Afghanistan: Mission Accomplished

[Idris2002]

 

[kebabking]

in the spirit of Blackadders' 'well done, take a short break - there, did you enjoy it?'... the UK government is considering sending a detachment of Tornado or Typhoon fast jets back to Afghanistan just two weeks after they left after the Afghan Government said it could not fight the Taliban without air support..

http://www.thesundaytimes.co.uk/sto/news/uk_news/Defence/article1492843.ece

Operation U-Turn? Operation oh-for-fucks-sake? Operation Arse, both hands, the dark?

 

[brogdale]

In the Dec 18th LRB James Meek wrote an interesting essay to coincide with the withdrawal...well worth the time it takes to read IMHO...it explores the costs (in all senses) of the war, the institutional hubris that increased those costs, disastrous decision-making at a 'strategic' level, the resources inadequate to the task, the lack of intelligence of the 'enemy' and lack of mission clarity...

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v36/n24/james-meek/worse-than-a-defeat

Both these traits – the upper echelons of the British military making American approval their primary goal, and the delusional exaggeration of British military capabilities – peaked in the 2000s. It was inevitable the two would clash; that at some point the desire to impress the Pentagon by using the Pentagon’s own resources as cover for Britain’s relatively low-budget military would conflict with America’s own interests, and end up damaging Britain’s military reputation more in Washington’s eyes than if the MoD hadn’t puffed itself up in the first place.

Alexander Alderson, a colonel who served in Baghdad, points out that in 2008 the Americans, the Australians and the Canadians all had centres for studying counter-insurgency. Britain didn’t. The other nations, Alderson writes, ‘were mystified why, given the obvious difficulties the UK had had in Basra, we had done nothing about it … Sadly, by 2008, the UK was not just the junior coalition partner to the US, but the junior intellectual partner as well.’

Whilst on the subject of Afghanistan, I'll give a heads-up for the new Adam Curtis film "Bitter Lake" that will be available on Jan 25th. It appears that Curtis is keen to explore his ideas about the "Contradictory Vaudeville" Of Post-Modern Politics (along the lines of his 'teaser' piece embedded in Charlie Brooker's 2014 'Wipe' programme) with particular emphasis on the Afghan war.

But there is one other country at the centre of the film.

Afghanistan.

This is because Afghanistan is the place that has repeatedly confronted politicians, as their power declines, with the terrible truth - that they cannot understand what is going on any longer. Let alone control it.

The film shows in detail how all the foreigners who went to Afghanistan created an almost totally fictional version of the country in their minds.

They couldn’t see the complex reality that was in front of them - because the stories they had been told about the world had become so simplified that they lacked the perceptual apparatus to see reality any longer.

And this blindness led to a terrible disaster - support for a blatantly undemocratic government, wholesale financial corruption and thousands of needless deaths.

A horrific scandal that we, in our disconnected bubble here in Britain, seem hardly aware of. And even if we are - it is dismissed as being just too complex to understand.

But it is important to try and understand what happened. And the way to do that is to try and tell a new kind of story. One that doesn’t deny the complexity and reduce it to a meaningless fable of good battling evil - but instead really tries to makes sense of it.

I have got hold of the unedited rushes of almost everything the BBC has ever shot in Afghanistan. It is thousands of hours - some of it is very dull, but large parts of it are extraordinary. Shots that record amazing moments, but also others that are touching, funny and sometimes very odd.

These complicated, fragmentary and emotional images evoke the chaos of real experience. And out of them i have tried to build a different and more emotional way of depicting what really happened in Afghanistan.

A counterpoint to the thin, narrow and increasingly destructive stories told by those in power today.

 

[FNG]

guess there will be some footage from the seventies of the time before 'chador aur char divari'

 

[coley]

in the spirit of Blackadders' 'well done, take a short break - there, did you enjoy it?'... the UK government is considering sending a detachment of Tornado or Typhoon fast jets back to Afghanistan just two weeks after they left after the Afghan Government said it could not fight the Taliban without air support..

http://www.thesundaytimes.co.uk/sto/news/uk_news/Defence/article1492843.ece

Operation U-Turn? Operation oh-for-fucks-sake? Operation Arse, both hands, the dark?

Thought they were having enough trouble keeping the ones in Cyprus airworthy?

 

[kebabking]

Thought they were having enough trouble keeping the ones in Cyprus airworthy?

not quite - the situation is more nuanced that the media (shock!) either write about, or, lets be honest, understand.

of the 80-90-odd Tornado GR4 airframes still in service, 16 have every single up-to-date (defensive, comms and targetting) widgit. those are therefore the 'tip of the spear'. that does not mean that the other 65-75 are useless or would be should out the sky by a goatherder with a catapult, merely that the are - in some cases very marginally - less capable of high-end warfare than the 'top' 16.

i should point out here that the 'gold standard' is not being able to fly easy racetrack pattens at 15,000ft over an enemy with no air defence system and no fighters or AWACS, its flying into heavily defended, by modern air and land based, networked systems.

however, no politician is going to risk having an a Tornado crew appear on IS TV knowing it will come out that the aircraft they were flying was one of the 'lesser' aircraft in the fleet - thats political suicide - so they restrict operations to the 16, even if the others are, in fact, perfectly capable of conducting the types of operations the 16 are carrying out and are at no more actual risk than the 16 flying over this enemy, but politicians aren't interested in reality, they are only interested in politics...

this is one of the costs of the penny-pinching that leads to 'fleets within fleets'.

now, there are other problems - redundancies and changes in pensions have lead to lots of very qualified and experienced air and ground crew leaving the RAF for less stressfull, better paid, less spending-4-months-in-Kandahar-with-sand-in-your-foreskin-every-12-months, less being ordered to fly aircraft that should never be allowed out of the factory jobs. that impacts on aircraft availability, as does the decision some years ago to end the training pipeline for Tornado navigator/WSO's. the problems are more 'not enough people' than 'not enough spares'.

 

[coley]

not quite - the situation is more nuanced that the media (shock!) either write about, or, lets be honest, understand.

of the 80-90-odd Tornado GR4 airframes still in service, 16 have every single up-to-date (defensive, comms and targetting) widgit. those are therefore the 'tip of the spear'. that does not mean that the other 65-75 are useless or would be should out the sky by a goatherder with a catapult, merely that the are - in some cases very marginally - less capable of high-end warfare than the 'top' 16.

i should point out here that the 'gold standard' is not being able to fly easy racetrack pattens at 15,000ft over an enemy with no air defence system and no fighters or AWACS, its flying into heavily defended, by modern air and land based, networked systems.

however, no politician is going to risk having an a Tornado crew appear on IS TV knowing it will come out that the aircraft they were flying was one of the 'lesser' aircraft in the fleet - thats political suicide - so they restrict operations to the 16, even if the others are, in fact, perfectly capable of conducting the types of operations the 16 are carrying out and are at no more actual risk than the 16 flying over this enemy, but politicians aren't interested in reality, they are only interested in politics...

this is one of the costs of the penny-pinching that leads to 'fleets within fleets'.

now, there are other problems - redundancies and changes in pensions have lead to lots of very qualified and experienced air and ground crew leaving the RAF for less stressfull, better paid, less spending-4-months-in-Kandahar-with-sand-in-your-foreskin-every-12-months, less being ordered to fly aircraft that should never be allowed out of the factory jobs. that impacts on aircraft availability, as does the decision some years ago to end the training pipeline for Tornado navigator/WSO's. the problems are more 'not enough people' than 'not enough spares'.

So, how many lets say,'combat serviceable' as opposed to totally combat ready do you reckon they might have available, taking into consideration manpower shortages? And would that leave us anything in reserve?

 

[kebabking]

So, how many lets say,'combat serviceable' as opposed to totally combat ready do you reckon they might have available, taking into consideration manpower shortages? And would that leave us anything in reserve?

i suppose the answer would depend on how long you needed to keep that force in place for and how long you would accept the force being 'down' for after that. it would also, of course, depend on how important the job was and what risks you were prepared to run in order to do it.

personally i think the empirical answer to your question is rather sensitive, and so i won't post the very detailed reply i'd written out, but in shorthand i'd suggest its 'more than the media might suggest, less than politicians might claim, and very certainly much less than a society who, 30 years ago, bought 220-odd Tornado GR1's might have a right to expect'.

 

[Brainaddict]

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v36/n24/james-meek/worse-than-a-defeat

I found the James Meek article utterly fascinating. Despite trying to pay attention to the war in the face of the disinterest of most of the press most of the time over the period of the 13 year (?) war, this was the first time I'd seen anyone say outright: the British Army was defeated in Afghanistan (and incidentally also in Iraq). He references some books that seem to say similar things - I'll have to get hold of one them. I suppose most of what I've read up to now (lefty press) has focussed on how politically stupid the war has been, not how militarily disastrous it has been. There have been occasional glimpses of the disaster in the press but always obscured by the 'Look! Girls in schools!' justification argument.

 

[Dogsauce]

I can remember when the war started some blowhard American on a forum going on about how it proved US supremacy as they'd 'won' Afghanistan in a few days (due to the government falling and Kabul being taken) which was better than the soviets who were driven out with their tails between their legs after several years. I don't think the outcome for the U.S. is too different on reflection.

The war was probably lost when Bush the Second decided to start his little diversion into Iraq.

 

[co-op]

this was the first time I'd seen anyone say outright: the British Army was defeated in Afghanistan (and incidentally also in Iraq).

It's not the first time I've heard it but it's fascinating to me the extent to which anyone who has studied these wars accepts that the British Army performed really poorly in both wars - was outright defeated in effect, and the complete and utter absence of public debate or discussion about this. I heard Rory Stewart (now MP) and others (military and media) debating the war on an obscure late-night R4 prog about 2 years ago and they all accepted that this was a defeat without disputing it at all - and yet I haven't seen or heard it mentioned once in the mainstream media. Some one posted this earlier

and it really does seem to be the way the establishment are going to play this one

 

[DownwardDog]

So, how many lets say,'combat serviceable' as opposed to totally combat ready do you reckon they might have available, taking into consideration manpower shortages? And would that leave us anything in reserve?

It's pretty easy to work out; there are three (count 'em!) GR4 squadrons: IX(B), Tatty Two and the Brown Stars. Each will have a nominal strength of 12 jets. My experience of Tornado ops is that 50% will be broken - "brief as four, launch as two" - so there are probably 18-20 available for ops.

XV(R) (the OCU) is also putatively declared to NATO as combat ready so there's another 12 (6) there. However that unit is staffed by crusty QFIs in the final stages of cirrhosis and flabby children born when Major was PM.

 

[DownwardDog]

this is one of the costs of the penny-pinching that leads to 'fleets within fleets'.

It's nothing to do with penny pinching; the Tornado GR1/4 has had vast amounts of money lavished upon it compared to other platforms. MLU, CSU-P and the BAE support contract cost literally billions. It's just that the RAF is really bad at fleet management.

 

[Brainaddict]

i think i want to agree with DownwardDog but my pride won't quite let me - we failed, imv, because of five things.

numbers. UK expeditionary land capability was/is around a Brigade+support, 10,000 men. that was our peg, and we 'decided' it would fit whatever hole we came across. its worth noting that when the US got seriously involved in Helmand in 2010 they brought a force of 30,000 to augment our 10,000.

aim. not only did we not have - in the post 2002/3 situation - a clear political/military end state we wanted to achieve, but we kept changing it, and we thought that the person we'd offended with our previous plan would wipe the slate clean when it came to the next plan. they didn't.

career meets war - and war loses. Officers hoping to be promoted (and here i'm talking about Lt Col and above) not only needed to be able to demonstrate that they'd had a 'good war', but they had to demonstrate they the'd had an impact, that they'd tried something new. when these people change every 6 months, and then add their changes to the political confusion over the overall aim, the situation became constant flux. nothing stayed in place long enough to achieve anything, and even if something had shown it was working, it would be changed by the next influx of senior officers looking to put something shiny on their CV. this was known about, and constantly highlighted by the officers involved, but the promotion system at that level was never changed to understand the difference between innovation in a peacetime Army and just fucking about with stuff for the sake of it in a wartime one.

moral failure. not one of the very many very senior officers who knew it was going wrong, and that it would continue to go wrong while all the above stayed in place, resigned and went public.

political failure. our politicians decided in 2009/2010 that the war was going to end in 2014, and as long as it ended they didn't much care who won it. so the smart Taliban went home, waited till we fucked off, and will emerge to fight, and probably defeat the central government - at least in the south and east.

in terms of our people, we are the only nation involved in Helmand on any scale who did not have a position overrun by the Taliban. our people on the ground were brilliant.

I don't deny those were all factors, but they seem potentially resolvable compared to the problem Meek talks about: The British didn't know which side they were fighting on, as perceived by the people (Afghans) who made up the different 'sides'. Most of the above problems could have been solved with better planning or resourcing. The failure to know which side they were fighting on could not, and would have screwed the whole venture even with ten times the number of troops.

 

[yield]

Whilst on the subject of Afghanistan, I'll give a heads-up for the new Adam Curtis film "Bitter Lake" that will be available on Jan 25th. It appears that Curtis is keen to explore his ideas about the "Contradictory Vaudeville" Of Post-Modern Politics (along the lines of his 'teaser' piece embedded in Charlie Brooker's 2014 'Wipe' programme) with particular emphasis on the Afghan war.

It's available on iplayer now http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/p02gyz6b/adam-curtis-bitter-lake

 

[likesfish]

The average troop on the ground was good at what he was told to do and quite willing to do it.
Unfortunatly the people making the plan had only a vauge idea of what they wanted to achieve and half those goals couldnt be achieved by military means.
Defeat the taliban
First define who or what are the taliban.
In helmund most of the conflict was the continuing helmund power struggle blood feud thats been going on for years and the british and proper foreign pakistan funded taliban got sucked into on rival sides.

 

[brogdale]

The average troop on the ground was good at what he was told to do and quite willing to do it.
Unfortunatly the people making the plan had only a vauge idea of what they wanted to achieve and half those goals couldnt be achieved by military means.
Defeat the taliban
First define who or what are the taliban.
In helmund most of the conflict was the continuing helmund power struggle blood feud thats been going on for years and the british and proper foreign pakistan funded taliban got sucked into on rival sides.

yep, have you watched Curtis' film?

 

[Humberto]

yep, have you watched Curtis' film?

Tell me more is it good? The bit on Charlie Brooker looked dubious.

 

[brogdale]

Tell me more is it good? The bit on Charlie Brooker looked dubious.

Short on analysis, long on narrative and yet quite an impressive, unsettling bit of tele IMHO.

e2a : AFAICS the Brooker piece bore little relation to Bitter Lake; two separate pieces of work.

 

[Idris2002]

From the looks of this piece, the Sons of Brenda needn't beat themselves up too much over having their arse handed to them by Terry Taliban:

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/01/19/corruption-revolt

tl:dr - Afghanistan is mired in corruption at every level, and the yanks not only didn't oppose it, they actually helped it, thereby rendering all their efforts in other spheres meaningless.

 

[Brainaddict]

There was an excellent article a few years ago (might also have been New Yorker) about how the US military was funding the Taliban to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars a year. Short version: they used Afghan contractors to truck stuff around the country, at a total cost over a billion dollars a year iirc. A vast percentage of this was being paid to armed groups to allow safe passage of convoys. The US army knew this was where their money was going and seemed to just shrug and resign themselves to it. Quite amazing.

Edit: it was a Nation article: http://www.thenation.com/article/how-us-funds-taliban

 

[brogdale]

There was an excellent article a few years ago (might also have been New Yorker) about how the US military was funding the Taliban to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars a year. Short version: they used Afghan contractors to truck stuff around the country, at a total cost over a billion dollars a year iirc. A vast percentage of this was being paid to armed groups to allow safe passage of convoys. The US army knew this was where their money was going and seemed to just shrug and resign themselves to it. Quite amazing.

Edit: it was a Nation article: http://www.thenation.com/article/how-us-funds-taliban

Interesting interview with former (UK) Major about who/what were Taliban in the 'Bitter Lake' film.

Go to 2.02.30

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/p02gyz6b/adam-curtis-bitter-lake

 

[DownwardDog]

There's an excellent article on the Herrick Tornados in this month's AFM. Some fun facts:

It's cost 1m quid/day since 2008. I'd fart blood if I were a UK taxpayer.

8 a/c received a unique comms/countermeasures fit (costing 6m per jet). The gentlemen and scholars of 12(B) then destroyed two of them in fires in two days.

In 6 years of continuous ops they released weapons and put 'warheads on foreheads' 140 times due to highly restrictive RoE. Apparently NATO forces are expected to display 'courageous restraint' when calling for CAS. Shades of Vietnam when Duke Cunningham remarked he needed a lawyer not a navigator in the back seat of his F4.

 

[likesfish]

http://www.amazon.co.uk/An-Intimate-War-History-Conflict/dp/1849043361

The army paid a TA major to do his phd on helmund then unsuccesfully tried to cover up the result because it was way worse than they were expecting.
They were expecting bad news but not that the whole sorry mess was adisaster from the first foot on the ground.

The British Army wasnt defeated by the taliban.
the British Army lacked knowledge of what the hell was going in helmund let alone what they were trying to achieve

 

[brogdale]

http://www.amazon.co.uk/An-Intimate-War-History-Conflict/dp/1849043361

The army paid a TA major to do his phd on helmund then unsuccesfully tried to cover up the result because it was way worse than they were expecting.
They were expecting bad news but not that the whole sorry mess was adisaster from the first foot on the ground.

The British Army wasnt defeated by the taliban.
the British Army lacked knowledge of what the hell was going in helmund let alone what they were trying to achieve

Yep, but the British Army was defeated...by Afghanistan.

 

[Idris2002]

http://www.amazon.co.uk/An-Intimate-War-History-Conflict/dp/1849043361

The army paid a TA major to do his phd on helmund then unsuccesfully tried to cover up the result because it was way worse than they were expecting.
They were expecting bad news but not that the whole sorry mess was adisaster from the first foot on the ground.

The British Army wasnt defeated by the taliban.
the British Army lacked knowledge of what the hell was going in helmund let alone what they were trying to achieve

So instead of "it ain't half hot mum" it was more like "some mothers do 'ave 'em?"

 

[likesfish]

It made the Britsh armys stratergy in Ni which was apprantly to militarly defeat PIRA seem highly intelligent
When your "enemy"can sit a pub when its pouring down with rain and confidently" state cant be arsed this week the weathers shite maybe the boys will be out and about next week when the weather improves" you know that idea is bollocks

It was mostly defeated by itself and HM goverment it could and did defeat anyone it fought. Thing was that achieved the sum of fuck all.

 

[Idris2002]

It made the Britsh armys stratergy in Ni which was apprantly to militarly defeat PIRA seem highly intelligent
When your "enemy"can sit a pub when its pouring down with rain and confidently" state cant be arsed this week the weathers shite maybe the boys will be out and about next week when the weather improves" you know that idea is bollocks

It was mostly defeated by itself and HM goverment it could and did defeat anyone it fought. Thing was that achieved the sum of fuck all.

 

[phildwyer]

Yep, but the British Army was defeated...by Afghanistan.

Not for the first time either.

 

[likesfish]

Not for the first time either.

Tbf every other Empire got its arsed kick and went home to lick their wounds only the British keep having ago.
Some people say its slow at Learning the bleedin obvious others say we are playing the long game see you in 2050 for round 6 or is it 7