baldysblog.co.uk

With the sad repatriation of 8 British soldiers today, there is obviously lots of media attention and politicians of all parties spouting this or that. Whilst the lack of helicopters is a major issue, of itself it is not the solution.

It should be borne in mind that the casualties suffered by a Rifles foot patrol that virtually eliminated a whole section could not have been prevented by any equipment. As part of holding the ground and reassuring the civilian population requires foot patrols which means however altered on a daily basis, a pattern will be created that the Taliban can take advantage of knowing where the troops will be and how they will react to a threat.

More…

More troops, a lot more troops would help in a whole number of ways but after ‘taking the ground’, the holding operation will always be expensive in terms of casualties whether caused by IEDs or Snipers. As an IRA Commander said during the ‘Troubles’ about similar attacks in Northern Ireland: “We only have to get lucky once, the British have to be lucky all of the time.”

Withdrawal in the immediate is not an option. The biggest single threat to the UK comes from Pakistan and the Tribal Region of the NW Frontier, as the Pakistani Army is making good progress and putting in a strong effort, we need to support them by putting in pressure from Afghanistan which is what these current operations seem to be about.

However, the idea that we are going to stay there for the long haul is a total illusion, we most certainly are not. We have no more than 2-3 years maximum before the NATO and US presence becomes part of the problem rather than any kind of solution and transform into the “foreign invader” that unites them all.

What Will be Left Behind

Forget leaving behind a stable western type democracy, it just won’t happen, as a society what we would describe as corruption, they describe as ‘power’. Opium gives the local Warlord the funds to finance power through dispensing favours, jobs and so forth, to the Taliban it provides the funds to pay farmers between harvests to fight the “invader”. There are fundamental Taliban but the majority of the tribes and groups that are ‘sympathetic’ to the Taliban are only so for their immediate self interest.

The only way Afghanistan can be held together is via the Central Government ‘doing deals’ with all the various Warlords which is exactly what happened when the West fixated on Iraq and forgot about Afghanistan. Any idea that on the back of NATO bayonets the writ of the Central Government can be extended nationwide is total nuts, both the British in the 19^th Century and the Russians in the 20^th have been here before.

Public Opinion

In the end public opinion in the West will decide the duration of this campaign and certainly in the UK opinion is pretty mixed and currently divided down the middle. Oddly, in the past year or so, support for the campaign has increased but remains volatile. There is a general perception that Gordon Brown is not to be trusted in these matters and has personally been responsible for the serious under funding of the Armed Forces that has taken place since 1997.

I do not believe that “lilly livered lefties” or any other thing will influence the withdrawal so much as the reality on the ground plus, what the Government has been totally lacking in, a clear message of both the strategy and the milestones that signify when the operation ends and troops withdraw. The British public are quite sophisticated on this and unless there is a clear message from Government, will assume that they don’t have a clue and therefore will want the troops pulled out on the basis that if there is no good reason for young troops to be maimed and die there, we shouldn’t be there.

One of the biggest problems with Afghanistan is the logistics tail or pipeline that starts at Karachi in Pakistan and has been frequently attacked. It means that we do need to make sure that the route back to and through the Khyber Pass is always made secure both for resupply now and withdrawal of heavy equipment, later.

Buying the Crop

With regard to the Opium crop, it has often been asked just why we in the West just don’t buy up the whole crop and use it for medicinal purposes ?

Whilst on the surface totally logical, I suspect that the reason it hasn’t been seriously tried and likely never will is simply that in a tribal society, it wouldn’t take them 5 minutes to work out that ‘skimming the crop’ buy understating yields by say 10 percent and selling that on a black market, combined with the guaranteed buy price for the rest, would be far more profitable and safer than the current system.

As with most things, there would be both good and bad in this situation. The ‘black market crop’ would push up the street price in the West but also increase the likelihood of greater violence and corruption along the whole route from Helmand through Pakistan and so on.

Oddly I understand, whilst the Taliban were in charge of Afghanistan, they throttled off a lot of Opium production on religious grounds. In a controlled market, local Tribal Chiefs and Warlords rather than the Central Government would control Opium production so, I don’t think buying the crop would work in the way intended.