James Forsyth reviews the week in politics
Britain has fought more wars than any other country, but rarely has it suffered two defeats in a row. That humiliation is what this country is currently drifting towards, following failure in Iraq with failure in Afghanistan.
Westminster might be obsessing over the Iraq inquiry’s revelations about how the decision to go to war was made, but the really important part of the inquiry’s work will come when it turns its attention to what happened after the invasion. The painful truth about Iraq, which no politician dares speak, is that Britain was defeated. As David Kilcullen, a Nato counter-insurgency expert whom both Gordon Brown and David Miliband have lavished praise on, has said: ‘In 2006 the British army was defeated in the field in southern Iraq.’ The principal job of the Iraq inquiry should be determining why this happened; everything else can be thrown to the historians.
We already know that while scrambling to leave Iraq, Britain decided to concentrate resources on Afghanistan. The thinking was that Afghanistan was a far less controversial conflict and so keeping troops there would be easier politically. There was also a desire on the part on the British military to prove to the Americans its effectiveness — something that had been thrown into doubt by what had happened in southern Iraq — by taking on one of the most difficult places in Afghanistan: Helmand province.
Worryingly, though, we seem intent on repeating the errors of Iraq in Afghanistan. A decision has been taken to start looking for the exit and, disastrously, the strategy is flowing from that. Brown may have announced an extra 500 troops on Monday, hardly an increase that is likely to make a decisive difference on the ground, but all the spin and pre-briefing was about withdrawal dates. On top of this, the relationship between the Prime Minister and the Defence Secretary is dysfunctional, as is the one between the Defence Secretary and the top brass.
The Afghanistan campaign is now becoming as unpopular as Iraq was despite for years being heralded as the war everyone could agree on. The biggest drain on support for the war is how hard it is to make a positive case for it, as opposed to a negative one. All you can say is that things would be even worse if we left: it is hardly inspiring to ask a soldier to die for the least worst option. When British terrorists launch attacks on London from Yorkshire it is also barely credible to claim that Helmand is the front line in Britain’s fight against terror.
Ask a politician on either side of the House how they justify to their constituents British troops laying down their lives to protect a polling station when President Karzai is stuffing ballot boxes and they just shake their heads. As one shadow Cabinet member says, ‘It makes you want to vomit, that British troops are risking their lives for Karzai and his brother.’
The same logic applies in the United States. President Obama may have decided to send 30,000 more troops but the time it took him to make that decision shows that he was far from enthusiastic about having to do so. Given that his vice-president and his chief of staff both favoured scaling down the mission, there will be pressure for Obama to change tack if the surge does not rapidly produce results. The Democratic party will not want Americans to be watching the flag-draped coffins flying in night after night in the run-up to the November 2010 midterms.
Obama’s treatment of Brown has been deplorable. As Con Coughlin detailed in this magazine a fortnight ago, Brown was left twisting in the wind while Obama took three months to ponder his options on Afghanistan. British diplomats say in private that while the normal bureaucratic lines of communication have remained open, they have not got the top-level political access they need, because Brown has already been written off by the White House.
If Cameron is the next prime minister, one of his first tasks will be to make sure that he is not left hanging by Obama as Brown has been; a US U-turn on Afghanistan could well come early in Cameron’s first term, owing to the American electoral cycle. It would be embarrassing, and hugely damaging for the special relationship, if Cameron were to set about reorganising government the better to support the Afghan mission only to find that Obama was calling time on it. A potential problem for Cameron is that his team lacks anyone with a personal relationship with the key players in the Obama administration. But in one respect Cameron is fortunate that Obama is in the White House. Obama’s cautious approach to the world means that the splits between Cameron and his more hawkish colleagues are unlikely to be brought into the open.
One thing we can be sure of is that Afghanistan is the last big nation-building project America and its allies will take on for some time. Counter-insurgency is one of the most expensive forms of warfare and with governments nursing their overdrafts there is little appetite for it, especially in Obama’s Democratic party, which would far rather spend the money on universal healthcare. If there is to be action against the new terrorist sanctuaries in Yemen and Somalia, expect it to come in the form of bombs.
Brown tried to assert himself this week by announcing his troop increase before Obama’s. But realistically Britain has to work in Afghanistan as part of the American strategy. The main strategic decisions that British prime ministers make are about whether or not to go along with the actions of the White House, so the foreign policy of a Cameron government will be largely determined by the foreign policy of the Obama administration. Following Obama’s speech on Tuesday night, Cameron will be able to tell the troops when he visits that withdrawal will start in 2011 at the latest.
Even before one considers the defence cuts that are coming, a period of retrenchment in British foreign policy seems certain regardless of who wins the next election. The challenge for the incoming government is to work out why a national security establishment that prided itself on the subtlety of its thinking and its expertise in counter-insurgency has proved so inadequate to the challenges of the post-9/11 world.
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