the invasion I said in the House of Commons that our actions were ‘every bit as justified as the fight against Nazism in the 1940s’.
By 2005, when I became Conservative leader, there was a growing sense that while Iraq might be the ‘wrong war’, as it had little to do with tackling Islamist extremism and might in fact be encouraging it, Afghanistan was the ‘right war’. We were at least trying to deal with one of the principal sources of the problem, and responding to a direct attack.
Come 2010, my message matched what I had said in the House of Commons almost a decade before. Our troops were combatting terrorism, with the Taliban beaten back. They were defending our security, with plots no longer coming directly out of Afghanistan (although there was still more to be done to address the threat from ungoverned parts of neighbouring Pakistan).
Sadly, like whack-a-mole, the scourge of Islamist extremism and its promotion of terror would rear its head elsewhere. Every broken or fragile state was a potential incubator, and the Afghanistan–Pakistan border was the most virulent region of all. But in tackling it there, we were tackling the motherlode.
In any case, it is true to say that Britain is safer as a result of the hard work and bloody sacrifice of our troops in Afghanistan.
That’s why the view of our intelligence experts in 2010 was clear: what we were doing remained justified. The most significant security threat to the United Kingdom remained al-Qaeda. If we left Afghanistan precipitately, it – and its training camps – could return.
But our action came at a grave cost. We were taking casualties almost every day. And, like the vast, sandy plains we were fighting over, the war seemed to have no end in sight.
What helped me now I was PM was that I’d visited Afghanistan more than any other country. I knew the drill: picking up a Hercules turboprop plane or a C17 transport jet in the Gulf to take us to Camp Bastion or the capital, Kabul. Then travelling onwards in the Americans’ Black Hawk helicopters or our own Chinooks, where I would sit upfront in the ‘jump seat’ just behind the pilots; landing to see the small fortified Forward Operating Bases (FOBs) our troops were defending, often against ferocious attack.
I knew the landscape: the way the totally dry desert merged into the lush green Helmand River valley, the beautiful blue-green water fertilising the land; the mud-brick houses that told of a deeply conservative society that hadn’t really changed for decades, even centuries.
I had seen some of the worst trouble spots, visiting the Helmandi town of Sangin in 2008 with William Hague. As we sat being briefed on the roof of the district centre under the fierce sun we could hear the crackle of small-arms fire. A local checkpoint was under attack. There was the quietest rush of air as a stray bullet passed overhead. The commanding officer gently ushered us under cover, muttering about the dangers of sunburn. Wonderfully British.
I had got to know a lot of the personnel, too. Hugh Powell, a top-rate civil servant, had served as the head of the Provincial Reconstruction Team in the capital of Helmand, Lashkar Gah, as well as being the senior Brit coordinating the UK counter-insurgency in the south of the country. One time we had breakfast together wearing our helmets because of an imminent security threat. Another, we tried on the full kit, body armour and radio of a lance corporal, jogging with a rifle around the yard of an FOB in the forty-degree heat.
When I first visited Bastion I climbed the air-traffic control tower and looked over a small camp of tents. Since then it had grown to an area the size of Reading, complete with a runway, a water-bottling plant, a medical facility as sophisticated as any district general hospital – and a KFC. Many of the pilots were from RAF Brize Norton in my constituency, and would talk candidly to me about life at the base. I heard about the problems first hand, from frustration at the lack of contact time with home to the potentially fatal shortage of helicopters and delays in getting new body armour.
Sometimes we would stay in Kandahar, the massive, mostly US, airbase covering the whole of southern Afghanistan. It was home to many of our fighter and helicopter pilots and our remarkable troops. Two miles long and right next to the city that is in some ways the spiritual home of the Taliban, it was subject to the occasional rocket attack and repeated ambushes.
I had also seen what ordinary life was like for Afghan people. I’ll never forget watching children flying kites across the river from where we were staying, or visiting a school funded by the UK’s Department for International Development.
I knew the lingo: a mixture of military-speak and banter. The heat: like a blazing fire that hits you the minute you step off the aircraft, made worse by the altitude that can leave you exhausted. The sand: it got everywhere; you’d come home with it still up your nose. The sounds at night: the constant coming and going of helicopters, the alarms when there was a threat of attack, and the endless sound of the diesel generators.
I even grew used to the tight, corkscrew take-offs and landings designed to evade rocket-propelled grenades and small-arms fire from the Taliban on the ground. Fortunately, I rarely had to contemplate the threat of a direct attack. My only brief taste of one was when our two helicopters were leaving the relative safety of Camp Bastion for a military outpost in the middle of Helmand. I was seated in the body of the second Chinook, looking out of the back, where the ramp is always slightly ajar, at the mountainous expanse below. Suddenly the helicopter turned back. There was good intelligence that the Taliban knew that someone senior would be coming in by helicopter.
That feeling – of being in the crosshairs of the enemy – is what our troops lived with every day. I don’t know how they did it.
I had a constant reminder of the tragic reality behind the growing death toll when I wrote by hand to bereaved families. So often were we losing men and women at the start of my premiership that I’d have one to write every few days. It was a task I would carry out at the kitchen table in the flat or in my study at Chequers. I would commend the soldier for their bravery and, carefully reading the citations made by their comrades about their service, I would take points from them. I would also use some of my own experience – particularly to parents – about losing a child. I tended to say that while there was nothing anyone could say to lessen the pain and grief, I knew that over time at least some of the clouds would part, and some of the happier memories from the past would come through. I would try to explain what we were doing in Afghanistan. It was a country far away, but the struggle against Islamist extremism and terror was something that affected us back at home.
It was this, instead of any overarching ideology, which would inform the decisions I would take. My approach was hard-headed and pragmatic. I tried to make the choices that would best guarantee the stability of Afghanistan, the security of our country and the safety of our troops.
As prime minister for less than a third of that thirteen-year war, I took some of its defining steps. There were three key things that I thought necessitated them.
The first was that the overall goal of our intervention had veered too much towards nation-building – ‘creating a Denmark in the desert’, as some put it – whereas we should be aiming for Pakistan-lite. We needed realism. A failing state would be better than a failed state. As I put it during that first visit to Afghanistan as prime minister: ‘We are not here to build the perfect society, we are here to stop the re-establishment of training camps.’
The second thing we needed was time to build up a sufficient Afghan National Security Force and government so they could handle the civil war without our help. (In fact, the size of the ANSF – army plus police – doubled between 2009 and 2012, making it strong enough to manage the fighting largely without NATO from 2015.)
The third thing was the need for a deadline. I could see the case against this. The Taliban could just wait for us to leave. But the counter-arguments appeared more compelling. Our military high command seemed to have settled on the idea of being in Afghanistan almost indefinitely. The Afghans had become far too reliant on our presence. And as we lost troops, public consent was dwindling. A date would force everyone’s hand to reach a satisfactory and stable position before support at home disappeared altogether.
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