Bob Ainsworth warns of ‘hard and dangerous’ road ahead as seventh soldier is reported killed in as many days
More British soldiers will die in Afghanistan, the defence secretary, Bob Ainsworth, warned today as it was announced that a seventh serviceman had been killed there in as many days.
In his first speech since he was appointed last month, Ainsworth said the conflict in Afghanistan would be “hard and dangerous”. There was no end date for military operations, which would cease only when Afghans were in a position to take responsibility for their own security, he said.
“Let us be under no illusion. The situation in Afghanistan is serious, and not yet decided. The way forward is hard and dangerous. More lives will be lost and our resolve will be tested.”
“No single or simple solution will work. Success will be achieved incrementally. Step by step and over time, the Afghans themselves will take full responsibility for their own security and their own governance.
“This is not going to happen tomorrow, nor in a few short weeks or months. If we are to succeed, we will need both the courage and the patience to see it through. There is no defined end date – only an end state.”
Addressing the foreign policy thinktank Chatham House, Ainsworth said: “In the face of the casualties we are seeing, it is understandable that people ask: is this too difficult?” But, he warned, if Nato forces left now, “the Taliban will take control and al-Qaida will return”.
He said he had recently met local elders in Sangin, in northern Helmand, the province in which hundreds of British soldiers recently launched a huge assault against insurgent strongholds. The elders had told him the people did not want the Taliban back, Ainsworth said. “We must stay and finish the job. There is a long way to go, but we are getting there.”
He later delivered a swipe at defence chiefs in general and General Sir Richard Dannatt, the head of the army, in particular. Asked why the government had rejected their plan to deploy a further 2,000 British troops to southern Afghanistan, Ainsworth replied: “Some of the people who are now saying ‘You should be doing more and putting more troops in there’ are some of the people who said a little while ago ‘You are breaking the army’ and ‘We’re doing too much.’”
Dannatt warned in 2006 that there was a danger that the commitment in Iraq could “break” the army.
Ainsworth said the government would “continue to make the contribution that is necessary, both in terms of people and resources”.
However, he was later criticised over the shortage of helicopters by Sir Brian Crowe, a former senior diplomat. Crowe said the situation appeared to be no better than 18 months previously, when his son, an army officer, had been in Afghanistan. “Why on earth are there not now enough helicopters?” he asked. “Why do we still have to borrow them [from US forces]? Why can’t we just buy some more helicopters?”
In his speech, Ainsworth said the focus now was to “prepare the way for [presidential] elections this year by confronting the insurgents, denying them the freedom to operate, isolating them and degrading their capability”. “It is crucial that these elections are credible and inclusive, providing the duly elected president with a mandate to take Afghanistan forward.”
The task now also was to “provide the time and space for the Afghan forces to take responsibility for the security of their people, and for the Afghan government to build their civil society.”
He said: “What will success will look like? Success will be an environment in which the Afghan government is capable of providing for its people the security required to govern their country themselves, suppress violent extremism and ensure the terrorists do not return. This means helping Afghanistan become an effective and accountable state, increasingly able to handle its security and deliver basic services to its people.”
That would require promoting a “political approach, encouraging reconciliation so that insurgents renounce violence in favour of legitimate, Afghan-led political processes. This needs to be done from a position of strength.”
Ainsworth warned again about expecting more casualties when describing the Taliban’s increasing use of improvised explosive devices. Referring to the deployment to Afghanistan of vehicles with heavier armour, Ainsworth said the insurgents were building higher-yield bombs. “So let us be clear”, he said: “Sacrificing manoeuvre for heavy armour in every circumstance is not the answer.”
Nick Harvey, the Liberal Democrat defence spokesman, said: “The truth is that for far too long our troops have simply not had the luxury of choosing between manoeuvrability and armour due to this government’s failure to act on equipment. New armoured vehicles are still not widely available to our troops in Afghanistan almost eight years after British forces went into the country.”
The high price of holding Helmand
A British commander’s death is not a crisis for the Afghanistan offensive, but a harsh reminder of the challenge facing the army
The death in action of the commanding officer of the Welsh Guards is a great sadness to his family, friends and his community in the regiment and the army. But it can hardly be deemed the “devastating blow” to British operations in Helmand portrayed by the BBC – nor even the “huge blow” described by the Times on Friday.
“This what brave and capable officers do,” a senior general told me this morning. “They lead their men in the best way they can, and this often means putting themselves in harm’s way. It is part of the job.”
By all accounts, Lieutenant Colonel Rupert Thorneloe, 39, was an outstanding officer. His legacy is in the battalion he trained and took to the fight in the Helmand valley where he died on 1 July – the great British military anniversary. On the same day 93 years ago, just shy of 20,000 of its sons were killed in a few hours on the first day of the long Somme offensive.
The Welsh Guards have been involved in some pretty hard pounding in Helmand, and still are. In just over two months, they have lost their commanding officer, a company commander, a platoon commander and a senior lance sergeant. Out of the 30 men in the reconnaissance Platoon, 19 have sustained injuries in combat. A brilliant insight into the nature of the fighting and the two big British and American operations along the Helmand river is given by Tom Coghlan in the Times.
On hearing of the colonel’s death, Coghlan said the guardsmen just carried on with the business in hand. This is exactly what happened when the last British commander was killed in battle. As it happens, I was some 300m back from where Lt Col H Jones of 2nd Battalion the Parachute Regiment was killed in the battle at Goose Green in 1982. The battle had stalled when he died, and after a brief rearrangement of who was in charge, Major Chris Keeble went forward, made adjustments to the plans in consultation with the company commanders and, slowly and surely, the paratroopers regained the initiative.
I do not recall anyone in the battalion talking about “a devastating blow” that afternoon on the Darwin Isthmus in the Falklands – they had too much work to do. H Jones gave orders about what should happen if he should be killed: the battery commander would direct the immediate battle, until the second-in-command, Major Keeble, could come forward to command the whole battle. Colonel Thorneloe will have made the same provision, with his second-in-command now in charge.
But this doesn’t mean that aren’t some serious tactical and strategic issues raised by his death. First, there is the proven vulnerability of the Viking tracked vehicle, which is too thinly armoured to resist the new booby trap bombs of the Taliban. Last month, the Oxford coroner welcomed the army’s announcement that the vehicles – originally designed to move ski troops in the Arctic – are to be replaced.
The most worrying aspect is the simplicity of such bombs used by the Taliban. The bombs are buried in the dirt and sand with very little in the way of electronics and only pressure plates to set them off when a vehicle trundles over or near them. This makes them very hard to detect by mine clearance teams.
The strategic question is raised by the big operations involving up to 10,000 British, American and Afghan troops now under way. The aim is to clear the Taliban out of the villages along the river, the prime poppy-growing territory, so they can hold relatively trouble-free national elections for the presidency and the assembly on 20 August.
The aim is described as “pushing back” the Taliban. No one is talking of an outright defeat of the Taliban across southern Afghanistan. Soon, the international forces will have close to the numbers the Russians had the height of their occupation and war against the Mujahideen in the 1980s – some 110,000 troops on the ground.
Unlike that war, the fighting has spread well beyond Afghanistan itself, into the North West Frontier territories and the Swat valley of Pakistan, and is now part of a broad regional conflict. Russia’s entanglement in Afghanistan ran for a disastrous decade and ended in a withdrawal that could only be called defeat; today, the commander-in-chief of the most powerful international force contingent, President Obama, has given himself a deadline of two years to get this, the military, phase of the job done.