War From the Ground Up (21 page)

The enduring prevalence of a Huntingtonian conception of civil-military relations is exemplified by the ineffectiveness of the strategic dialogue that liberal powers have conducted during the coalition campaign in Afghanistan. The coalition narrative has, at the time of writing, shifted essentially to the avoidance of state failure. As of January 2012 the International Security and Assistance Force (ISAF) mission was stated as follows:

In support of the Government of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan, ISAF conducts operations in Afghanistan to reduce the capability and will of the insurgency, support the growth in capacity and capability of the Afghan National Security Forces (ANSF), and facilitate improvements in governance and socio-economic development in order to provide a secure environment for sustainable stability that is observable to the population.
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General Stanley McChrystal's re-assessment of the situation on his assumption of the ISAF command, which encouraged an alignment of desire in the light of practical possibility, took place in 2009, although the process had been started by General David McKiernan before him.
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However, it was evident earlier than 2009 that wide policy goals were unrealistic. The assumption that the coalition's actions earlier in the campaign were always leading to the same end point is an understandable teleological perspective, encouraged by a retrospective viewpoint from the more coherent strategic context that emerged after 2009; but it distorts the historical reality. Many of the coalition's actions were going a different way before 2009, to satisfy different policy objectives that were at best confused.

The British Secretary of Defence at the time thought of the deployment of British troops into Helmand in 2006 primarily as a reconstruction mission. This was not an illegitimate viewpoint given the absence of a serious pre-existing insurgency. However, that narrative was not agile enough to maintain coherence once real fighting started, and yet it did not evolve, causing a gap to open. As an infantry platoon commander, I met no soldiers or junior officers in my 2007–8 tour in Afghanistan who actually thought that our more idealistic aims were really achievable, at least without a long and well-resourced commitment in most rural parts of southern Afghanistan. At this time Prime Minister Brown would describe in Parliament what British forces were
doing in terms which emphasised schools, governance and drug eradication. This may well have been his view, but had little to do with the army's operations at the time, which were focused on clearing out the Taliban from populated areas through aggressive combat operations.

The Prime Minister by late 2008 came to stop mentioning his previous view of the more idealistic interpretation of the army's actions, and focused instead on securing Afghanistan from terrorism in terms of UK national security.
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From then on the ‘chain of terror from Afghanistan to the UK' argument has dominated, although this is increasingly failing to convince people.
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Justification tends now to focus on the mission's other, to my mind legitimate, goals: state and regional stability, the credibility of NATO and the moral commitment to the Afghan people.

Having moved away from more ambitious policy goals, Western politicians now tend to define the narrative in the negative: ‘we are not building Hampshire in Helmand' or ‘Switzerland in Afghanistan' are both expressions that have been used by British politicians. In his speech of 27 March 2009, President Obama declared the objective to be to ‘Disrupt, Dismantle and Defeat al-Qaeda in Afghanistan and Pakistan', primarily in the context of Western security and regional stability, a significantly clearer and more narrowly focused mission. Afghanistan would need to be secure to achieve this. In terms of the Afghan state, President Obama has been reported to have spoken (confidentially at the time) in the US National Security Council about not having the resources to ‘build a perfect Afghan state', and possibly achieving ‘Bangladesh levels of corruption'; this is fairly depressing, especially since it is an aspiration.
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However, President Obama's more pragmatic approach is entirely sensible and more realistic, given what is within the realm of the possible on the ground. Ultimately, to have significantly reduced the policy aims of the war is common sense on the basis that one needs to align what is desired with what is possible.

Discrepancies between aims and their achievability became apparent as both the NATO footprint and the insurgency expanded from 2005–9. The December 2005 revision to the plan (NATO OPLAN 10302, Revise 1) which set out the extension of the NATO footprint into southern and eastern Afghanistan (following the earlier expansion into the North and West) set out a narrow ‘Alliance Political End State': ‘a self-sustaining, moderate, and democratic Afghan government able to
exercise its sovereign authority, independently, throughout Afghanistan' (note that anti-terrorist operations were still to be conducted under separate authority, such as Operation Enduring Freedom, distinct from the NATO plan).
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To achieve the end state, the plan set out NATO's mission in Afghanistan: essentially, that in coordination with Afghan security forces, the NATO force would assist with security, the development of Afghan governance structures, and assist reconstruction/humanitarian efforts.
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As far as expansion into southern Afghanistan was concerned: ‘the strategic intent of the southern expansion is twofold. First, to expand the beneficial ISAF effect in Afghanistan by deploying NATO-led PRTs [Provincial Reconstruction Teams] into the Southern Provinces. Secondly, expansion to the south will establish conditions for the assimilation of the remaining provinces into the NATO-led mission…'
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The three levels used here as examples (political end-state, strategic mission, regional application of strategic intent) at which the NATO plan engages can in one interpretation be seen as fairly narrow in their objectives. If the lower level regional direction is read in the light of the political end-state, their ambition is limited to a fairly stable Afghan state, which is not far from the present aim. However, these examples also show that if read individually, and more broadly than was probably intended by the plan's drafters, there is the potential here to understand the mission more in terms of nation building. Moreover, there was not a large-scale insurgency to frustrate the plan at the time it was published in December 2005. By the time it was being implemented, and partly given the expansion of the insurgency in response to its implementation, the beneficial effects of NATO's expansion into the south were far less detectable than the vicious fighting that was taking place. Even if the destruction that such fighting brought with it was actually localised, wider audiences were at the time more disposed to have understood the conflict through the lens of aggressive combat operations than reconstruction.

The NATO 2005 plan read how, I think, its drafters would have intended it to have been read makes sense and was not overly ambitious. However, the scope for interpreting it in a broader, more ambitious sense was made apparent by the potentially confusing narratives advertised by Westerners, from political leaders speaking to their electorates to soldiers explaining to Afghans why they were there, sometimes during
combat patrols on their land. In the background of the picture was the idea of reconstruction; in the foreground was intense violence, at least in the southern and eastern peripheral areas of Afghanistan. The strategic narrative did not paint a coherent tableau; its conflicting themes were only re-harmonised in 2009 in terms of aims, the resourcing of those aims and their operational execution. The speed at which strategic dialogue was able to harmonise desire and possibility was too slow, and was outpaced by events on the ground.

Afghanistan illustrates how, in any circumstance, possibility will ultimately catch up with desire. If one cannot change the facts on the ground with the means allocated to do so, the facts will catch up with one's policy and force it to change, or make it fail. If policy is unrealistic, there will come a point when that becomes clear. The key question in a liberal democratic context is to whom it is clear, and the time it takes between being clear to those on the ground, to the policy-makers, and ultimately to the public, their auditors. The lag between perception and reality can be identified when the strategic narrative does not correspond to the reality on the ground. If ground truth and the perception of ground truth by those who make policy are different, the closing of the lag between the two can be politically embarrassing, and worse, lethal.

The alternative to changing policy ungracefully because it is publicly obvious that it is unrealistic is regularly to adjust aims in light of what is possible; thus intention and possibility are not allowed to move too far apart. That implies early recognition of the point at which aims are not being realised on the ground. As this is typically most obvious to those on the ground, it means incorporating them into strategic dialogue.

This may seem to be common sense, but it is by no means common practice. In a Westminster Hall debate on Helmand in 2009, Adam Holloway MP, an ex-army officer, stated:

I wonder what on earth the Government have been doing. The Defence and International Development Committees go out there regularly. Every time we are given the same good news story, but it is not reflected on the ground. It is like smoke and mirrors, with everyone lying and deluding themselves. That is certainly how it feels from my perspective. As one Government employee put it to me yesterday: ‘We realise it is now time to start taking it seriously'.
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There is an argument that the UK government cannot make strategic decisions as a junior partner in an American-led coalition. The need to
maintain the credibility of NATO and keep the UK under the US security umbrella are legitimate objectives. However, the lack of clarity over the political command and control of the mission from a junior partner's point of view in a coalition can lead to correspondingly confused political engagement with the campaign, especially in terms of the expectations of the domestic population. The handover of Sangin (a town in Helmand) to the US Marine Corps in 2010 made complete sense in operational terms, as it allowed UK forces to concentrate their efforts in central Helmand. This set conditions for the relative success which the British army, with adequate force ratios, has had in securing its three districts of central Helmand since then.

However, the fact that so many British lives had been lost in Sangin consumed most of the media attention of the handover; the media coverage also highlighted the corresponding military concern that it would be seen as a British defeat or forced withdrawal. In one sense, to remember British casualties is entirely understandable and correct. In another sense, however, the concern that such a move would be seen as a British defeat (which it was not) exemplifies how the temptation remains for the domestic populations of junior coalition partners to see the conflict too rigidly through the experience of their own troops.

The British public tend to identify Afghanistan with Helmand, for example. A coalition campaign will only work if the coalition maintains political coherence, which often means junior partners acknowledging that policy is made higher up, even if they have some input. To talk about ‘British policy aims' in Afghanistan only makes sense when understood that this is in a coalition context, unless one is specifically alluding to reasons for British participation in the conflict that are ulterior to what the coalition is seeking to achieve in Afghanistan.

Proper strategic dialogue involves the adjustment of policy in the light of practical reality in relation to various audiences. Such dialogue should be continuous, as it is in domestic politics; politicians are wary of overly idealistic policy, precisely because they understand that it can cause political embarrassment when it fails.

One of war's defining features is its strong tendency to evolve in unexpected directions. Clausewitz identified how policy cannot entirely regulate war. In war the particular logic that is brought into being when
there is a clash of organised violence had a subordinate, but independent role. Clausewitz described the ‘explosive' quality of war's logic, namely its capacity to escalate into something beyond the desire of the policy-maker, and beyond even the desire of both sides: ‘war is an act of force and there is no logical limit to the application of that force. Each side, therefore, compels his opponent to follow suit; a reciprocal action is started which must lead, in theory, to extremes'.
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While war itself was for Clausewitz subordinate to policy, the relationship was certainly not one way. War itself, its internal logic brought about by the clash of violence, either actual or anticipated, had an active role which could push back on policy and change it. Thus policy would ‘permeate all military operations, and so far as their violent nature will admit, it will have continuous influence upon them'. For Clausewitz ‘the political aim is not a tyrant. It must adapt itself to its chosen means, a process which can radically change it; yet the political aim remains the first consideration'.
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Clausewitz summarised the relationship between the uncertainties of violent clashes that war brought into play, which he termed war's ‘grammar', and policy, in the argument that war's ‘grammar, indeed, may be its own, but not its logic'.
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The point is that policy does ultimately regulate war by providing its ‘logic'; yet violence in war produces dynamics which policy cannot fully control.

The capacity of war's ‘grammar', even as the subordinate agent, to unhinge policy has revealed itself to some degree in every war. Admiral J. C. Wylie argued that, rather than being a continuation of policy, ‘war for a non-aggressor nation is actually a near collapse of policy'.
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The defeat of one side is the obvious example of this throughout history: the final collapse of policy in war. In this case war is still animated by policy, but the enemy's rather than one's own. War can unhinge the policy of the victors too. France and Britain were among the victors of the First World War. Yet the Great War for them was not the war it was supposed to be. It was not over by Christmas 1914; their empires were mortgaged to pay for the conflict; in the long-term it marked the start of the end of a period of European world domination.