Category: Aghansitan

Article for Yorkshire Post

By Paddy Ashdown 22 Oct 2007

 

 

Mark Twain once wrote of a notice in the wheelhouse of the Mississippi steam boats which said “Don’t speak to the Captain; don’t spit on the floor”. It’s a good motto for ex-Party Leaders and one I have tried to follow.

 

But the Lib Dems don’t have a Captain on the bridge at the moment. So here are some thoughts for those now campaigning to get there.

 

First I hope our new Captain will be Yorkshire MP, Nick Clegg. I have known him for more than ten years since Leon Brittan (check spelling), then the Tory Commissioner in the EU for whom he worked, described him as the brightest young talent he had ever known, complained that he had tried in vain to tempt Nick into the Tories and asked me to help him in the Lib Dems.

 

That kind of thing doesn’t work in the Lib Dems. And anyway Nick has made it entirely through his own formidable talents and on the way won the admiration of all he has met and taken some very courageous decisions; such as the one not to hold onto the safety of his seat in the EU Parliament while he won Sheffield Hallam when it would have been easier and safer (but less principled) to hold onto it until he was in Westminster. Courage and decisiveness are the essential quality for leadership and Nick has them, alongside a formidable array of the more usual political talents. They will serve him, the Lib Dems and the country well when, as I hope, he wins on XXX (insert date of announcement of the ballot) when the new Lib Dem Leader is announced.

 

But what kind of job is he stepping into ?

 

The toughest one in British politics.

 

The Leader of the “official” opposition (David Cameron) gets the salary of a Cabinet Minster, an official Government driver and a Government car. Nick will have none of these. He will be expected to match and outmatch both Cameron and Brown. But he will be paid as an ordinary MP. If he has an official car, he will depend on the Party or a benefactor for it. And if he is driven around on the exhausting schedule Party Leaders have to follow, then he will either do it himself or depend on one of his very limited (in comparison with Cameron and Brown) staff.

 

At Prime Minister’s Questions (which I found more frightening than anything I ever did on active service with the Royal Marines or the SBS), Cameron and Brown speak from the Despatch Box, which means they can have full folders of notes. He will have no such advantage. When he speaks he will do so to a House in which he will be outnumbered ten to one by hostile opposition MPs and he will do it from an ordinary place on the benches where anything but the skimpiest notes are impossible. They can speak from prepared texts. He has to depend on his wits.

 

So what can he expect? Shouting and barracking from 600 hostile MPs (check how many MPs in the House now) if he makes the tiniest error and having to fight for every column centimetre and broadcast second of press coverage from a media system (The Yorkshire Post honourably excepted) which would much prefer that the third Party didin’t exist so that they could concentrate on the “big two”.

 

So why would anyone want the job ?

 

Because, although leading the Lib Dems may be the toughest job in politics it is, for the stout hearted and the fleet of foot, also the best. It allows you to be unconventional; to lead opinion rather than follow it, to break the mould where you need to and, above all to be the voice for the greatest of all political philosophies and the only one genuinely in tune with our age; Liberalism (I know this because both Tories and Labour are trying desperately to pretend that this is what they are too).

 

So my advice to the next Leader of the Lib Dems is make very clear what you want to do before you get the job. It may be easier to win with careful words and carefully constructed compromises. But there is no point in winning this back breaking and sometimes heartbreaking job unless you know exactly what you want to do with it and have the mandate from the Party to do it. Nick seems to understood this well, as his call for the Party to “go outside its comfort zone” shows.

 

But being right does not necessarily mean winning. The next Leader of the Lib Dems also needs to recognise what kind of a game he is in. For the Leaders of the “big two”, politics is like a heavyweight boxing match. They slug it out and the last one left standing, wins. Leading the Lib Dems is much more like jujitsu. You rarely get to create the momentum of the moment. So you have to take the momentum set by the other two and turn it to your advantage. To do this, you need to be sharper, and more quick witted than them and take more risks, including the risk occasionally to be in the minority in Parliament and derided for it. That is what my great hero Jo Grimond did over Suez, I did over Bosnia and Charles Kennedy and Ming Campbell did over Iraq.

 

My last piece of advice for whoever wins on XXX is, don’t forget politics does not just exist at Westminster. Personally I hated the place. I preferred my politics out of Westminster, amongst the people of the country who we serve. If we are to re-build trust amongst ordinary people in our political system, then it is in their midst that we must increasingly do our politics, not the hothouse of that brawling pit, the Chamber of the House of Commons.

 

Joint article for the Guardian

By Nick Clegg and paddy Ashdown

Publication Friday 18 September

Embargo midnight 17 September

 

The crucial question on Afghanistan today is not is this war important? It is. It is not are the consequences for failure serious? They are. It is the much more brutal question: Can we win?

 

And the answer is no. Unless we change both our current polices and our present attitudes, failure is inevitable.

 

The reasons are manifold.

 

The international community continues to lack a united strategy with clear priorities. Nato is all over the place. President Obama’s plan is taking too long to be applied. British soldiers are fighting the war at full capacity, but their government is not. Respect for the Karzai government, to which we are tied, is not rising, it is falling. We lack a political plan that works. And it is far from clear that the military plan is working. All of this has led to public support for the war eroding at a frightening rate.

 

There are no quick fixes. But we need to start immediately, to forge a co-ordinated response to each of these problems and, above all, to show the strategic resolve to see it through.

 

The central failure is the absence of any clear international strategy. The British think Afghanistan is Helmand; the Canadians think its Kandahar; the Dutch think its Uruzgan; the Germans think it’s the North and the Americans, until recently at least, thought that the only solution was a kinetic one.

 

Gordon Brown and his European allies have called for an international conference to review progress. This will be a waste of time, if it does not produce the single united international strategy that has so far been so disastrously lacking.

 

Nato, too, has to wake up to the fact that it faces a catastrophic failure with very wide consequences for its own future, unless it can start working like an integrated military alliance, rather than a hotch potch of the committed and the half hearted.

 

We now have an Afghan military team of the highest quality in US Generals Petraeus and McChrystal, recently joined by Britain’s new head of the army, General David Richards, the first person to hold that post with actual – and much admired – command experience in Afghanistan. There is a chance for a new start. But the word from Washington is that Dick Holbrooke is floundering and the political plan is taking far too long to put together. Some say the fault lies in Washington in-fighting, with Holbrooke imprisoned in the State Department and ignored by the Defense Department and the CIA. Others that the problem is the Holbrooke personality. Whatever the reason, there is a perception of lack of co-ordination and drift from Washington. President Obama’s March white paper on Afghanistan was excellent. But why is it taking so long to be properly applied? Much rests on General McChrystal’s imminent, long anticipated military plan. He should propose a change in strategy and a change in gear.

 

The British government needs to change gear too. Mr Brown’s recent speech should have been a clarion call to the nation. Instead it was a lecture on post-rationalisation. We all know our prime minister will never be Henry V at Agincourt – his chief means of persuasion is not charisma, but volcanic grumpiness. Nevertheless he must find better means to tell us what this war is for if he is to reverse the alarming erosion in public support. The British people are not squeamish. They have shown time and again that they are prepared to put up with pain and sacrifice, provided that they are convinced of the cause and see a reasonable chance of success.

 

You cannot win a war on half-horsepower. The prime minister needs to make it clear that this struggle is now the nation’s first priority and we will strain every sinew to win it. In most of our recent wars, the prime minister formed a special war cabinet. Why not now? Why not a minister for Afghanistan? Why have we not assembled the very brightest in the FCO, DfID, the MOD and Cabinet Office to from a co-ordinated team to see this thing through?

 

This war will not be won by the bomb and the bayonet. It will be won by development and local ownership. So why is increasingly prosperous India top of Britain’s aid list, receiving more than twice the money than the ever more dangerous (and grindingly poor) Afghanistan?

 

We need to think again about the Afghan government as well. If, despite the cloud hanging over the election, President Karzai is returned to power, we have to ensure that Karzai II is very different from Karzai I. His government must not be made up of the unfragrant coalition of war lords and crime bosses he put together to get himself elected. It should be a genuine government of national unity that will clean out corruption and pursue an aggressive policy of integration of those Taliban who will pursue their aims through the constitution, not the gun.

 

This should include a recognition by the international community that a programme to strengthen local government, running with the grain of Afghanistan’s tribal structures, will be more effective than pouring more money into government in Kabul. Tribal politics are the key to Afghanistan, not western models of centralised government.

 

We must also take a long hard look at our military tactics on the ground. The policy of “clear hold and build” in rural areas might have worked three years ago. But since then, the situation has moved heavily against us. Now, in the rural areas at least, we are no longer fighting an external insurgency, but, for most of the contested rural areas of Helmand and Kandahar, a war amongst the people. The aim of Operation Panther’s Claw was to resurrect our lost opportunity. The theory was that if our troops moved in, there would be a spontaneous reaction from the locals to abandon the Taliban and seek our protection and development. But in most cases it hasn’t happened, leaving our soldiers once again over-extended and isolated in Beau Geste style forts, from which they can only dominate an area large enough to increase their vulnerability to ambush and roadside bombs, but too small to begin the development process.

 

If this is so, then it’s time to consider Plan B. One would be to concentrate our forces in future in the cities, so as to deepen the effect of the development process where it matters most, and then build out from there as force levels and resources allow.

 

Beyond that we may even have to consider Plan C, a modern version of the old policy of Lord Curzon, but run from Kabul instead of Calcutta, which would use airpower and special forces to prevent the Taliban ever again marching on Kabul or becoming a haven for al-Qaida, while we concentrate on the rest of the country outside the Pashtun belt.

 

All this will be very uncomfortable. But not as uncomfortable as re-enforcing failure with more lost lives.

 

It is not yet lost in Afganistan. Not quite. We are in the territory of the last chance. There will be no more.

 

Nick Clegg is leader of the Liberal Democrats. Paddy Ashdown is a former leader of the party and served as international high representative in Bosnia and Herzegovina.

Afghanistan 

It is not worth wasting one more life in Afghanistan.

All that we can achieve has now been achieved. All that we might have achieved if we had done things differently, has been lost. The only rational policy now is to leave quickly, in good order and in the company of our allies. This is the only cause for which further lives should be risked.

It is now crystal clear that we have lost in Afghanistan. We have succeeded in only one thing; albeit the big thing we first said we went to war for – driving out Al Qaeda. In almost all the other tasks we set ourselves, especially the establishment of a sustainable state, we have failed. The word “defeat” is only inappropriate because it infers some stain upon the extraordinary young men and women who have fought our cause in a foreign land. They alone emerge from this, anything but unscathed, but, in large measure, untarnished. They were not beaten. In the battles they fought against the Taliban they invariably won.

Our failure in Afghanistan has not been not military. It has been political.

This was a war that it was proper to fight and that the international community could and should have won. We went in under a UN Security Council mandate, in support of international law, consistent with our own national interests and with the overwhelming support of the Afghan people. Eleven years later we have recklessly squandered all these assets and, in the process, written the definitive text-book on how to lose these kind of wars.

The reasons for this are not new. Many of us have been warning about them for years.

The international community in Afghanistan needed to speak with a single voice in pursuit of a single plan with clear priorities. Instead we have been divided, cacophonous, chaotic. We should have concentrated on winning in Afghanistan where it mattered, instead of distracting ourselves with adventures in Iraq. We should have engaged Afghanistan’s neighbours, instead of going out of our way to make them enemies. Our early military strategy we should have been about protecting the people, instead of wasting our time chasing the enemy. We should have made fighting corruption our first priority, instead of becoming the tainted partners of a corrupt Government whose writ, along with ours, has progressively collapsed, as that of the Taliban in the South has progressively widened. We should have understood that victories on the battlefield are meaningless if you can’t translated them into political progress and better lives for ordinary people. We should have placed more emphasis on political means than military ones, instead of looking to the soldiers to win the war for us. We should have understood the culture and history of Afghanistan, instead of imposing an unaffordable Western style centralised constitution on a country which has been decentralised and tribal for more than a thousand years. And at the end we should have grabbed the best opportunity for a negotiated peace three years ago, instead of continuing our blind pursuit of the illusion of outright military victory.

Up to now the price for these follies has been paid in lives – those of our young soldiers and far too many Afghan civilians – but they soon need to be. Now there will be a political price to pay in diminished Western influence and increased instability in what is one of the most instable regions in the world.

We may not like that, but we are not now in any position to alter it.

There is only one thing more we can do now to buttress Afghanistan after we go, and that is not military, it is diplomatic; try for a regional treaty to underpin the integrity of the Afghan state.

Beyond that, what can be done to stop Afghanistan internally unravelling into chaos, has already been done. The only outcome of staying longer is more deaths for no purpose; most of them now caused, not by the enemy in front of our troops, but by the enemy amongst them. 54 Coalition soldiers have been killed this year by members of the Afghan National Army or Police – 12 of them have been British.

So now is the time to abandon the pretence that there is more of substance to be achieved in Afghanistan. The main thing to do now is leave as quick as we decently can, providing as much protection for our friends as we can, in the best order that we can and with as much of our equipment as we can.

Soldiers call this a fighting withdrawal and it is the most difficult military manoeuvre of all.

To succeed it needs clarity of purpose, speed and perfect co-ordination. None of these are in place.

Our commanders are not clear about their tasks. Do their political masters really mean what they say; that there is still more to be done? Or can they now concentrate on what they know is sensible; getting out in good order? Someone should tell them which – soon.

Meanwhile, a deadline has been set; all out by 2014. The military say it will take that long to get the kit out. Maybe. But the longer it takes, the greater the sacrifice. Maybe we have to balance a quartermaster’s perfection, against the lives lost in delivering it.

Meanwhile, our allies by their actions seem to think co-ordination a dirty word. Most are now rushing headlong for the exits. The US hints darkly about leaving earlier. Obama’s re-election probably means they will. But no-one knows for sure. The Government should be pressing them hard for clarity on this. Young brave lives – their and ours – depend on it.

In together out together may remain the best policy. But our other motto for the moment should be “quick, neat and soon”, if we are to avoid having to answer in our time, the famous question Senator John Kerry’s asked over Vietnam

“How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?”

1002 words

 

The Times

 

The Afghan War February 2012

 

And so the long baleful litany of tragedies of the eleven year Afghan war continues. On Saturday it was announced that the civilian death toll in the country rose for the fifth consecutive year – by 8% to 3,021.

 

Among these tragedies is that fact that this was a war we didn’t have to lose. Launched in 2001 was not a detested invasion like the Russian one which preceded it. It was underpinned by a UN Security Council Resolution and overwhelmingly supported by the Afghan people. But now it will end almost exactly where the Russians ended; an untimely exit leaving behind, at best, a strong military, a corrupted police and a weak Government. The tragic price paid for that in Western blood over the last decade will end in a little over two years. But the even higher price paid by the Afghans will not.

 

We, the Western nations, have no-one to blame for this but ourselves. Afghanistan will be seen in the future as a copy book example of how NOT to do these things.

 

We failed to concentrate first on the rule of law and now find ourselves both burdened and besmirched with a Government in Kabul so tainted with corruption that its writ (and ours) declines by the day, while that of the Taliban increases. At the important moment when we should have concentrated for success, we distracted ourselves with by Iraq. For too many years our military strategy was chasing the enemy, when we should have been protecting the people. We wasted resources, money opportunities and lives on our own impossible ambitions rather than delivering the simpler things the Afghans would have been content with. We have been blunderingly ignorant of Afghan customs, traditions and language because we thought we knew better. We have repeatedly deluded ourselves about “successes” which never existed and thus took so long recognising that a victor’s peace was beyond our reach, that we wasted the best opportunities for a negotiated one. We failed to understand that, in these wars it is the politics, not the weapons, that counts most; even if you win on the battlefield, you lose if you lose politically – which we have, painfully. And – greatest mistake of all – when unity of command and action on the part of the interveners is the crucial ingredient of success, we have completely failed to achieve this in the places, Kabul chiefly, which really matter. And we’re still doing it. As everyone rushes for the door in Afghanistan, there is a real danger, following the French unilateral withdrawal and US Defence Secretary, Leon Panetta’s unwise announcement that they weren’t fighting after next year, that this now turns into a disorderly retreat.

 

Only the “Poor Bloody Military”, who have done the jobs we asked of them with such outstanding courage and professionalism, can march out of Afghanistan with their heads high. One of our biggest challenges over the next two years will be to sustain their morale and explain to the country, why young lives should continue to be maimed and sacrificed for a cause which is now dribbling away towards an end which is so much less than we said it would be when it all started. Another will be to ensure that, as the Western armies head for the exit, they do it together, in good order and continue to sustain their aid programmes in Afghanistan. But having wasted so many billions, do we have enough left?

 

So now, this eleven year extended exercise in self-delusion has to end. It is vital that we see the next forty months before final withdrawal with an absolutely clear eye.

 

First, talks with the Taliban, coming so late, are now little more than a mask for retreat – we know it, they know it and every Afghan knows it. The peace process can now result only in an Afghanistan government in which the Taliban, armed or not, will play constitutional part, especially in the Pashtun south. That is the bitterest pill, especially for those – chiefly women – who looked to us for a chance to get on with living their lives by more civilised values. But it is nevertheless a pill we need to swallow. Perhaps there is meagre comfort in the thought that, once the Pashtuns can choose their own Government it will not be long before they choose not to have a Taliban one.

 

Second, as after the Russians, the danger now is civil war. All our last actions in Afghanistan have to be dedicated to building the best bulwarks we can against this possibility. That – not “beating” the Taliban – is the reason why leaving behind a professional, constitutional and non-political Afghan Army is so important.

 

It is also why we have to do what we can to promote a change to the constitutional structure of the country. It was arrogance compounded by ignorance which led us to press for a western style centralised constitution in a country which as been decentralised and tribal for at least two thousand years – complete with elections they couldn’t afford without our money. A sustainable peace in Afghanistan requires a new de facto constitutional structure which runs more with the grain of its tribal realities.

 

It also needs an external context in which to better sustain its internal peace. The best means of ensuring this is through a treaty based international agreement, rather like the Dayton Agreement for Bosnia, underpinned by great power guarantors (especially Russia the US and China), in which the neighbours – crucially Pakistan, India and Iran – commit to preserving the territorial integrity of the country and refraining interfering in its internal affairs. This will not act as a perfect bulwark against further blood in Afghanistan, especially if Pakistani malevolence cannot be restrained (though a Taliban government in the south may make that less tempting for Islamabad). But it’s probably be the best we can do.

 

Because of our mistakes, we are heading towards a malodorous exit from Afghanistan – one which will probably – and probably rightly – stop us ever doing this kind of thing again. Let us at least do this last bit right, so that we do not add even more innocent lives to the price of our failures.

 

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