Did the bureaucrats lose the war?

The Times went big on their story of Britain’s campaign in Helmand, and all the mistakes made in 2005 when the deployment was being planned. It is a good piece of reporting, which adds to the volume of stories about the war, its planning and execution.
Britain’s effort Helmand, like the one in Basra, will in time need a magisterial study, a sort of multi-volume study like Winston Churchill’s The Second World War, which can weave the front-line experience together with the turning of the bureaucratic wheels. But at least the first draft of history is now being written.

The articles make some mistakes and quotes people who did not participate in the planning of the initial offensive and will not have a detailed view of developments, like the otherwise excellent Major-General Andrew MacKay. They also do not give enough attention to political gaffes – such as the removal of Helmand governor Shir Muhammad Akhundzada, who was venal but effective, and his replacement by a succession of polished, but ineffective politicians, who the British desperately tried to anoint, in the words of one Helmand PRT member, “Princes of the South”.