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British soldiers of the Empire were undermined in Afghanistan by war aims that were not achievable, or poorly executed

IF THE sceptics are to win their argument as to why British forces should pull out of Afghanistan, yesterday was the day to pounce. Nothing better has demonstrated the drift and converse grip of intransigence that has increasingly come to characterise this Government than the fiasco of Lord Malloch-Brown’s U-turn on helicopter numbers.

Just hours after he told The Daily Telegraph “we definitely don’t have enough helicopters”, the outgoing Foreign Office minister – assumed by one and all to have come straight from a slapping at Number 10 – said he’d been misunderstood: “On the issue of helicopters in Afghanistan, I was making the point – as the prime minister and commanders on the ground have also done – that while there are without doubt sufficient resources in place for current operations, we should always do what we can to make more available on the frontline.”

Few appeared to believe him. Fewer still accepted Gordon Brown’s comments just an hour later at a Downing Street briefing to journalists that: “I am satisfied it has the resources it needs to be successful and I think the fact that it is yielding results already shows it is the case. We have to take ground and hold ground. It is completely wrong to say the loss of life is due to the absence of helicopters and that is being confirmed by officers on the ground.”

He claimed to have arrived at this assessment after speaking with his military commanders – although, presumably, not Sir Richard Dannatt, the soon-to-retire head of the army. Journalists, at daggers drawn with the Brown administration, have accused Defence Minister Bob Ainsworth and others of reacting to the Chief of the General Staff’s public calls for greater military resources with a smear campaign (the default tactic the PM and his people use in adversity, say cynics) before realising that it wouldn’t wash with Fleet Street and backing down, to further hoots of derision, not least for the Tories, whose own lack of focus must have caused them to look to the skies and give thanks for this most open of goals.

It might be funny to think that the next General Election could be fought and lost over whirlybirds, were it not for the numbers of dead soldiers involved. It must be incredibly frustrating for Brown, who has now lost the battle over adequate resourcing for operations in Afghanistan as the public debate has focused on this singular issue as the reason for the highest troop losses suffered by this country, even though there is evidence that other factors are contributing to casualties. But then it is hard to feel for a man hoisted by his own petard, whose steadfast refusal to properly fund Operation Herrick in its earlier days – either because he didn’t believe in it, or because he failed to understand the consequences of under-resourcing – has created the situation where, now that we are in combat operations in earnest, public support is melting away.

So, while the Government is right to argue that the rise in deaths is directly linked to the increase in the fighting’s intensity as part of Operation Panther’s Claw, it serves them right when the public doesn’t believe ministers.

Despite a majority of the public now against the war (47%, as opposed to 46% for, according to a recent Guardian/ICM poll), the media has ignored opposition at home, for despite the drift and a dangerous seeming absence of war objectives, the aim of bringing Afghanistan out of 30 years of conflict remains a laudable one – if only the natives would stop resisting our attempts to civilise them. It is in this area, and the lessons that history is supposed to have taught us, that commentary is now concentrating.

Writing on the BBC News website, Dr Huw Davies, a lecturer in Defence Studies at King’s College in London, asks “Will history repeat itself in Afghanistan?” before concluding, after examining our three previous forays there, that “much has changed”. Although he admits that there is far less of an empirical approach this time round, Dr Davies argues for a greater effort at cultural understanding. This raises all kinds of uncomfortable questions for a country whose boundaries are less a border and more a lasso thrown over a hubbub of tribes and cultures.

Comparisons have also been drawn with the Soviet conflict of the 1980s but, as with our three Afghan Wars of the 19th Century, the aims of the participants were different. The US, cleverly and correctly realising that fighting in Afghanistan could tie down and eventually bankrupt its strategic foe, poured a fortune (Operation Cyclone, the CIA funding operation, was up to $630 million by 1987) into supporting ungrateful mujaheddin, whose remaining veterans can sometimes be found directing so-called Taliban operations against its own forces.

But perhaps the most often over-looked aspect of this war is the use of the term Taliban. As a fundamentalist organisation, this ceased to exist in 2001, when Nato forces first entered the country. What we have in its place is really a semi-organised freedom fighter movement in which former Taliban commanders wield influence in certain areas – although that is to do with their experience rather than any Islamist desire on the part of their soldiers (indeed, plenty of former Taliban rankers themselves were more motivated out of a desire to survive rather than for ideological reasons). Most of the fighters that oppose our forces, and who are dying in numbers of up to 60 a day in Operation Panther’s Claw (and in the US’ Operation Strike of the Sword, to the South), are there because they have had enough of foreign interference. This even extends to the Arab volunteers, who are instead going into battle in neighbouring Pakistan, where there is in part a theological element to the insurgency there.

An absence of foreign volunteers, and indeed of the Taliban itself, rather undermines the whole reason for being at war. Gordon Brown maintains that if we were to leave, the country would return to the control of Mullah Omar and his colleagues who, having been seriously inconvenienced by eight years of conflict, would welcome back Osama bin Laden and his murderous entourage. It just doesn’t make sense, but then neither do our reasons for being at war.