Since 2001, 453 British forces personnel have been killed in
Afghanistan and more than 2600 wounded; 247 British soldiers have had limbs
amputated (the Ministry of Defence refuses to categorise the severity of these
amputations on the grounds that releasing the information would help ‘the
enemy’). Unknown numbers have psychological injuries.
In “Investment in Blood: The True Cost of Britain’s Afghan
War” Frank Ledwidge puts the cost of the Afghan War at £40 billion. The British
forces wanted to have all the equipment the Americans had, but couldn’t afford
quite enough of it, quite so up to date or quite so soon. Britain built a base
in Helmand, Camp Bastion, bigger than any it had constructed since the end of
the Second World War, occupying an area the size of Reading. It has now handed
Camp Bastion over to the Afghan military which, at the time of writing, was
struggling to prevent it being overrun by attackers. Everything the military
did depended on the petrol, diesel and kerosene trucked in from Central Asia or
Pakistan; one US estimate calculated that the price of fuel increased by 14,000
per cent in its journey from the refinery to the Afghan front line. In
firefights, British troops used Javelin missiles costing £70,000 each to
destroy houses made of mud bricks. Ledwidge
adds in the cost of buying four huge American transport planes to shore up the
air bridge between Afghanistan and the UK (£800 million), 14 new helicopters
(£1 billion), a delay in previously planned cuts in the size of the army (£3
billion) and the cost of returning and restoring war-battered units (£2
billion). More contentiously, he includes the £2.1 billion spent on aid and
development, not all of which was stolen or wasted – although much of it was.
Ledwidge highlights the grotesque sums spent on providing security and creature
comforts to foreign consultants: an annual cost of around half a million pounds
per head. He was a consultant in Afghanistan himself, besides serving there as
an officer. ‘A great many people, several hundred,’ he writes, ‘could be
employed in Helmand for the price of a single consultant plus security team and
“life-support”.
“The soldiers who are killed and wounded today are not
victims – they are not the conscript ex-civilians of the First World War. They
are professionals, willingly trained in the business of killing, and (by and
large) well paid and well treated while they are soldiers … Servicemen are
under no illusions as to the risks they sign up to … In looking so closely at
the human costs of this war, the key point that must be borne in mind is not
‘How terrible! Those poor soldiers …’ Rather it must be a realistic and firm
realisation: ‘We sent them, now we must take care of the consequences.’ ”
Ledwidge estimates the cost of the British military’s
bloodshed and psychological trauma – the amount spent on the ongoing treatment
of damaged veterans, compensation under the recently introduced Armed Forces
Compensation Scheme (AFCS), and an actuarial estimate of the financial value of
human life – at £3.8 billion. He points out that, despite the AFCS, Britain’s
care for its veterans falls short of the elaborate system in the United States.
An Afghan who sought compensation from the British in
Helmand after losing his sight as a result of a military operation might expect
a payment of £4500. A British soldier suffering the same injury would be
entitled to £570,000.
British troops were moved into Helmand. The defence minister
John Reid said he hoped the operation could be carried out without a shot being
fired. In those first six months, The commander of the paratroopers, Lieutenant
Colonel Stuart Tootal’s men fired half a million bullets. Eventually the
Americans sent in the Marines, bailing Britain out. Blair and the generals had
bitten off far more than the British armed forces could chew.
An Intimate War: An Oral History of the Helmand Conflict
1978-2012 by Mike Martin, a Pashto speaker, a British officer who served in Helmand
in the late 2000s argues that ‘insurgency is a pejorative term, one that is
useful to governments in establishing their legitimacy or that of their allies
and in defining their enemies.’ Martin believes that the conflict in Helmand
should be seen as ‘a continuing civil war’. Because the British were ignorant
of what was really going on – due, in large part, to their short six-month
tours of duty and lack of linguists – they were manipulated into becoming pawns
in long-running conflicts over land, water, drugs and power between local
leaders. Hostility towards the British among the Pashto-speaking Pashtun tribes
of Helmand goes back to the early 19th century. The British were hated in
Helmand before they’d fired a shot. A popular local assumption was that the
British had come for revenge. The British, Martin explains, were never fighting
waves of Taliban coming over the border from Pakistan: they were overwhelmingly
fighting local men led by local barons who felt shut out by the British and
their friends in ‘government’ and sought an alternative patron in Quetta. The
Taliban provided money, via their sponsors in the Gulf, and a ready-made,
Pashtun-friendly ideological framework the barons could franchise. Since the
British were hated even before they arrived, recruitment of foot soldiers was easy.
Looking at it from the Helmandi perspective, the population
might well ask, ‘how can you protect us from ourselves when we are resisting
you?’ This idea was recognised during the Soviet era as well. Neither the
Soviets nor Nato had conceptual space in their doctrines for large sections of
the population resisting them, so instead they were painted as Maoist-style
insurgents from outside who were terrorising the community.
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