Afghanistan Will Be Our Next Northern Ireland

By Trevor Royle Diplomatic Editor
December 14, 2008
Courtesy Of The Sunday Herald

SENIOR BRITISH army officers fear the deployment of troops in Afghanistan's Helmand province will turn into an operation lasting as long as that in Northern Ireland.

The military chiefs' concerns come as the names of the latest British casualties, four Royal Marines, were released yesterday - on the day Prime Minister Gordon Brown made a surprise visit to the province.

Sergeant John Manuel, Corporal Marc Birch and Marine Damian Davies were killed by a suspected suicide bomber aged just 13 in Helmand on Friday afternoon.
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Earlier in the day, Lance Corporal Steven Fellows died from injuries when an explosion hit his vehicle while on patrol in Sangin. Three of the four marines were from the Arbroath-based 45 Commando.

A senior British officer said Northern Ireland is one-fifth the size of Helmand, yet at the height of the Troubles in the 1970s and 1980s the British Army committed 20,000 troops to wage a war against a much smaller enemy force. There are currently a little over 8000 British personnel garrisoned in Helmand.

Operation Banner, the army's term in Northern Ireland, began in 1969 and ended in 2007, the longest operational tour of duty in British Army history.

As the Black Watch prepare for a six-month tour in Helmand next year, the officer asked: "Do we really want to find ourselves involved in a draining commitment which could last up to 30 years? Because if the answer is yes' we're going to need more assets or fewer commitments elsewhere. One thing is certain: we lack sufficient ground troops and our air support in Helmand is pitiful."

His fears were echoed by the Chief of the Defence Staff, Air Chief Marshall Sir Jock Stirrup, who warned that the end of the British presence in Basra in Iraq would not necessarily provide a magic wand for him and his planners.

"We're currently doing more than we're structured or resourced for over the long term," he told an audience at the Royal United Services Institute, a Whitehall-based think tank. "We cannot simply make a one-for-one transfer from Iraq to Afghanistan."

Military analysts also fear the tours of duty in Helmand will not be as successful as in Northern Ireland because the army is failing to win the hearts and minds of the local population.

According to Dr Daniel Marston, a counterinsurgency warfare specialist, the army will have to relearn the lessons of Northern Ireland if it is ever going to be successful in Afghanistan.

When units were first deployed two years ago, the British government insisted that they would be engaged in peace enforcement and anti-narcotic roles. The reality was that they were involved in a vicious counter-insurgency war for which they were neither equipped nor trained.

Marston told an invited audience at the National Press Club in Washington: "This frame of the mission was primarily a matter of political expediency because if you talk about a counterinsurgency campaign, you're talking 20, 30 years."

There were also calls last week to extend the length of each British brigade's deployment from six to 12 months in order to provide operational continuity and to ease the problem of engaging the local communities. According to General Sir Michael Rose, the British commander of the UN forces in Bosnia in 1994, the extension would allow the local population "to develop confidence in those who they can never properly get to know".

However, a Ministry of Defence spokesman denied there were any plans to extend deployments, insisting that it was "never going to happen".

"There are a number of very sensible reasons why you wouldn't want to do that, not least the mental health factor. It's proven that if you deploy people for more than six months then the risk of mental health increases dramatically," he added.

Speaking in Musa Qala, the nearest point to the frontline a British prime minister has ever visited, Brown warned: "There is a line of terror that leads from the Pakistan and Afghanistan mountains to the streets of our capital city and our towns if we allow the Taliban and al-Qaeda to flourish." He said this was why British armed forces are in Afghanistan.