other day and the teachers don’t get beheaded. We can but dream.

The world we inhabit, unfortunately, looks more like the one in Toby Harnden’s unputdownable Dead Men Risen about the Welsh Guards’ 2009 disastrous tour of Helmand. This was when they lost in action a CO (Rupert Thorneloe), a company commander (Sean Birchall) and a platoon commander (Mark Evison): the first battalion to suffer such attrition since the Royal Northumberland Fusiliers during the Korean war.

No one who has read Harnden’s book could fail to feel angry and bitter about the hopelessness of the task facing our troops in Afghanistan. Really, if you wanted to devise a method by which as many magnificent men and women as possible lost lives and limbs to no purpose, you couldn’t come up with a better system than the one devised during the more recent incarnations of Operation Herrick: a dire shortage of helicopters; insufficiently armoured vehicles; thinly defended outposts with a narrow range of patrolling routes ideally suited to ambush; and so on.

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D Short

May 20th, 2011 9:04pm Report this comment

What's the point this writer is trying to make, I wonder.

And military interventions are not 'wars'.

Johnjohn

May 24th, 2011 11:04pm Report this comment

If the quote by Sir Sherard Cowper-Coles is true, he should be sent out on patrol in Helmand Province.

Stuart Seacole Smith

May 25th, 2011 2:13pm Report this comment

D Short, seems there are a few points:
- think carefully about whether it is winnable before launching military action
- if yes, then are you prepared to plan it, man it, equip and fund it properly?

If you can't answer yes to all these questions, then you probably shouldn't do it.

Finally, if your economy is gurgling round the U-bend (thanks Gordo, you financial genius), it's likely not the best time to launch a war, oops, military intervention.

There, that wasn't so hard.

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