The Making Of The British Army (73 page)

In late 1995 a political settlement, brokered at Dayton, Ohio, brought a fragile ceasefire between the Bosnian Serbs and Bosnian Muslims. It was to be cemented by an ‘implementation force’ (IFOR) based on the new NATO Allied Command Europe Rapid Reaction Corps (ARRC) with an enforcement mandate from the Security Council. The ARRC was British-led with a predominantly British staff, and its key fighting elements were British. And there was indeed some fighting to enforce the agreement, but although intense at times it was local and renegade, and by degrees the ARRC was able to withdraw. In its place an ad hoc ‘stabilization force’ (SFOR) was able to oversee the ten-year process of democratization which led in December 2005 to the EU’s taking responsibility for the residual military operation.

It would not be the ARRC’s last encounter with the Balkans, however, for there was, as Washington called it, ‘unfinished business’ – unfinished from Dayton, but also from the fall of the Berlin Wall, from the Second World War, from the First World War, and even from the Congress of Vienna. After the Dayton ‘humiliation’ the Serbian
president Slobodan Milosevic, who had backed the Bosnian Serbs both militarily and politically, turned to forcibly expelling the Muslims from the semi-autonomous region of Kosovo. In 1999, after a prolonged strategic bombing campaign by NATO air forces, he agreed to withdraw the Serbian army and paramilitaries from Kosovo and accept instead a NATO force to stabilize the ethnic conflict which had been largely of his making. Again, the commander was British – Lieutenant-General (later General) Sir Mike Jackson, the future CGS, whose famous disagreement with US General Wesley Clark over the Russian
coup de main
at Pristina airport won him plaudits on both sides of the Atlantic.
²⁶²
The occupation of Kosovo was, indeed, a very British combination of military diplomacy and force, both implied and explicit: at its peak there were nearly 20,000 British troops committed to ‘KFOR’. But Kosovo has remained ‘unfinished’, and many soldiers wondered at the time how the government, by now headed by Tony Blair, could continue taking the ‘peace dividend’, further reducing the army’s strength, in so patently uncertain a post-Cold-War world.

What emerged from the Balkans, however, was a renewal of military pragmatism in the British army, and a confidence to engage in operations where there is both a threat from the enemy and a battle for the support of the civil community – ‘war among the people’, as the former UNPROFOR commander and leader of 1st Armoured Division in the Gulf War, General Sir Rupert Smith, calls it. Dag Hammarskjöld, the UN’s second and greatest Secretary-General, once said that peacekeeping was ‘not a job for soldiers but only soldiers can do it’. The experience of Bosnia, especially before Dayton, and of Kosovo, underscored the word
soldier:
the peacekeeper had to be a man thoroughly expert in battle drills and equipped to fight; he had to be able to
throw
a punch if the promise of
pulling
his punches was to have any effect; he would otherwise be merely brushed aside by bruisers who did not fight by the rules.

At the turn of the twenty-first century, therefore, the British army, smaller than it had been since before Bonaparte’s day, was a master of ‘operations other than war’. Some officers were echoing the Americans’ concern, however, that a constant diet of ‘minimum force’ and seeking
consent was blunting the army’s fighting edge. But would there ever be a need again for the all-arms, high-intensity battle of old?

The Pentagon was certain there would.

THE EXACT MOMENTS AT WHICH THE TWO HIJACKED PLANES CRASHED INTO
the ‘Twin Towers’ on 11 September 2001 – ‘9/11’ – are now erased from the mainstream media. Taste and decency demand it, and also reason: repetition risks dulling the senses. Yet although the choice of weapon and target far exceeded the evil of the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor (a day that in Roosevelt’s words would ‘live in infamy’), the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, and the heroically thwarted attack on the White House, shared with Pearl Harbor the shock of sudden vulnerability – and in consequence provoked the same seismic shift of strategy. If Kipling had been alive he might have been moved to write something along the lines of ‘Edgehill Fight’, noting that the twisted outline of blackened steel ‘changes the world today’.
²⁶³

Forty-eight hours after the attacks a defiant President George W. Bush stood amid the rubble at ‘Ground Zero’ (significantly, the term used of the point of impact of a nuclear weapon), his hand on the shoulder of one of the New York firemen who had borne the brunt of the courageous rescue effort, and spoke to the crowd through a microphone.
When a distant voice called out, ‘George, we can’t hear you!’ Bush smiled and answered loudly: ‘I can hear you! I can hear you, the rest of the world can hear you, and the people who knocked these buildings down will hear all of us soon!’

A week later, addressing Congress, Bush expanded on his extemporary remark:

Sitting close by the president in Congress was Tony Blair, Britain’s prime minister, who had flown to Washington in a show of solidarity and to offer support (though tellingly he had not taken with him the chief of the defence staff). Bush spoke of several countries which had shown their support, then added: ‘America has no truer friend than Great Britain. Once again, we are joined together in a great cause. I’m so honoured the British prime minister has crossed an ocean to show his unity with America. Thank you for coming, friend.’

Going to Washington was, of course, what Churchill had done in the aftermath of Pearl Harbor. Blair’s ocean crossing would likewise define the British military response, though he played his hand with considerably less acumen than Churchill did in the Second World War.

Within a month of the attacks the United States had begun its military counter-offensive, the ‘War on Terror’. Afghanistan under the Taleban had been a haven and training ground for Al-Qaeda, which had carried out the 9/11 attacks as well as bombings and assassinations over the previous decade in East Africa, the Middle East and western Asia.
The US campaign to oust the Taleban from Afghanistan (Operation Enduring Freedom), endowed with legitimacy under Article 5 of the North Atlantic Charter,
²⁶⁴
was a brilliantly conceived and well-executed application of high-tech intelligence, Special Forces (including British), air power (including the RAF), and the armies of the various anti-Taleban warlords known officially as the United Islamic Front for the Salvation of Afghanistan, and commonly as the Northern Alliance.

By the middle of November, Kabul was in the hands of the Americans and their allies, and by the end of December it looked as if all that was left was merely mopping up. Indeed Sir John Keegan, writing in the
Daily Telegraph
, compared the apparent victory with one of the great turning points in the military history of the British Empire: ‘The collapse of Taliban resistance in northern Afghanistan and the fall of Kabul may stand as one of the most remarkable reversals of military fortune since Kitchener’s victory at Omdurman in the Sudan in 1898.’

But despite the ferocious battles in the mountains of south-east Afghanistan, in which lay the cave complex of Tora Bora to which many Taleban had bolted, the key Al-Qaeda leaders could not be found. Those Taleban who had not been killed in last stands at Tora Bora fled across the border into Pakistan.

US and British forces and their Afghan allies now began to consolidate. A
loya jirga
(grand council) of tribal leaders and former exiles, in effect an interim Afghan government, was established in Kabul under Hamid Karzai, and military attention turned to civil projects to win over the hearts and minds of those Afghans who were indifferent to who ruled in Kabul. The Taleban had not given up, however, and both American and British troops were in action throughout 2002, although far enough from Kabul as to reinforce the general impression that peace prevailed, and democratic and economic progress was being made. British efforts were in the main concentrated on ‘provincial reconstruction’, in which the army (with around 1,500 troops) was – in broad terms – meant to provide conditions of security within which the civilian agencies could operate. However, both London and Washington increasingly took their military eyes off the ball, while the
civil agencies seemed unable or unwilling to play the game at all. The experienced British major-general in charge of the multinational ‘security assistance force’, John McColl (who would later become NATO’s deputy supreme allied commander Europe), was replaced by a newly promoted colonel to head the British contingent. It all looked like the early symptoms of ‘mission-accomplished’ syndrome.
²⁶⁵

The causes of the Iraq War of 2003, or the Second Gulf War as it is sometimes called (with either a conscious or an unconscious nod to continuity – or ‘unfinished business’), were several, ranked differently depending on viewpoint: Iraq’s alleged possession of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) which posed an imminent threat to US security and that of their allies in the ‘War on Terror’; Saddam Hussein’s harbouring and supporting Al-Qaeda in the ‘nexus of terrorism’; his financial support for the families of Palestinian suicide bombers; Iraqi human rights abuses, not least on the Kurds of Northern Iraq; security of the country’s oil reserves as well as wider regional security fears; and the ‘neocon’ doctrine of accelerating the post-Communist glide into worldwide liberal democracy, including pre-emption where necessary.
²⁶⁶
So motives might have been mixed; but mixed motives are not necessarily bad motives, and collectively the concerns clearly amounted in Washington to a strong
casus belli.

Tony Blair, in another instinctive move that some believe to have been strategically correct for the ‘special relationship’ (‘my ally right or wrong’), immediately aligned himself with President Bush in the rhetoric of the
jus ad bellum
, as he had in the immediate aftermath of 9/11. Not only was this Britain’s
only
possible geopolitical option, the apologists argue, Blair also believed that by nailing his colours to Bush’s mast he would be able to influence events before, during and after the war. Only the long view of history can judge Blair’s strategic wisdom, but his ‘tactics’ proved wholly wishful: Britain had no meaningful
influence in the planning or conduct of the war, nor any in the concept for post-conflict nation-building. Indeed, there seems to have been precious little planning for what would happen after Saddam was toppled. General Sir Richard Dannatt, former chief of the general staff, has put it simply: ‘I think history will show that the planning for what happened after the initial successful war fighting phase was poor, probably based more on optimism than sound planning.’

The war itself was peremptory in its execution, however, confounding many a pundit who had predicted Armageddon.
²⁶⁷
In only twenty-one days, a US force of nearly 250,000 forged its way to Baghdad, the Iraqi army of almost twice that size, including the famed Republican Guard with its capable Russian-made tanks, disintegrating before them. Meanwhile, the British contingent – three brigades, including 3rd (Commando) Brigade Royal Marines, under Headquarters 1st Armoured Division – took the key port of Basra and secured the oilfields of the south-east.