The Making Of The British Army (75 page)

What had demoralized these troops was the residual ‘Northern Ireland approach’ – ‘counting each round’, and afterwards the pedantic after-action investigations by the military police and the lawyers – which had proved inadequate in the face of violent rebellion. And none of it was helped by the deep unpopularity of the war at home: at heart every soldier knew not only that the invasion had been of questionable legitimacy at the very least, but also, and more importantly, that the subsequent campaign had been botched.
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The strategy of ‘transition, with security’ was beginning to look like ‘cut and run’. Sir Richard Dannatt himself seemed to be saying as much when, in an interview shortly after becoming CGS, he hoped we would ‘get ourselves out sometime soon because our presence exacerbates the security problems’.

For their part, the Americans were critical of what they perceived as a British unwillingness to grip security in Basra. To some extent this was a reaction to British criticism of their heavy-handedness in the early days by officers certain of their better understanding of counter-insurgency, but it came also from their exasperated conviction that the surge was having tangible effect in the north and that the continuing lawlessness in the south was threatening to undermine it. London was nevertheless wedded to its withdrawal programme, the more so because of the violence of the Taleban resurgence in Helmand, which threatened to draw in a vastly greater number of men than had been expected. And it suited the new prime minister, Gordon Brown, with Blair’s Iraqi albatross hanging heavily around his neck, to announce progressive troop reductions – which he took every opportunity to do, sometimes counting the same troops twice.

Against this background, the least propitious since Suez, and embroiled in possibly the most unpopular war in the army’s history, commanders had a hard job of it in Basra. In September 2006 the new commander of MND(SE), Major-General (later Lieutenant-General) Richard Shirreff, a forceful cavalryman who like General David Petraeus was deeply read in his operational art, launched Operation Sinbad, in large part to restore the offensive spirit at battalion level, but principally to root out ineptness and corruption in the Basrawi police and to get a greater number of Iraqi troops on to the streets. Sinbad, which lasted for six months, went a good way to restoring fighting morale, but in the end it failed to achieve what it might have done because of sheer lack of ‘boots on the ground’. For unlike Petraeus, Shirreff did not have the ear of his commander-in-chief.
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That the British public evidently had little stomach for the fight was also exercising the CGS, who was increasingly dismayed at the indifference – and sometimes even hostility – shown towards the troops in Iraq (and Afghanistan), and the consequent effect on morale. He spoke of ‘the growing gulf between the Army and the nation’, contrasting it with the support that US troops were shown both politically and by the nation as a whole, and called for homecoming parades for regiments returning to Britain from operations. This was to prove more successful than many in the MoD expected.

Garrison towns, not just the regiments’ own recruiting areas, were soon turning out to applaud the marching ranks of desert combat dress. Even the least military of places were suddenly seized with a
Sunlike
feeling for ‘our boys’. The Norfolk market town of East Dereham asked the Light Dragoons based at a lonely disused airfield 5 miles away – the only troops for 50 miles – to march through its streets when they returned from Afghanistan, though all its soldiers were from either Yorkshire or the North-East. Being cavalry, and perhaps because it was late November, the dragoons put on their best uniform rather than ‘desert combats’. The local Iceni Brewery presented every soldier with a
bottle of specially brewed beer named ‘Breckland Hero’, and two dozen public houses across the county sold it and made donations from the profits to the Army Benevolent Fund and the ‘Help for Heroes’ campaign.
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Tough old serjeants who thought they had seen it all had lumps in their throats during the march. Similar events were taking place up and down the country as people tried to express support – sympathy – for the troops while distancing themselves from the war(s) itself. And in Wiltshire the little town of Wootton Bassett began what soon became the sad custom of lining the route for the hearses which take the repatriated bodies of servicemen from nearby RAF Lyneham on the first leg of their home journey to their final resting places. Dannatt had succeeded in decoupling esteem for the soldier from the political unpopularity of the war.

Not long afterwards, in December 2007, British troops pulled out of Basra altogether and consolidated at Basra airport in what was called an ‘overwatch’ role. This withdrawal remains hugely controversial. There was in it an element of ‘tough love’, judging that the Iraqis were as ready as they would ever be to take on operational responsibility for the city, with much reliance (including much hopeful thinking) placed on the respected Lieutenant-General Mohan al-Furayji, who commanded the two Iraqi army divisions in the south-east, though one of these was still in embryonic form. But in truth it was pragmatism: certain commanders had worked out that, in the absence of the resources, especially troop numbers, needed to do the job properly – a straight reflection of political – strategic will – the only sensible alternative left was in effect to ‘retreat’ into the firm base at the airport, having signed a deal with the devil: Muqtada al-Sadr, leader of the main Shia militia, the so-called Mahdi Army. The duke of Wellington used to say that the test of generalship was to know when to retreat and to have the courage to do it; but this was a retreat not of the soldiers’ making, and the imputations of defeat were and remain deeply resented.

Despite the militias’ ceasefire, which had allowed the British to quit the city without firing a shot, violence and general lawlessness once again flared up, in part because the Mahdi Army had been infiltrated by Iranian-trained saboteurs. General Mohan had planned to launch an operation with coalition forces to defeat the Mahdi Army and the
criminal gangs working under its patronage once his second division was ready, and before the provincial elections in October. But in late March the prime minister Nouri al-Maliki, buoyed up by the reduction of violence in Baghdad and elsewhere brought about by the surge (among other things), and dismayed by the starkly contrasting situation in Basra, told Petraeus that he intended taking personal command in the city and launching an immediate offensive against the Mahdi Army with Iraqi troops brought from the north.

Petraeus urged caution, but Operation Charge of the Knights went ahead two days later, taking the British as much by surprise as it did the militias (indeed, MND(SE)’s commander was out of the country). Within days, however, British troops were able to get themselves back into the loop and lend support, although Whitehall spin suggesting that everything had gone according to plan fooled no one. The then defence secretary Des Browne made an airy statement in Parliament, announcing that ‘We and our coalition partners are providing support to the Iraqis in line with our commitments under overwatch and in accordance with our usual rules of engagement. Requests for support are being made through the coalition, and I can confirm that UK forces have continued to meet all their obligations as part of the multinational corps.’ He was at once chided by the opposition whip and former soldier Crispin Blunt for hiding behind senior officers’ words, which to some extent have to be couched in such terms as to maintain morale.

Although the operation was at times chaotic – many Iraqi troops mutinied or deserted – it did succeed in clearing the Mahdi Army from significant areas of Basra, allowing the police and Iraqi army to consolidate control in the following months. By the end of the year, the city was as ‘peaceful’ as Baghdad was increasingly becoming. Even the
Guardian
, impaled uncomfortably on the dilemma of having supported the war while being viscerally unsympathetic to all things military, opined in December that ‘The Basra which Britain will leave behind is a city that is rubbish-strewn, divided and impoverished. But it is safer – at least for now – than it has been throughout most of the army’s five-year occupation.’ British troops formally withdrew from operational responsibilities in Iraq on 30 April 2009, leaving only small specialist teams – trainers principally – behind. Significantly, the Iraqi government has asked the British to run their officer cadet training, which perhaps inevitably was dubbed ‘Sandyhurst’.

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The strategic tug-of-war between Iraq and Afghanistan had been the entirely unintended and unforeseen consequence of that second strategic miscalculation in as many years: the ‘non-combat’ mission in Helmand. NATO had taken over responsibility for the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) in Southern Afghanistan, and it was unsurprising therefore that Britain would be asked to do more. Announcing the increase in troop numbers in January 2006, the defence secretary John Reid was at pains to explain that the 3,500 (a brigade’s worth) extra men were being deployed to help the reconstruction effort, but he added not unreasonably that

Predicting that security for the reconstruction of Helmand could be a three-year task, he distanced the operation from that of the Americans (Operation Enduring Freedom). It was, he said, ‘fundamentally different to that of the US forces elsewhere in Afghanistan … We are in the south to help and protect the Afghan people construct their own democracy.’ But then, in a sort of throwaway line which encapsulated a decade’s woolliness in Westminster’s military thinking, and having already implied that there was no unity of effort in the country, he added: ‘We would be perfectly happy to leave in three years and without firing one shot because our job is to protect the reconstruction.’

While such hopes of peace were wholly worthy they would soon reveal a dangerous mis-appreciation of the situation in Afghanistan, and in Helmand province in particular, as well as quite remarkable hubris. Within months of the announcement forty servicemen had been killed, half of them in Helmand in one month alone, for 16 Air Assault Brigade (which includes two battalions of the Parachute Regiment and all the army’s airborne combat support) at once began
trying to pre-empt Taleban attacks, as Reid had intimated, as well as fighting them off. The brigadier, Ed Butler, a former commander of the SAS, seemed determined to take the fight to the Taleban rather than await the inevitable – as he saw it – counter-offensive, though in fact in terms of combat power he had not much more than an augmented 3 Para. In the late summer and autumn there were daily and heavy fire-fights with the Taleban, and platoon-size (thirty men) standing patrols dotted about Helmand in defended houses had to resort increasingly to calling in fire from artillery, RAF (and allied) ground-attack aircraft – the RAF, principally, with that old warhorse the Harrier ‘jump jet’ – and the Apache attack-helicopter.
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While this huge amount of ordnance killed Taleban in large numbers, the collateral damage was also heavy, and what little progress there was in ‘nation-building’ was soon either put on hold or even reversed.

This was the time of General Sir David Richards’s ‘conversations with Slim and Templer’,
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and the ‘dozens of Rorke’s Drifts every day’.
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And although, unlike Iraq, Helmand was so far away as to be inaccessible to the casual news cameraman, the ‘embedded’ print journalists were able to paint pictures of the fighting which would have thrilled a Victorian audience. Under the headline ‘Makeshift “Rorke’s Drift” unit of medics and engineers hold out Taliban’ (26 November 2006), the
Daily Mail
’s Matthew Hickley wrote a story that (with the odd cut) could have come straight from the pages of the
Boy’s Own Paper: