Recently, the retiring head of the British Army, Gen. Sir Richard Dannatt, flew over Helmand province in Afghanistan in order to review the state of Britain’s military deployment there. He returned to Britain with the message that, among other things, his troops badly need more helicopters to prosecute the war against the Taleban. Dannatt’s message was graphically, and perhaps deliberately, underlined by the fact that the helicopter in which he conducted his tour d’horizon was not British but American.
Nobody can remember a time when the British government was openly clashing with its own generals. It is a state of affairs as astonishing as it is unprecedented. Brushing aside official protocol, Dannatt unilaterally arranged to be accompanied on his trip by a leading BBC radio interviewer, precipitating outrage at the highest levels of government. The general’s unmistakable objective was to exercise maximum control over the media presentation of his views. It comes as no surprise that he has since been advised by fellow defense chiefs that a period of silence from him might now be in order.
It is a measure of how critical the situation for the British Army has grown that Dannatt was prepared to suffer the humiliation of being seen to be beholden to the US military in order to gather evidence that without greatly increased resources the British military operation in Helmand faces debacle.
Britain’s Prime Minister Gordon Brown maintains that the Helmand deployment is vital to both British and international security. Yet, all the indications are that Britain’s armed forces have been starved of resources for many years. There is no escaping the scandalous conclusion that British soldiers and airmen have been dying avoidable deaths as a result of chronic penny-pinching over Britain’s defense budget.
It may actually be almost a relief to the British government to be embroiled in an unseemly public row over whether the army is adequately equipped. Though seriously embarrassing, the controversy about resources is at least easier for the government to deal with than the issue of the fundamental legitimacy of the deployment. Moreover, it perhaps has the additional advantage of helping to deflect attention from that issue altogether.
Nevertheless, the question of what exactly Britain is doing in Helmand province is not likely to go away. It has grown especially acute in the wake of the recent spike in the number of British casualties and emotive television images of public grief in the market town of Wootton Bassett, through which the flag-draped coffins of servicemen killed in action are driven. It is true that public opinion about British military involvement in Afghanistan is divided, though with a clear majority in favor of ending it in the foreseeable future.
It is because of the palpable brittleness of public support for the Afghan mission that there is an increasing air of desperation about the government’s insistence that it cannot afford to fail. Ministers assert that failure would lay Britain wide open to terrorist attack while also handing a propaganda victory to Al-Qaeda. But support for the mission can hardly have been strengthened by the news that a 20-year-old native-born, mixed race Briton, Andrew ‘Isa’ Ibrahim, a privately educated convert to Islam, with no apparent Afghan connections, has been sentenced to at least 10 years in prison for seeking to commit terrorist acts on the streets of Bristol. There is indeed little evidence that the British army’s presence in Afghanistan is helping to stop the emergence of home-grown terrorist threats. On the contrary, it seems only too plausible that there are British Muslims who are being radicalized because of the anger they feel about Britain’s participation in what they regard as an essentially imperialist and anti-Islamic enterprise.
A GOVERNMENT genuinely convinced of the severity of the threat posed to Britain by the Taleban would surely have made certain that it took the most effectual measures to deal with it. Brown has done nothing to lessen public cynicism about his posture over Afghanistan by appointing as Secretary of Defense Bob Ainsworth, a lackluster politician who ranks 21st out of 23 in the pecking order of his Cabinet ministers.
The truth that dare not speak its name is that British foreign policy in Afghanistan is rooted in the endless compulsion of Britain’s post-imperial political elite to do Washington’s bidding. Not that concern about British backing for the US is entirely one-sided.
Recently, the US think tank, the Brookings Institute, acknowledged that the British presence in Afghanistan is little short of indispensable to the American military effort there and in Pakistan, since US public assent to it could be undermined if America’s key ally started to look for a way out.
It has long been apparent that the United States is under no illusion about what Britain can tangibly contribute to its military adventures. What does matter to the US is the symbolism of demonstrable British loyalty at a time when international support for American foreign policy is in desperately short supply. The fact is that the aborting of the British mission in Helmand would have grave implications for the credibility of the US/NATO strategy for combating global terrorism.
Yet it could come to that, for there must be a limit to the number of casualties Britain can sustain in Afghanistan without decisively forfeiting public support for the British deployment, especially when there is such a lack of clarity about its purpose and such bitter controversy about the army’s lack of resources. For the moment, however, the British government appears bent on persevering with the deployment irrespective of mounting national disquiet about the whole nature of the undertaking. The impression is of politicians whose determination to preserve Britain’s status as America’s pre-eminently obedient servant knows no bounds.
