Afghanistan

Thursday

Daniel Korski

Pre-empting Chilcot

Sir John Chilcot’s Iraq inquiry has begun honing in on failures of US and British post-conflict planning. As General Sir Frederick Viggers told the inquiry, problems arose from “not having defined the ends, ways and means of how we were going to deliver this phase of the campaign.” None of this is particularly new. As further evidence is provided to the inquiry, it will become even clearer how unprepared the British state – the Government, civil service and military – were for the task at hand, and how soldiers, diplomats and development workers were expected to deliver near-miracles with limited resources, limited backing, limited security and limited public support. I

Wednesday

Alex Massie

The Chopper Wars

CHESTER, ENGLAND – DECEMBER 03: A soldier of 1st Battalion The Royal Welsh waits for a Chinook to land during an exercise before deployment to Afghanistan. Members of 1st Battalion The Royal Welsh, who are based in Chester, are to be deployed following Prime Minister Gordon Brown’s announcement on Monday of an extra 500 troops for Afghanistan. Photo: Christopher Furlong/Getty Images. The omnishambles at the Ministry of Defence is such that, astonishingly, it may have supplanted the Home Office as the government department least fit-for-purpose. This is no small achievement and, one suspects, owes little to any improvement on the Home front. It’s been apparent for some time that defence

Thursday

Wednesday

James Forsyth

Has Labour u-turned on protecting defence spending?

Back in July, Lord Mandelson added defence to health and education as an area of spending that Labour would protect from cuts. But looking at page 97 of the Green Book, defence is conspicuously absent from the list of areas of public spending that are protected in 2011-2012 and 2012-2013. The only areas mentioned are NHS spending, schools, sure start, policing and overseas aid. As some of these are only receiving funding increases in line with inflation, it seems reasonable to assume that everything else – including defence – is likely to be cut in real terms.    (There is a commitment to spend up to £2.5 billion from the

Monday

Peter Hoskin

The Lib Dems’ hunt for an issue may lead them to an Afghan pull-out

As Anthony Wells says over at his UK Polling Report, there are plenty of reasons to doubt whether Labour could convert a third of Lib Dem voters over to their cause.  But the article in today’s Times on Labour’s new strategy will still give Team Clegg pause for thought. The problem for the Lib Dems is that they haven’t yet managed to hit on an attention-grabbing issue to make their own – their favourite, perhaps only, election strategy.  The cause of Parliamentary reform could have done the trick, but – beyond Nick Clegg’s call to prevent MPs from taking their summer holiday – very few of the Lib Dem proposals

Wednesday

Alex Massie

Obama’s War: Same as the Old War

President Barack Obama speaks in Eisenhower Hall at the United States Military Academy at West Point. Photo: Roger L. Wollenberg-Pool/Getty Images The text of President Obama’s West Point address is here. I didn’t watch the speech, but having read it I think it can be summarised, broadly, as “More of the Same, Only More So”. It’s an intensification, I think, of the existing strategy rather than a radical new approach to a series of interlocking, intractable problems. Increasingly the Afghan campaign reminds me of that old Irish joke: “Can you tell me the way to Limerick?” “Well, you wouldn’t want to start from here.” But here is where we are.

Daniel Korski

Welcome to Obamastan

After months of deliberation, endless consultation and reams of paper, President Obama came to the same conclusion that he himself had reached only a few months ago, and that which his handpicked commander, General McChrystal, had arrived at more recently: the US-led intervention is just, right and demands more resources. As usual, Obama’s oratory was impressive – though without the personal anecdotes he normally works in. He rejected comparisons with Vietnam and evoked World War II with a reference to President Roosevelt. The West Point cadets added a kind of battle-evoking gravitas that Obama, who has never worn a uniform or been in war, often struggles to evoke. His new

Tuesday

Alex Massie

The Afghan Conundrum | 1 December 2009

Like Yglesias, I guess one ought to have an official “What I Think About Obama’s Escalation in Afghanistan post”. And the truth is that I don’t know. Don’t know whether Obama’s new strategy will work, don’t know if it is wise or enough or too much or just about right. And I’m intensely suspicious of anyone who celebrates it and, most especially, those who immediately claim that it’s insufficient, reckless, half-hearted or whatever. Because (almost) none of us have a clue, really, and pretending that we do does no-one any good. What may be said, with all due caution, is that the administration is doing its best to make the

Daniel Korski

There are troops – and there are troops

The waiting will soon be over. Later today, the President Obama is expected to order around 34,000 troops into battle, including into Helmand province. This surge will be added to the additional 500 troops Gordon Brown committed yesterday and what sources tell me are cast-iron troop offers by another eight countries, including Turkey, Australia, Montenegro, and Georgia. If all these countries do sign up to send more troops, the credit must primarily go to Anders Fogh Rasmussen, the NATO Secretary-General, who has travelled far and wide in the attempt to drum up more military muscle. No doubt Gordon Brown will claim that his two week effort was key in securing

Monday

Peter Hoskin

The doubts that remain after Brown’s Afghanistan statement

So there we have it.  Gordon Brown has confirmed what we all expected: that 500 more British troops will be sent to Afghanistan, bringing the total UK presence up to around 10,000.  The “surge” will be rounded off when Obama announces something like 35,000 extra US troops tomorrow. Although greater manpower is A Good Thing for the mission in Afghanistan – and the mission in Afghanistan is certainly an important one – I can’t help but have some qualms about the twin UK and US announcements.   For starters, there’s the simple issue of numbers.  500 more UK troops and 35,000 more US troops falls short of the bar of

Sunday

Fraser Nelson

The Iraq inquiry we should be having

Do we still have the will to win in Afghanistan? If so, the question the Iraq inquiry should be asking is not “how did we get into this war” – we have had a number of separate inquiries into that already – but “why were the military defeated on the ground in Basra?”. If the Chilcot Inquiry were to focus on that, it might actually serve a purpose: not just in unearthing new information (which it has signally failed to do so far) but drawing lessons that just might help the troops in Afghanistan. I make this point in my News of the World column today. I am in a

Wednesday

James Forsyth

At last

President Obama will announce his new Afghan policy on Tuesday night at 8pm eastern time, the early hours of Wednesday morning UK time. Obama will announce a troop increase and the signs are that he will send 30,000 plus in reinforcements. This is welcome, the nearer Obama gets to giving General McChrystal the 40,000 troops he has asked for the better. But the process has done the White House little credit and shown Obama to be even less solicitous of the concerns of his allies than President Bush. Bob Ainsworth’s said yesterday that a ‘period of hiatus‘ in Washington had undercut public support for the war in this country. This

David Blackburn

With friends like these | 25 November 2009

Bob Ainsworth has publicly criticised President Obama’s slothful deliberation on an Afghan troop surge. The Defence Secretary said: ‘We have suffered a lot of losses. We have had a period of hiatus while McChrystal’s plan and his requested uplift has been looked at in the detail to which it has been looked at over a period of some months, and we have had the Afghan elections, which have been far from perfect let us say. All of those things have mitigated against our ability to show progress… put that on the other side of the scales when we are suffering the kind of losses that we are.’ I don’t agree

Tuesday

David Blackburn

Carry on Karzai

The New York Times reports that 15 Afghan ministers, past and present, are under investigation on suspicion of corruption. Obama’s and Brown’s unequivocal stance on the Mk.3 Karzai government leaves the president with no choice but to sacrifice a few lambs. However, if ever there’s a bolthole Karzai will scamper through it. Corruption is Afghanistan’s chief political currency and Karzai’s authority, such as it is, rests on backhanders. Oligarchic Afghan law decrees that ministers must be prosecuted by a specially convened court, and guess who controls judicial patronage? It’s an ingenious constitutional contrivance for seeming to do something but actually doing nothing. The recent history of Afghan special courts is

Monday

James Forsyth

The case for 40,000

As President Obama continues to consider his options on Afghanistan, The New York Times has a good primer on what the military could do with the various levels of reinforcements being considered. This is what the military believes it could do with an extra 40,000 troops: “Should President Obama decide to send 40,000 additional American troops to Afghanistan, the most ambitious plan under consideration at the White House, the military would have enormous flexibility to deploy as many as 15,000 troops to the Taliban center of gravity in the south, 5,000 to the critical eastern border with Pakistan and 10,000 as trainers for the Afghan security forces. The rest could

Saturday

Peter Hoskin

Money talks in Afghanistan

Afghan politics stinks; we all know it.  But it’s still shocking to read how the former governor of Helmand, Sher Mohammed Akhundzada, encouraged his supporters to join the Taliban after he lost his position, in 2005, under a cloud of drug-running allegations.  Here’s what he tells today’s Telegraph:   “When I was no longer governor the government stopped paying for the people who supported me ….  I sent 3,000 of them off to the Taliban because I could not afford to support them but the Taliban was making payments. Lots of people, including my family members, went back to the Taliban because they had lost respect for the government. The

Thursday

Alex Massie

Does Obama Need Britain in Afghanistan?

Since I outlined a modest case for dithering on Afghanstan last month, it probably behoves me to admit that, politicaly though perhaps not militarily, the time for consequence-free dithering seems to be running-out. Con Coughlin’s story in this week’s magazine damns Obama’s approach to the Afghan problem, not least because the President, according to Con, has little interest in consulting his allies: The astonishing disregard with which Mr Obama treats Britain has been made clear by his deliberations over the Afghan issue. As he decides how many more troops to send to Afghanistan — a decision which will fundamentally affect the scope of the mission — Britain is reduced to

Wednesday

James Forsyth

Even by the standards of Karzai’s government this is extraordinary

The story, ‘Afghan Minister accused of taking bribe’ might seem depressingly predictable. But the accusations in today’s Washington Post are shocking even by the standards of the Karzai government. The paper reports that a US official has confirmed that there is a ‘high degree of certainty’ that the Afghan Minister of Mines took a $30 million bribe from a Chinese company in December 2007 to award it a $2.9 billion contract. It should be noted, that the Minister of Mines strongly denies the accusation. But the timing of this story and its source, a US official, is interesting. It seems to fit with a pattern of efforts to try and

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

Britain’s AWOL ally

Cameron just made a very good point in his speech – namely, that Brown claimed just days ago that Obama would make an Afghanistan announcement in the “next few days”. Now, we have no idea when the announcement will come. But this isn’t Gordon Brown’s fault – it’s Obama’s. The way Washington is treating Britain is deplorable and the subject of an excellent cover piece tomorrow by Con Coghlin (cover image above). As Con says in his piece: ‘The Afghan issue has made clear the astonishing disregard with which Mr Obama treats Britain . As he decides how many more troops to send to Afghanistan – a decision which will

Daniel Korski

Afghanistan: air fares, not infantry needed

The British government’s policy on Afghanistan has a spasmodic, yet regular kind of rhythm to it. The issue pops up at intervals, hovers menacingly over Brown’s premiership until the PM awakes from a period of inaction. He then goes into hyper-drive, promises all manner of things, and reverts to inactive type a few days later only to repeat the routine a some days/weeks/months [cross out as appropriate] afterwards.  This time is no different. While the government, along with our allies, wait around for the US president to make up his mind on an Afghanistan (and, by extension, how his first term will be remembered), the PM has been overflowing with