Hubris cost 330 lives

 

 

Napoleon had no strategy unit.

For the first time, plausible explanation are being offered into why the UK blundered into Helmand province. The truth is stranger than the speculation. History will rank the chaos as worse than the Charge of the Light Brigade.

The Public Administration Committee (PASC) on a daring probe into a forgotten subject - Grand Strategy. In the UK we have not had one since the demise of the Committee on Imperial Defence in 1939.

Napoleon did not have a strategy unit. He was very successful on the battlefield but failed to turn that military success into political success.  

Two military supremos who were involved in the Helmand incursion decision gave astonishing evidence to PASC. Lieutenant General Sir Robert Fry KCB (rtd) and Commodore Steven Jeremy RN (rtd).  The campaign plan was 3,150 troops and a budget of £1.5 billion for three years when we were meant to lead the reconstruction of Helmand.  Unforgettably Defence Minister John Reid said he hoped that not a shot would be fired.

Steven Jeremy told PASC  The one thing we got wrong when we looked at Helmand––and I was intimately involved in this––was that we did not really understand the political context properly, and we did not understand that when we were moving from Mez down to Helmand, we were moving from the Northern Alliance areas down into the Pashtun areas, and I think that was a NATO failure.  

He asked what was the plan. He was told "There’s no plan, Sir.  We’re just getting on with it.”  So what I knew and what I could deduce at that stage was that NATO did not have a coherent strategy.  When you look at it, you can actually see evidence for that, because if you think about the South, Kandahar is by far the most important province there, and it had 1,200 Canadian troops.  Helmand is not the most important but it had 5,500 British troops.  That does not make sense."

 Robert Fry had an equally empty explanation on this disaster. "I think a number of Departments felt pretty comfortable with the general idea of shifting the main national effort from Iraq to Afghanistan.  I think the development agencies saw this as a much more natural arena within which to play than Iraq, which they regarded as a middle-income country.  I think that the Foreign Office saw an opportunity to take on a leadership role within the NATO alliance to re concentrate American attention on Afghanistan and so on.  He concluded that Helmand showed  an absence of Grand Strategy.  The other thing that is missing in this is a sense of national interest."

 

Another reason given for Helmand was the ' aim to try to revivify interest in Afghanistan, which had been completely lost because of the distraction of Iraq at the time.' It certainly did that.

Slowly emerging is the awful truth. Helmand was a blunder with no intelligent strategy, no UK national interest and a reckless intrusion into terrotory that is virulently hostile to us. It was done for the greater glory of the Foreign Office to lead NATO.

330 British lives was a high price to pay for hubris.  

Closure?

Bad news tomorrow that a Newport employer of 114 people is facing closure. The bakers Warburtons in Rogerstone is in trouble. I have arranged to speak to the company tomorrow..

 

Comments

[DG]

"Helmand was a blunder with no intelligent strategy, no UK national interest and a reckless intrusion into terrotory that is virulently hostile to us. It was done for the greater glory of the Foreign Office to lead NATO."

Just being Devil's advocate here for a moment, but if you were "playing" the war like a simple game of Risk with the objective being to take over Iran, then the incursion into Helmand would make perfect sense; you'd have troops on two borders in a classic pincer movement.

But I concede that chock-up is more likely than conspiracy.

[Kay Tie]

Good luck for tomorrow. It would be interesting to know why they are closing.