Читать книгу For the Record - David Cameron, David Cameron - Страница 34

When I took office there were more than 10,000 British troops in Afghanistan, engaged in a conflict that had lasted nearly a decade. That made me the first prime minister to come to power from a different party when the country was at war since 1951 – the year Churchill replaced Attlee while British troops were fighting in Korea.

I spent more time on Afghanistan – visiting, reading, discussing, deliberating, and yes, worrying – than on any other issue. The burden weighed heavily upon me every single day until the final British combat soldier left Camp Bastion in 2014. I still care deeply about Afghanistan’s future today. And I will always remember the families of the fallen, and those living with life-changing injuries because of their service.

Many leaders have written about what it’s like to send brave men and women into battle. My reflections are about inheriting that responsibility and handling a conflict whose aim had become ambiguous and whose unpopularity was growing.

I supported the decision to send troops to help rebels overturn the Taliban government in 2001. The ‘invasion’ of Afghanistan was justified. The brutal Taliban regime, which controlled 90 per cent of the country, was harbouring al-Qaeda, the perpetrators of 9/11. It was continuing to train jihadists and plot attacks against the West. When asked to expel Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda, it had refused. The US had no sensible choice but to act. And we were right to support it. As a young backbencher, on the day after 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.

One of the early defining steps I took was recommitting Britain to the war, by making sure Afghanistan was our number-one security priority. On my first full day in Downing Street, I convened the new NSC. We were a country at war, I told the assembled ministers, and this would be our war cabinet. We wouldn’t just be setting the strategy and leaving the heads of the army, navy and air force to fill in the gaps. We would seek to shape events more directly and take urgent action. We would have monthly published reports on progress and quarterly statements – by a cabinet minister – to Parliament. This would not become a forgotten war. We started with a boost for the troops, doubling the operational allowance they were paid while on tour.

I was clear where action was needed most urgently: Sangin. President Obama had rightly ordered a ‘surge’ in the number of US forces in 2009, increasing them from 30,000 to 90,000. Britain meanwhile had committed to an increase from 9,000 to 9,500 troops in Helmand, where we had taken over security in 2006.

I didn’t object to the increase; I objected to how thinly spread we would end up being in comparison to the Americans. The advice was that our numbers would be sufficient. But I commissioned some figures that revealed that while the US would now have up to twenty-five soldiers per thousand members of the Afghan population, we would have just sixteen.

Sangin demonstrated this lopsided deployment. This small town is where we sustained nearly a quarter of all our losses during the conflict. I knew that we had to match America’s densities of troops. But we had carried more than our share of the burden – we made up only a tenth of the fighting force in Afghanistan, but suffered a third of the casualties – so the option of increasing UK troop numbers seemed wrong. Taken together, this meant getting out of Sangin. I overruled the advice and secured agreement for the withdrawal.

The US Marine commander who took overall responsibility for Helmand was a splendid man called Brigadier General Larry Nicholson. As if marching straight out of Central Casting, he crushed the bones of my right hand with his handshake and declared that he had come straight from Fallujah – one of the toughest battles in Iraq – and was ready to take the fight to the Taliban. He proceeded to use a dried opium-poppy stick to point at the map on the wall and run through his plans. He recognised that our decision was a reasonable one, and US forces took over what remained one of the toughest jobs in the country.

Partly because of this redeployment, our casualty numbers fell dramatically. In 2010, 103 British troops were killed. In 2011 and 2012, that fell to forty-six and forty-four respectively. For the final three years we were in Afghanistan, the British death toll dropped to single figures each year.

The move also improved our performance in the rest of Helmand. But action wasn’t just needed in adjusting the force; it was needed on the state of our equipment, which had become something approaching a national scandal. I knew from my previous visits the key improvements needed: more helicopters, faster casualty evacuation, more rapid improvements in body armour. And, above all, better-protected vehicles.

The Taliban’s weapon of choice was the improvised explosive device (IED), which was becoming ever more sophisticated. Every time we increased the armour on our vehicles, they would find a new way of burying more explosives. Every time we developed a metal detector with more sensitive scanners, they would find a way of using fewer metallic components. IEDs became the primary instrument for killing and maiming not just our troops, but local people, including children. Our forces’ ageing Snatch Land Rovers were no match for these roadside bombs. To be fair to my predecessor, plans were in place for improvements, but I did everything I could to add to them and speed up their delivery.

The action we took in the NSC – including expanding a new system that bypassed bureaucracy and delivered equipment more quickly – aimed to give our forces what they needed. After a couple of years, no one raised concerns with me about poor vehicles or a shortage of helicopters. Some even said to me that in some regards our equipment was superior to that used by US troops.

The biggest decision, though, would be about our long-term involvement in Afghanistan. After nine years of the conflict – and four bloody years in Helmand – people were rightly asking: when will our work be completed? And when will our troops come home?

To answer those questions, we needed to be far more precise about exactly what it was we were trying to achieve. And while some elements of that nation-building would be important – getting children into school, improving healthcare, constructing infrastructure – we had to show common sense and keep a grip on what was possible.

Early on, I called a seminar in Chequers, packed with experts from the worlds of military, academia, aid and policy. There was a debate between ‘The war can’t be won’ on one side and ‘Stick with the mission’ on the other. But the seminar did point me towards a third option: concentrate more on training the Afghan army and police as the route for our exit. This was a middle way. Don’t leave immediately, job undone. Don’t stay indefinitely, a war without end. Set some sort of deadline.

So that was my decision: to withdraw from Afghanistan, but only after giving the military enough time to prepare and to hand over to the Afghan forces. I chose the end of 2014, because I thought that left us enough time to do the work we needed in order to prepare.

I set out the plan at the G8 in Muskoka. No cabinet meetings, no pre-briefings, no public rows between the military and civilians – just private agreement with George, William and Nick, and a statement to the press. To give a strong lead to our troops and change the tone, I knew it was one of the things that needed to be done quickly.

But I didn’t want us to leave and that be that. We were committed to financial contributions, both in terms of aid for economic development and funding for the Afghan security forces. Together with Obama, I would lead the charge at subsequent NATO summits – in Lisbon, Chicago, Cardiff and then finally Warsaw in July 2016 – to help secure similar commitments from other countries.

I knew my history. The Afghan government didn’t collapse in the 1990s when the Russians left; it collapsed when they withdrew funding for the military. The other way we could help make Afghanistan more stable beyond our military input would be by helping to foster a political agreement that brought at least some of the Taliban into the political settlement.

After all, the big mistake had happened at the beginning, back in 2001, when the West insisted on a settlement that was free of Taliban involvement – whereas my view is that true peace is only possible if it includes at least elements of the Taliban.

In many ways, of course, war suited both sides. The Afghan president Hamid Karzai and his allies could use war to favour their own tribes. The Taliban could use that fact to portray the government as tribalist and anti-Islamic. Plus, talking to the Taliban wasn’t exactly easy. (One fact illustrates this perfectly. We were being told repeatedly – right up to 2015 – that their willingness to cooperate depended on the permission of Mullah Omar, whereas we now know that Omar died in 2013.)

In the end it would have to be Afghan talking to Afghan, but we hoped that – with our strong relationship with Pakistan – we might be able to help get the ball rolling.

There was, however, a chronic lack of mutual trust between the two governments. The Pakistanis thought that the Afghans were too close to their rival, India. The Afghans thought that Pakistan was harbouring the Taliban, hedging its bets by allowing terrorists to weaken its neighbour, and still had designs on redrawing the border to unite all Pashtuns inside Pakistan.

I reasoned that one of the best ways to make progress would be to try to strengthen the personal relationships between the leaders and – where possible – include their military and intelligence chiefs in their discussions.

In opposition I had got to know Karzai quite well, and he was the first foreign leader I received at Chequers, shortly after taking office. He was charming and wily, and claimed to have a real affection for Britain. He believed that, because of our history, we had a greater understanding of the situation in Afghanistan than did the United States.

Part of my job, as I saw it, was to help focus him on making his government work and ensuring that the country was run properly, for example appointing governors, passing basic laws and dealing with rampant corruption. Karzai himself had been dogged by corruption claims in both the 2004 and 2009 elections: Hugh Powell had visited a polling station in Helmand with a turnout of three hundred which had reported 15,000 votes for Karzai.

One of the reasons some Afghans turned to the Taliban was because they seemed better at dispensing justice and ensuring order than the legitimate authorities. And corruption was so ingrained in the country’s culture that Karzai could never quite accept that we were there because we genuinely believed in the mission as part of an international coalition. In January 2012 I remember him asking me what was it – minerals? mining rights? – that we really wanted from Afghanistan.

He could be hard work. He would criticise the activities of British and American troops, even though they were making extraordinary sacrifices and were essential for his regime’s survival. And he found it too easy to play the nationalist card and blame all his problems on Pakistan.

But there was enough there for me to be able to use the relationship I had built up, and the fact that the Pakistanis trusted us more than the Americans, to help build the trust between Afghans and Pakistanis.

The high-water mark of my efforts came at the Chequers summit in 2013 when Karzai and President Asif Ali Zardari of Pakistan spent two days in talks. They slept in adjoining bedrooms, each with a guard outside sitting ramrod-straight and wide awake in his chair. I came downstairs the next morning to find the two presidents joking about which of them had been snoring the loudest.

We agreed a series of small steps to build confidence: publicly praising each other’s leadership; agreeing visits to each other’s countries; and – crucially – recognising that the security of one was the security of the other.

We aimed to move on to talk about border security and the import­ance of dealing with terrorist safe havens on both sides of the Durand Line (the controversial border between the two countries). We wanted to get some of their military and intelligence personnel to sit together and work together – even suggesting joint patrols. A further series of coordinated steps would then follow to help deliver a peace process: the release from Pakistani custody of potential Taliban peacemakers so they could carry out talks, hints that Afghanistan would consider constitutional reforms, and so on.

But Karzai couldn’t bring himself to trust Pakistan. Zardari was often willing, but as we know, it is really the military that makes the key decisions.

The Americans were supportive and appreciative of our efforts. They took up the cudgels for contacts with the Taliban, but ultimately the distance between the two sides, and their half-heartedness about a compromise, was too great to make meaningful progress.

This is the agenda I most wish had come off. But I am convinced that it remains crucial today, and that it can be done.

So, for all the blood spilt and treasure spent, was Britain’s involvement in the Afghan war worth it? Historians say it’s too early to say. It is incredibly depressing whenever the country slips back. Sangin is back in Taliban hands. Their flag flies over Musa Qala. Opium fields still stretch across Helmand. These are painful things to write.

But at the same time, in 2014 Afghanistan saw its first peaceful, democratic transfer of power, to the anti-corruption academic Ashraf Ghani. It now has its own police force and national army. And more than that. By 2011, 85 per cent of the country had access to basic med­-ical care, compared to 9 per cent under the Taliban. Seven million more children were in school compared to one million in 2001. A third of them were girls. Not a single girl went to school in the Taliban years. As long as we go on funding the Afghan army and police (and the inter­national community remains committed to this), the Taliban is unlikely to win the whole country, and terrorists cannot get the same foothold they had before.

The agenda is still the same. The Afghan government needs to deliver for all its people. It needs to find a way of bringing at least some elements of the Taliban into the legitimate political sphere. It will only do this if it forges a trusting partnership with Pakistan, where both accept that allowing safe havens on either side of the border for terrorists will end up destroying them both.

The difference now is that our troops are not exposed to the daily risk they once were. Arguably, it will be easier now for some sort of deal to be done because the provocative presence of foreign troops on Afghan soil is so much less.

The prevailing views are that this war was either doomed to fail or that it should have been pushed harder. I believe there is a third category, where you do the right thing and keep doing it, but it takes a very, very long time before you achieve stable and lasting success.

Samuel Beckett said, ‘Fail again. Fail better.’ Foreign troops could only ever provide a breathing space for a legitimate Afghan government to get its act together and deal with the fundamental issues.

Delivering security and some semblance of uncorrupt administration; getting the relationship between Afghanistan and Pakistan right; achieving a political settlement which demonstrates that all Afghans are welcome. I believe all these things are achievable. The story isn’t over.

Afghanistan brought me into close contact with the UK’s military chiefs. While there were robust arguments and discussions, they were generally good-natured. However, my relationship with them would come under greater strain when we had to discuss another intractable challenge: how to make sense of the UK’s defence budget in an age of austerity.

I had read widely about the history of military top brass interacting with those at the top table of government – particularly the blazing rows between Churchill and General Alan Brooke in the rooms I was now so familiar with in Downing Street. I have huge respect for the chiefs of staff who head up the army, navy, air force and the armed forces as a whole. But PMs need to build up their own expertise. Like all my predecessors since James Callaghan, I didn’t have a military background, so I decided to hire a senior military adviser to be in my private office.