It’s not quite ‘mission accomplished’

The British prime minister never actually uttered the phrase “mission accomplished” in Camp Bastion last Monday. However, his choice of words was close enough to be an unsettling echo of president George W. Bush’s infamous celebratory banner and speech of May 2003, in which Bush marked “the turning of the tide” in Iraq just as the insurgency was ramping up. David Cameron is correct that British troops should be proud of what they have achieved. Afghanistan today is a far better place, in nearly every respect, than it was 12 years ago under Taliban rule. That has come at a tremendous price. When the Helmand campaign was just beginning, the commander of UK forces in Afghanistan, General David Richards, observed that Britain had not experienced such intense combat “so consistently since the Korean war or the Second World War”, other than for periods in the Falklands and the Gulf. However, the question is not whether Afghanistan has improved. It is whether the gains of the last decade can be preserved by a weak and corrupt state, facing a resilient insurgency that is contained but undefeated. In part, the difficulty with assessing Britain’s performance is that the mission has been pruned. As insurgency grew, Britain’s aims shrunk. Indeed, the shift from nation-building to a narrower, sharper focus on counter-terrorism took place under the last government — with bipartisan consensus. Last Tuesday, Cameron acknowledged that, “we will not leave behind a perfect country or a perfect democracy”, and emphasised that his aim was “basic security” to avoid Afghanistan becoming a terrorist haven. In this respect, the mission succeeded long ago. Al Qaida’s presence is dwindling: Around 75 operatives, largely confined to the remote north-east and kept on the run by US drone strikes. Critics point out that the terror group may regenerate in Afghanistan over the longer term. This is true, but there is no reason to think that committing British and allied forces to several more years of combat will prevent this. More importantly, Al Qaida’s centre of gravity has shifted West, away from the Afghanistan-Pakistan border areas and towards the Arabian Peninsula, the Levant and North Africa. The United Kingdom remains especially vulnerable to plots from Pakistan, given that country’s large diaspora, but threats from Syria and Yemen loom larger. It makes eminent sense for Britain to allocate its increasingly scarce resources appropriately. Indeed, were it not for the perceived obligations of Britain’s alliance with the US, this would probably have been done years ago. Yet, in so many other ways, Britain’s mission has failed.

A field study published this year by Theo Farrell and Antonio Giustozzi concluded that “a resilient insurgency has adapted under immense military pressure to become more centralised and more professional. The Taliban have suffered very heavy attrition in Helmand, but they are far from defeated”. Worse still, argued the academics, “the British made the situation far worse when they deployed forces to Helmand in 2006”, owing to Britain’s over-reliance on air power, “indiscriminate use of fire” on the ground and a deeply unpopular though short-lived programme of poppy eradication. Where military gains did create political space, this was often squandered. British-built schools and health centres have already had to shut because the Afghan government cannot pay for them. And other parts of the mission have fared even worse. Last year, Nigel Inkster, a former MI6 assistant chief, observed that Britain’s intervention had “not only done nothing to reduce global supplies of illicit opium”, an area where the UK led international efforts, but “made the problem worse”.

Pretending that Britain is departing in victory will blind us to the lessons learnt from this catalogue of errors. All this might not have mattered if Afghan forces were able to take up the slack, but the evidence is mixed. On the one hand, fears that the Taliban will overrun cities are wildly overblown. Afghan forces, though lacking in key areas like logistics and air power, are immeasurably more professional and capable than a few years ago. On the other hand, they may not be strong enough to quell the insurgency; they may only succeed in enforcing a stalemate and locking in the present levels of violence. And if the status quo is the best we can hope for, who will pay for this? Training and equipping the Afghan security forces in the fiscal year 2014 will cost $7.7 billion (Dh28.32 billion), well over double the government’s revenue. The international community has pledged to meet the eye-watering $4.1 billion those forces will require each year between 2015 and 2017. The Americans will pay the bulk and the UK under 2 per cent of it. But it is hard to see Congress or parliament keeping up this financial lifeline in perpetuity. So when Cameron says “mission accomplished”, we should ask: Which mission? And will it stay accomplished? The terrorist threat may not be eradicated, but it is unquestionably diminished. Nevertheless, the broader mission — the one that animated British policy after 2001, and sucked Britain into Helmand in 2006 — will earn few plaudits. If Britain has avoided defeat in Afghanistan, it is in large measure by shifting the goalposts.

— The Telegraph Group Ltd, London, 2013

Shashank Joshi is research fellow of the Royal United Services Institute.