Pride and fall: the British army in Afghanistan, 2001-2014
by Sergio Miller
Osprey, £30

SERGIO MILLER served in defence intelligence in the Ministry of Defence throughout the British army’s campaign in Afghanistan from 2001 to 2014. This is his outstanding study of a war that cost the lives of over 450 British servicemen and women, and over £37 billion in national treasure.

Throughout, Miller pays tribute to the courage and determination of the soldiers, marines, airmen and sailors who served in Afghanistan.

It was Britain’s second-longest war in the last 100 years (the conflict in Northern Ireland was the longest), and Miller claims that it was also Nato’s first real war — wasn’t Nato’s illegal assault on Yugoslavia in 1991 a real war?

Just a week after the September 11 2001 terrorist attacks in the New York, US national security analyst Anthony Cordesman warned: “Nothing could be worse than sending ground forces across hostile territory into the middle of nowhere in search of a dispersed and hidden enemy with no strategic objective other than to replace one bad regime with a fragmented one, and with the certainty of region-wide hostility and a long-term political backlash.”

But Britain’s Strategic Defence Review of 1998 had argued that Britain “must be prepared to go to the crisis, rather than have the crisis come to us.” Miller observes: “Of course, it was the British government’s interventionism that was provoking home-grown terrorism, but this point could not be conceded.”

Former ambassador Rodric Braithwaite, in evidence to the defence select committee, said: “I’ve never believed the argument that by fighting in Helmand you will prevent people plotting in the mountains of Pakistan to blow us up on the streets of London.”

Miller comments: “He was right.”

Prime minister Tony Blair told the lord mayor’s banquet in November 2001: “Once chaos and strife have got a grip on a region or a country trouble will soon be exported.” But, as Miller writes, “The last half-century had witnessed an exceedingly long roll-call of chaos, strife and ‘failed states,’ none of which had led to any harm being done to ‘us’.”

General Mike Jackson, former chief of the general staff (CGS), later conceded that the British task force provoked the violence by poking a stick into the “Taliban anthill.” Miller shows that the British entry into Helmand was a disaster because it incited the province-wide insurrection.

Miller criticises Margaret Thatcher’s 1985 decision to privatise Royal Ordnance. It later collapsed because it was undercut by foreign competitors, which did not seem to have bothered the ministers awarding contracts to foreign firms. In 1985 Britain had had 16 ammunition factories, but by 2001 we had just one left.

After the war, the independent and bipartisan US Commission on Wartime Contracting in Iraq and Afghanistan concluded its three-year investigation: “At least $31 billion, and possibly as much as $60 billion, has been lost to contract waste and fraud in US contingency operations in Iraq and Afghanistan.”

Miller points out that no such investigation was undertaken in Britain and never would be, even though corrupt Afghan officials had stolen tens of millions of pounds of British taxpayers’ money. He also notes “the persistent, gross financial mismanagement” in the Ministry of Defence, which had a £74 billion black hole in its finances.

He sums up: “Neither the Taliban nor al-Qaeda had been defeated. They were stronger. The absurdity of the proposition was self-evident to all except those determined to defend the notion that Helmand represented some sort of jihadist domino in the Global War on Terror — a British soldier or marine dying in a street in Sangin was somehow keeping another Briton in a street in Surbiton ‘safe’.”

Nato member governments, misled by a misguided Washington, spent 14 years fighting “non-wars” against “non-terrorists,” engaging in two ruinously misconceived exercises in armed nation-building in Iraq and Afghanistan.

To the end the US government continued to promote “the fallacy that although the war was not winnable in a conventional sense, the Taliban were beatable, and beating the Taliban was an essential precursor to successful negotiation and withdrawal. This was the same fallacy promoted in the long and painful withdrawal from Vietnam.”

The book is a timely reminder that wars are not born of mistakes, or of our rulers’ folly. Wars are terribly profitable for the ruling class. They are also terribly useful politically, because they divert our class from seeing its real enemy.