Blair fervently believed that the international community had a moral duty to help stabilise and rebuild Afghanistan. One senior official in Downing Street recalls that the prime minister spent December 2001 ‘drumming up international support for a nation-building effort’. Blair had initially wanted a large international peacekeeping force to maintain security across Afghanistan. The 5,000-strong ISAF confined to Kabul ‘was a disappointment to Blair’.1 In a clear sign of his commitment, the prime minister flew to Afghanistan on 7 January 2002, accompanied by his wife. It was a risky trip: Blair’s party flew into Bagram airfield in total darkness. Waiting for him was an SAS close-protection team and, standing at the end of a red carpet, President Karzai with a hastily assembled Afghan honour guard. Blair remembers being ‘warned not to step off [the red carpet] since large parts of the airfield were still mined’.2 Karzai took the prime minister to a nearby building to meet his cabinet. Alastair Campbell recorded in his diaries that Karzai ‘was clearly pleased that TB [Tony Blair] had come, particularly given the genuine security risks’. In front of Karzai and his ministers, Blair pledged that ‘Britain would stay with them for the long term’.3
By 2001 Blair had a track record of committing Britain and its armed forces to saving strangers. Indeed, in this he was a bit of a trailblazer: Blair was the first world leader to articulate the general case for humanitarian intervention.4 Using military force for humanitarian ends is a post-Cold War invention.5 It was not accepted state practice before 1991 and has no basis in international law, as the United Nations Charter only permits use of force in self-defence or when authorised by the UN Security Council in order to uphold international peace and security.6 Thus, in none of the four cases of credible humanitarian intervention during the Cold War – India’s invasion of East Pakistan in 1971, Tanzanian intervention in Uganda in 1978, Vietnam’s invasion of Cambodia the same year, and French intervention in the Central African Republic in 1979 – was use of force by the intervening state justified on humanitarian grounds; India, Tanzania and Vietnam all claimed to be acting in self-defence, and the French government did not bother to justify its action. Ironically, one year before its own intervention to remove the brutal dictator of the Central African Republic, France condemned Vietnam’s invasion to overthrow the genocidal Khmer Rouge, telling the UN Security Council that ‘the notion that because a regime is detestable foreign intervention is justified and forcible overthrow is legitimate is extremely dangerous’.7
Along with the rise of humanitarian intervention came a more robust approach to using force to keep peace. Peacekeeping had developed in an ad hoc way during the Cold War.8 It involved neutral states deploying lightly armed troops, under a UN mandate and following cessation of armed conflict, to police a ceasefire or peace agreement between the rival states.9 Contrary to the usual military practice of camouflage, peacekeepers wore bright blue helmets and drove white vehicles to highlight their presence. The end of the Cold War created the demand and opportunities for humanitarian intervention and peace operations. A series of regional peace agreements – in Angola, Namibia, Central America, Cambodia and elsewhere – required peacekeeping forces to oversee implementation. At the same time, cooperation between the East and West became possible in the UN Security Council (where previously they had blocked each other’s resolutions), the surplus of military power no longer needed for the Cold War could be redirected towards humanitarian ends, and public pressure in the West increased for states to take action in the face of large-scale civilian suffering overseas. Between 1988 and 1993, twenty new peacekeeping missions were established, and the annual UN peacekeeping budget shot up from $230 million in 1988 to $1.6 billion by the end of the 1990s.10 Not only was there a massive growth in the number of UN peace missions, but their size and complexity increased from simply policing ceasefires between two states, to supervising the demobilisation of various non-state armed groups and overseeing elections. Some of the more challenging peace missions also involved using force against ‘peace spoilers’ and the protection of aid workers and civilians.11
Initially, it was the United States under President Bill Clinton who was pushing for this more robust approach to peace operations. Clinton came into office in 1993 with a more idealistic foreign policy than his predecessor, the Cold War realist President George H. W. Bush. Clinton and his Secretary of State, Madeleine Albright, were true believers in multilateral interventionism.12 At the time Britain, under the Conservative Prime Minister John Major, was more cautious. The British reluctantly sent troops into Bosnia along with the French and others in June 1992, at first to secure humanitarian aid convoys and then later on to protect civilian enclaves during an ongoing civil war. The end of 1992 saw a reluctant Bush deploy a 28,000-strong American force into Somalia, in order to ensure the distribution of humanitarian aid in the face of mass starvation.13 Under Clinton, the mission expanded to brokering a peace deal and rebuilding the Somali state. It was a disaster: US troops and UN peacekeepers got drawn into a war against the dominant warlord and came off the worse for it. Indeed, America’s involvement in the Somalia mission came to an abrupt end when eighteen US troops were killed in an ambush in October 1993.14 Thereafter, the Clinton administration became more wary. It refused to land US peacekeepers in Haiti in 1995 when faced with resistance from a small mob. It publicly ruled out sending ground troops to stop ethnic cleansing by Serbian security forces in Kosovo in 1999, instead relying on air power to bomb the Serbs into submission.15
Things went the other way in Britain when Blair replaced Major as prime minister in 1997. Major had been decidedly uneasy about the Bosnia mission, and had resisted pressure from the Clinton administration for a more forceful approach to dealing with what the Americans considered naked Serb aggression.16 In contrast, Blair brought an almost missionary zeal to British foreign policy. He and his Foreign Secretary, Robin Cook, declared that Britain would be ‘a force for good in the world’.17 This policy priority was reflected in the UK Strategic Defence Review conducted in 1998. Where previous defence reviews under the Conservatives had been little more than cost-cutting exercises, New Labour’s election manifesto committed the new government to a proper foreign policy-led exercise. Involving an extensive process of consultation with a wide range of experts and interested parties inside and outside of government, the Strategic Defence Review did not disappoint.18 It boldly declared that ‘We do not want to stand idly by and watch humanitarian disasters or the aggression of dictators go unchecked. We want to give a lead, we want to be a force for good.’ Moreover, the imperative was not simply ethical. With some prescience, it noted that Britain had a national interest in acting for the common good given that security threats often spring from zones of instability in the world and could reach British shores. The implication of this was clear: British forces ‘must be prepared to go to the crisis, rather than have the crisis come to us’.19 As one senior defence planner noted, the ‘grand strategic guidance’ that followed from this policy was to ‘fight them over there not here’.20 Thus, ethical concerns and strategic imperatives meshed in a simple and compelling logic: ‘in a world that is fast becoming a global village’, the British people could not afford to ‘turn our backs on human suffering’.21 Actions followed these words. In his first term in office, Blair committed British forces to fight for humanitarian causes in Kosovo (1999), East Timor (1999) and Sierra Leone (2000).22 As Sir Nigel Sheinwald, a senior British diplomat and Blair’s future foreign policy adviser, recalls, in 2001 there was ‘a sense of success’ among British officials when it came to the humanitarian interventions of the 1990s. Moreover, Blair in particular ‘was in favour of a more muscular British foreign policy’.23
This, then, was the context in which the prime minister and his closest advisers viewed Afghanistan. The country had been destroyed by the mujahedin war against the Soviet invaders and their puppet regime from 1979 to 1992, and the bloody civil war that followed from 1992 to 2001. Life expectancy and living standards for ordinary Afghans had plummeted to medieval standards, and threats to life and property were endemic. These conditions had allowed the Taliban to sweep into power (the Afghan people were desperate for security, even if offered by religious zealots) and al-Qaeda to operate with impunity from the country. The United Nations was warning of a potential humanitarian catastrophe following the fall of the Taliban. Blair was determined to break the cycle of civilian suffering and violent extremism in Afghanistan. In fairness, most European countries thought likewise – though Britain under Blair was at the forefront of arguing for the deployment of an international security force.
In contrast, George W. Bush made in clear that he was not interested in nation-building. This view was shared by senior members of his national security team. Indeed, as National Security Advisor to the Bush election campaign, Condoleezza Rice criticised the idealistic humanitarian interventionism of the Clinton administration, and called on a future president to refocus US foreign policy on ‘promoting the national interest’.24 Similarly, Rumsfeld was determined to avoid US forces getting bogged down in Afghanistan, and for this reason was adamant that the US ‘footprint’ should remain light in Afghanistan. The Bush administration took firm action to contain US commitment to Afghanistan; hence Rumsfeld successfully killed the proposal to expand ISAF in size and geographical scope. The US special envoy to Afghanistan, James Dobbins, would later reflect that ‘[t]he fact that security was not extended beyond Kabul was largely driven by the disinclination of the U.S. administration to get involved in Afghan peacekeeping’.25 Beyond providing basic support to the organisation of a donors’ conference on rebuilding the country, the United States did not provide much by way of leadership in terms of what should be done with Afghanistan.26 American attention had turned elsewhere.
Well before the job was finished in Afghanistan, the Bush administration switched focus to a prospective war against Iraq. On 21 November 2001, General Tommy Franks was instructed by the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff to begin revising CENTCOM’s war plan for Iraq; this order came down from Rumsfeld. At that stage, the war in Afghanistan was in full swing, with Taliban forces retreating to Kandahar. Bob Woodward notes that CENTCOM ‘was under immense pressure’ and that ‘the workload was staggering and round-the-clock because of the war in Afghanistan’. Franks was ‘incredulous’ that he was being tasked to plan for a second war while still prosecuting the first one. His response was suitably blunt: ‘Goddamn, what the fuck are they talking about?’ Ten days later, he received a formal order from Rumsfeld, again communicated via the Joint Chiefs, to come up with a new base plan for Iraq. Normally CENTCOM would be given a full month to produce a new base plan; Franks was given just three days.27
By early December, the Europeans picked up hints that the United States was looking with intent at Iraq. The US Deputy Secretary of State, Richard Armitage, noted that the United States was ‘on a roll’ in its military campaign in Afghanistan, and ‘that President Bush intended to use the momentum to force Iraq to open its borders to United Nations inspectors looking for weapons of mass destruction’.
Quite how victory against the Taliban would generate usable momentum for Iraq was never explained. The German foreign minister, Joschka Fisher, was less than impressed: ‘All European nations would view a broadening [of the war] to include Iraq highly skeptically – and that is putting it diplomatically.’28
Downing Street had worried about such a development from the start. In the days following the 9/11 attacks, the British learned that the US National Security Council was considering war against Iraq. But then, much to British relief, this option was dropped. British policymakers had no inkling that CENTCOM was told to spin up the Iraq war plan in November 2001. The British had a military team embedded in CENTCOM supporting the coalition campaign in Afghanistan. However, they were kept separate from the planners working on Iraq. Moreover, the Chief of the Defence Staff had ordered his officers at CENTCOM ‘to tell the Americans that we were not interested in discussing Iraq’.29 Thus, as late as March 2002, the British team was supposedly unaware that CENTCOM had developed a new war plan.30 However, Number 10 could sense something was up. Blair’s Chief of Staff, Jonathan Powell, later recalled that ‘By the time you get to December, you have speeches being made in the Senate calling for action on Iraq, Senators Lieberman and McCain wrote to the President demanding action on Iraq’.31
It was Bush’s State of the Union speech delivered on Capitol Hill on 29 January 2002 that caused alarm bells to ring in Whitehall. Honouring Karzai, ‘the distinguished interim leader of a liberated Afghanistan’, who was present for the speech, Bush declared that ‘America and Afghanistan are now allies against terror. We will be partners in rebuilding that country.’ So far so good – even if the last point was a little disingenuous, given the president’s well-recorded dour view of nation-building. But then he went on to say that ‘Our war on terror [has] only just begun’. He further identified Iraq, along with Iran and North Korea, as constituting ‘an axis of evil’ that ‘pose a grave and growing danger’ to the United States and the world. The president’s message could hardly be more plain: ‘I will not stand by, as peril draws closer and closer.’32 Although it was perhaps not plain enough for some in Whitehall; according to Hoon, ‘our first reaction in the Ministry of Defence was to think about precisely what the President was getting at in relation to his axis of evil speech’.33 Number 10 tried to find out what was happening. David Manning, the prime minister’s foreign policy adviser, recalls that in mid February 2002, Rice ‘confirmed to me that the [US] administration was indeed looking at options but said there was absolutely no plan [for war] at this stage’.34
By early 2002, Blair had taken the decision to ‘hug America close’ as the best way to moderate the unilateralist tendencies of the Bush administration. As one Number 10 aide explained, ‘what we wanted to do was influence American decisions, to be a player in Washington – as Churchill was with Roosevelt, or Macmillan with Kennedy, or Thatcher with Reagan’.35 Accordingly, Blair began to align himself with Bush’s increasingly belligerent position towards Iraq. In early March, The Times noted that ‘Tony Blair began preparing Britain for the second phase of the war on terrorism’, referring to comments the prime minister made about the dangers posed by Iraq. As if to underline the point, the Daily Express published an article by Blair with the title ‘Why Saddam is still a threat to Britain’.36
Bush invited Blair to visit him at his private ranch in Crawford, Texas, over 5–6 April 2002. While the two leaders discussed a range of issues including the wider Middle East peace process, for many looking from afar this meeting was to all appearances an Anglo-American council of war. In advance, Britain’s military chiefs met with Blair on 2 April at Chequers, the prime minister’s country residence in Buckinghamshire, where they ‘painted a gloomy picture of the military options for Iraq’.37 Campbell recalls the senior British military representative at CENTCOM reporting that he thought the Americans were planning for war in late 2002 or early 2003.38 Rumours about CENTCOM planning had reached the British Chiefs of Staff in early March.39 The problem was that the British military did not really know what was going on; they were out of the planning loop. The Ministry of Defence wanted the prime minister to push for British military planners to be brought into the CENTCOM team working on Iraq; this eventually happened in July.40
The Crawford summit was an eye-opener for the British. It quickly became clear that for Bush using military force to remove Saddam Hussein from power was the only option on the table for dealing with Iraq. ‘It was when we first began to realise fully how serious they were about it,’ remembers one Number 10 official. Blair confirmed that Britain would support US military action against Iraq provided certain conditions were met, including that every chance had been given for the UN inspectors to complete their work. In essence, Blair told the Americans ‘we’re with you’ in order to maximise his chance of influencing US policy from inside the tent. However, in his own mind, he had not yet committed British forces. As one British official later put it, ‘saying “we’re with you” is different from saying “we’re going to war with you”’. The problem was that this distinction was lost on the Bush administration, which ignored Blair’s conditions. As Armitage later told the British ambassador, ‘the problem with your “yes, but” is that it is too easy to hear the “yes” and forget the “but”’.41 Blair returned from Crawford to face a wall of opposition. His Cabinet and Whitehall were deeply sceptical of the ethical, legal and prudential case for war on Iraq; and the British public, the Parliamentary Labour Party and fellow European leaders were openly hostile to the idea. Iraq was to dominate Blair’s foreign policy agenda for the rest of his time in office.
As if Iraq wasn’t enough, British and US governments had an even more serious crisis to deal with from December 2001 to June 2002: a military stand-off between India and Pakistan that carried the real risk of escalating to nuclear war. At issue was the disputed territory of Kashmir, which each country claimed (and still claims) for itself. Pakistan’s support for militants in the Indian-governed part of Kashmir was a running sore in relations between the two countries. In 1998, Pakistan joined the club of nuclear-armed states when it test-detonated six nuclear devices. India, already a nuclear power, promptly followed suit with five nuclear tests of its own. In 1999, Pakistan triggered a small conventional war with India when it tried to seize some remote territory in the Kargil Mountains. Then on 13 December 2001, five Kashmiri terrorists armed with rifles, grenades and explosives attacked the Indian national parliament, killing nine people before being shot by security forces. The Indian government was understandably furious, and responded by moving its army to the border with Pakistan. It demanded that Pakistan close down the terrorist camps in its territory or the Indian Army would do so. Pakistan responded by mobilising its army, and soon around 1 million soldiers were facing off on the Indo-Pakistani border.42 Campbell notes with some understatement that by New Year’s Eve ‘The tensions between Pakistan and India were dominating the serious news and getting very difficult’.43 In his memoirs, Jack Straw recalls that this crisis, and not Afghanistan or Iraq, ‘dominated’ his time in early 2002: ‘In public, we deliberately played down the risk so as not to create panic – one reason why so little is recalled of this potential nuclear conflagration today. However, the situation was very dangerous. We came very close to war.’44
With the United States and Britain temporarily distracted by the crisis on the Indian subcontinent and increasingly preoccupied with Iraq, the international effort to rebuild Afghanistan was allowed to drift. This was already evident at Bonn, when the head of the US delegation, James Dobbins, was given free rein to do as he pleased. On 21–22 January 2002, the international community gathered in Tokyo to pledge support for Afghanistan. Leading the US delegation again was Dobbins, who noted wearily that ‘With forty to fifty countries represented, it meant several days of speechifying’. The World Bank, the Asian Development Bank and the United Nations Development Programme had produced a ten-year package of support for Afghanistan costing $14.6 billion. The Tokyo conference ended with states promising substantially less than this amount: $5.1 billion in aid over a five-year period. Indicative of its priorities, the United States provided only 5 per cent of the total aid pledged at Tokyo, some $290 million.45
The challenges facing Afghanistan were immense. The country had no manufacturing base and the licit economy was reduced to agriculture and small-scale trading. The roads were appalling and often impassable in wet weather; only part of the Kabul to Kandahar highway was tarmacked. Electricity supply to the main cities was erratic at best. The domestic telephone system had collapsed; international calls could only be made in the central post office in Kabul. Most of the population in Kabul had been surviving on food aid for the previous five years. The new Afghan government was completely broke. There was no system to collect tax, and the customs duties collected at the major border crossings were kept by local warlords.46
Compounding the pressure on the interim Afghan government, hundreds of thousands of refugees began to flood back from Pakistan and Iran under a voluntary repatriation programme administered by the United Nations; Pakistan had 3 million Afghan refugees and Iran had almost 1.5 million, and both countries were understandably eager to see these people return to Afghanistan. These returnees brought with them raised expectations as to what government should do and provide. They had received access to rudimentary health care and education facilities in the refugee camps. As Thomas Barfield notes: ‘Poor as these [facilities] were by international standards, for Afghans who had come from villages with few schools, and no electricity, running water, or health care facilities of any type, the realization that government agencies or nongovernmental organizations could provide needed services on a large scale was a revelation.’47
Aid to Afghanistan from donor states was channelled through a number of international trust funds managed by the World Bank. These were used to pay the salary bill for Afghan civil servants, and to re-establish education and basic health-care services. A follow-on donor conference was held in Berlin on 31 March 2004. By then, as one observer noted, the earlier optimism of donors ‘had given way to a growing realization that statebuilding and reconstruction would be a long, hard slog’. The new Afghan finance minister, Ashraf Ghani, presented a comprehensive seven-year development plan called ‘Securing Afghanistan’s Future’. Freshly returned from the United States, where he had taught at Johns Hopkins and at Berkeley and worked at the World Bank, Ghani was a trusted technocrat ‘who spoke the language of donors’. He could also be blunt when required. He told the Berlin conference that the $5 billion pledged at Tokyo was ‘peanuts’. He was asking for $28.5 billion for his seven-year plan. In the end, he walked away with another $5 billion.48
The paradox was that while Afghanistan needed all the aid it could get, it struggled to absorb the aid that it did receive. It simply lacked the administrative infrastructure to implement this level of expenditure. Life in Kabul had become so difficult for civil servants under the Taliban – who viewed educated urbanites with suspicion – that many had left government and even Afghanistan. Thus by 2001, many central ministries were effectively empty shells, with a minister and enough advisers to engage with the international community, but not to implement anything. Nor was there the time to develop sufficient administrative capacities given the volume and speed of international aid. In consequence, foreign consultants and aid organisations were contracted to manage the flow of funds into and around the country. Ironically, this served to further undermine the development of Afghan government in two ways. Firstly, many returning skilled Afghans took better-paid jobs with aid organisations rather than rejoining the civil service. Secondly, foreign consultants and hired Afghan advisers formed, in effect, a ‘second civil service’ that oversaw the development and delivery of internationally funded public services.49
The incompetence and corruption of Afghan bureaucracy made matters even worse. Excessive regulation made it difficult to get anything done; an electricity connection in Kabul, for example, required the signatures of twenty-three officials. Add to this the very poor pay of civil servants and you had a system that was designed to breed corruption. Officials had to demand bribes for access to public services just to provide for their families. The inflow of aid also created opportunities for large-scale corruption. International projects generated highly lucrative contracts for the leasing of land and buildings, and for construction, transport and security services. Afghan subcontractors had to pay handsome bribes to senior government officials for licences to bid for such contracts, and for introductions to the aid organisations that sought these services. As the inflow of aid increased in the second half of the decade, so the scale of government corruption grew.50
Afghanistan enjoyed a temporary respite from conflict in 2002. However, the effort to create a new security architecture for Afghanistan soon floundered under a British plan to parcel out key responsibility to five states, with each leading on a different element – the United States took the lead on raising the new Afghan army and creating the National Directorate of Security, Germany took the Afghan National Police (ANP), Italy justice reform, Japan the demobilisation, disarmament and reintegration of various militias, and Britain counter-narcotics. This ‘lead nation’ approach, proposed by the British, was adopted at a summit of the G8 states in April 2002. Without an overriding state or agency in charge, it almost guaranteed incoherence in the international effort to secure Afghanistan. Progress was also painfully slow.
The newly appointed Afghan minister of defence, the Northern Alliance warlord Marshal Fahim, had suggested merging the various militias into a new 250,000-strong national army. This notion found little favour with Western governments, who were less than keen on the idea of bankrolling a massive force whose loyalties to the state would be questionable. Britain and the United States proposed instead to raise a smaller, brand-new army, which would be more affordable and not have any prior links to any warlords. American special forces began in May 2002 to train up the 2nd and 3rd Battalions of the new Afghan National Guard, the 1st Battalion having been trained already by the British under ISAF. During this period the basic structure of Afghan field units was agreed: the new army would be organised into battalions (or kandaks), each with four infantry companies. The first kandaks were lightly armed and lacked motorised transport. Recruits were provided with ten weeks of training covering basic infantry skills. This US effort was modest: the aim was to train up 2,000–3,000 Afghan troops by November 2002. The new Afghan National Guard was far outnumbered and outgunned by the militias of the main warlords; Marshal Fahim’s Jama’t-e Islam militia alone numbered some 20,000 fighters. Compounding problems was a lack of morale among Afghan troops. Within a year, half had deserted.51
In late 2003, it had become apparent that the Afghan National Guard had fallen under the control of Fahim’s Jama’t-e Islam faction. The United States insisted that the entire Afghan MoD and National Guard be disbanded, and that everything start again from scratch. As one analyst notes, ‘this paved the way for a new model Afghan National Army’. This one was much larger, eventually rising to 70,000, with a general staff and air corps, and supported by a more professional MoD.52 Leading this effort was the new US Combined Security Transition Command-Afghanistan (CSTC-A, pronounced ‘see-sticka’) based in Kabul, which was scheduled to produce 20,000 trained soldiers by 2006.53
The situation was even worse with the Afghan police. The Germans acknowledged the scale of the challenge. Their advance team reported that ‘the police force is in a deplorable state’, noting that ‘there is a total lack of equipment and supplies. No systematic training has been provided for around 20 years.’ However, as observed earlier, the German response was woefully inadequate: a training academy was set up in Kabul staffed by seventeen German police officers and requiring Afghans to complete a three-year course. This was hardly going to meet the need to produce tens of thousands of Afghan police. In 2003, the US State Department took over, reorganising the Kabul academy and setting up regional training centres in Kandahar, Mazar-e-Sharif, Gardez and Jalalabad. The State Department hired a private US contractor, DynCorp International, to do the actual training. Yet questions soon surfaced about the quality of the DynCorp trainers and training. The Afghan interior minister, Ali Ahmad Jalali, later complained that many DynCorp contractors ‘had little or no useful background for training police in Afghanistan’. Eventually, in 2005, the US Department of Defense took over responsibility for ANP training and handed the mission over to CSTC-A. CSTC-A produced a damning report in 2006, finding that the ability of the ANP ‘to carry out its internal security and conventional responsibilities is far from adequate’. This was an understatement. ‘Illiterate recruits’, ‘pervasive corruption’, poor leadership and lack of equipment were among the problems identified in the report; to these could be added high rates of drug use and desertion. Initially the commanding general of CSTC-A believed that he ‘could change the police force in a few months’. However, he soon realised ‘that it would take over a decade’.54
Blair had made staunching the flow of drugs from Afghanistan one of the grounds for British action against the Taliban. In justifying the start of the military campaign before a specially recalled House of Commons on 8 October 2001, the prime minister noted: ‘we know that the Taliban regime are largely funded by the drugs trade and that 90 percent of the heroin on British streets originates in Afghanistan.’ He went on to conclude: ‘so this military action we are undertaking is not for a just cause alone, though this cause is just. It is to protect our country, our people, our economy, our way of life. It is not a struggle remote from our everyday British concerns; it touches them intimately.’55 The bulk of heroin in Britain did indeed originate from Afghanistan. Moreover, Blair had been elected on the promise, among other things, to tackle the problem of drugs. To this end, the incoming Labour government had appointed a ‘drugs czar’ to ‘coordinate our battle against drugs across all government departments’.56 However, this is not to say that the Taliban were behind the heroin trade. Notably, the push to include this issue in the reasons for military action did not come from the Home Office or Foreign Office (which had the lead on coordinating international efforts to combat drugs). Rather, the decision to portray the campaign as partly a war on drugs was taken from within Number 10 and probably by Blair himself. As one Whitehall official pointed out, ‘The evidence on the claim regarding the Taliban involvement in drugs was limited and it shackled us to an unsolvable problem.’57
Afghanistan’s emergence as a major drug-producing country was unrelated to the rise of the Taliban. Bans on growing opium poppy introduced in Iran in the late 1950s, and in Pakistan in the late 1970s, pushed drugs production into Afghanistan. Furthermore, in the 1980s Afghan agriculture was devastated by the Soviet War, and farmers turned to growing poppy as a resilient crop that was easy to store and sell. Money from the drugs trade also funded the mujahedin war on the Soviet invaders. According to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, Afghanistan’s share of world opium production shot up from 19 per cent in 1980 to 70 per cent in 2000. As it happened, the Taliban banned poppy cultivation in 2000, declaring drug use to be prohibited in Islam. Critics argued that they did so only to court international approval, and this explains why the Taliban only introduced the ban some years after seizing power. This argument is hardly persuasive, however, given that the Taliban showed scant regard for world opinion on other matters, such as women’s rights or harbouring terrorists. A more convincing account is that the Taliban were slow to impose a ban because they knew it would be unpopular with farmers, and they wanted to ensure they would be able to enforce it. Whatever the reason, it was dramatically effective: opium production in Afghanistan plummeted from 3,276 metric tons in 2000 to only 185 metric tons in 2001. Western observers hailed the success of the Taliban ban as a ‘rare triumph in the long and losing war on drugs’; one UN official described it as ‘one of the most remarkable successes ever’ in the fight against drugs. However, the Taliban did not ban the trade in drugs, probably because they derived taxation from it. Moreover, they were unconcerned about keeping heroin off European streets. Regardless, overthrowing the Taliban regime, and thereby removing the ban, made the drugs problem far worse for Europe as Afghan farmers went back to growing poppy in record quantities.58
The Foreign Office lead on counter-narcotics, Michael Ryder, had served on the UN team sent to verify the poppy ban under the Taliban and was familiar with the scale of the challenge. He realised that a ban in itself was unlikely to work without a programme to provide farmers with viable alternative livelihoods. Ryder proposed a ten-year plan to develop Afghanistan’s licit agricultural economy by moving farmers over to growing wheat, and introducing high-earning crops like saffron. Following the Tokyo donors’ conference in late January 2002, Ryder received £125 million to fund his counter-narcotics plan – a massive budget in Whitehall terms but, as one observer notes, ‘it was minuscule compared to the $1 billion in revenue that Afghanistan’s first poppy harvest since the Taliban was about to rake in’. In mid 2002, Ryder’s budget was raided by MI6, who came up with their own plan to fund warlords to eradicate the poppy crop. Over £60 million was diverted to a scheme that was sure to fail since most warlords were heavily involved in opium production. Any eradication undertaken by warlords would be directed towards those farming communities not already under their control. It is more likely that the actual intent was simply to buy influence with those warlords favoured by British intelligence.59
Ryder’s plan involved getting farmers to eradicate their own poppy crop by paying them $350 dollars for each jerib (unit of land). Of course this raised a host of challenges in terms of getting payment to farmers and verifying that they had in fact destroyed their crop, but the basic premise of directly engaging with farming communities was sound. In time, more British officials would come to realise the importance of empowering local communities. All the same, the plan failed. There were simply too many incentives for farmers to grow poppy. Warlords and drug smugglers lent farmers the money to plant it, and collected the opium paste directly from them; thus, there was no need for farmers to bring their crop to market, with all the costs and risks that entailed. More importantly, a jerib of poppy would net a farmer seventeen times more income than a jerib of wheat. With the fall of the Taliban, opium production promptly increased to 3,400 metric tons in 2002, climbing up to 3,600 tons in 2003, and 4,200 tons in 2004.60 Jack Straw would later reflect that ‘we should have spotted that worrying about counter-narcotics was a hiding to nothing’.61
‘The war in Afghanistan was over – we had won’ was how one US official recalls the view in Washington DC in 2003.62 According to another, ‘Afghanistan was seen as like Bosnia, mostly a governance issue.’63 In short, the Bush administration was done with Afghanistan. Indicative of this was the administration’s aid budget request for Afghanistan in 2002 – a paltry $1 million. In the event, Congress ended up appropriating $250 million.64
However, for Western soldiers, diplomats and aid workers in Afghanistan, there was still much to do. In June 2002, 10th Mountain Division handed over command of Operation Enduring Freedom to Combined Joint Task Force (CJTF) 180, formed from the headquarters of 18th Airborne Division and led by Lieutenant General Dan McNeill. Britain sent three officers to join McNeill’s command, one of whom was Nick Carter, an ambitious colonel from the Royal Green Jackets Regiment. In Carter’s case, ambition was matched by abilities and achievements; he was to return to Afghanistan in 2009 as commander of ISAF forces in the south, and again in 2013 as deputy commander of ISAF, and would eventually rise to become Chief of the British General Staff. Carter was appointed Chief of Plans for CJTF-180 and in this role he designed the new Afghan National Guard, working with the capable Brigadier Sher Mohammad Karimi, then the National Guard’s Chief of Operations (and future Chief of Staff of the Afghan National Army). In a model of partnership, Carter travelled up to the Afghan Ministry of Defence ‘every other day’, in a soft-topped Land Rover with just a driver and a sidearm, to hammer out the new army design with Karimi. Curiously, Carter was never allowed on the top floor of the Ministry of Defence building. The running joke was that there were still Russians up there.65
Even more importantly, Carter was the original architect of the main platform for civil–military operations in Afghanistan, the Provincial Reconstruction Team (PRT). Carter recalls that ‘McNeill did not want to put on a suit and get into the political space with Karzai’, and yet the CJTF commander recognised that something had to be done to get the Afghan government up and running, especially in the provinces. Thus McNeill ‘spent a lot of time in dusty tents on VTCs [video teleconferences] back to DC to persuade Rumsfeld and others on the need to develop government capacity’. The Bush administration was not interested in investing money or personnel in Afghanistan in 2002. So McNeill ordered Carter to find ‘lateral ways’ to meet the challenge.66
Carter needed to travel to the provinces to find out what was happening on the ground. He was only able to do so because on a visit to CJTF-180 headquarters, Brigadier Graeme Lamb ordered British special forces to ‘resource this guy to get around the country’. Carter visited American special operations forces teams in Kunduz and Mazar-e-Sharif in the north, and Gardez in the east. In Gardez, he observed how the US team, who were all reservists and happened to include a doctor and a vet, were able to build strong links with surrounding communities; the vet, in particular, was very popular with locals. The Gardez team was ‘the germ of the idea’ for what Carter called the Joint Regional Team. The problem with the Bonn Agreement and with ISAF was that it was focused on Kabul. There was no mechanism to improve security and the rule of law out in the provinces and to extend the writ of government beyond Kabul. Joint Regional Teams were to act as ‘hooks’, to connect the regions to central government. Karzai liked the idea, although he objected to the name, so the Joint Regional Teams became PRTs. Karzai’s view was that ‘warlords do regions, the government does provinces’. The word ‘reconstruction’ was included even though initially, as the commander of the first British PRT recalls, ‘we didn’t do any reconstruction’.67 In later years, reconstruction would become a major focus for PRTs.
McNeill pitched the PRT concept to Rumsfeld and got approval for three pilot American PRTs: one in Gardez in eastern Afghanistan, and the other two in Bamyan and Kunduz in central Afghanistan. Initially, the British considered establishing a PRT in Kandahar. However, because they wanted to ‘stay small scale’ for their first PRT, they decided to set it up in Mazar-e-Sharif, the capital of Balkh province. Both Dostum and Atta had militia in the region, and so Lieutenant General John Vines, who replaced McNeill as commander of coalition forces in Afghanistan in May 2003, and the British ambassador held a meeting with the two warlords to ensure that the British deployment had their support. The British PRT was established in Mazar-e-Sharif in July 2003 and staffed by around one hundred troops from the Royal Anglian Regiment, supported by a number of SAS reservists; a smaller, fifty-strong British PRT was set up in Maymaneh, the capital of Faryab province, in May 2004.68
The two British PRTs were supposed to cover five provinces in north and north-west Afghanistan, roughly an area the size of Scotland. Small and lightly armed ‘mobile observation teams’ were sent out to range across these provinces with the basic instruction to ‘get out there and find out what is going on’. The British PRTs focused on building trust with local commanders, and demobilising and disarming militias. This was just as well, as they managed to stop a major row between Dostum and Atta escalating into an armed conflict. Dostum was muscling in on Atta’s ground in Faryab, and had managed to buy off Atta’s militia in the district: Atta was none too pleased. By the time the British had turned up both warlords had mobilised forces, 12,000 on Dostum’s side against 8,000 on Atta’s. The situation in Mazar-e-Sharif was especially tense, with each party accusing the other of breaking agreements. The commander of the British PRT, Colonel Dickie Davis, ended up getting Atta’s and Dostum’s respective chiefs of staff into his Land Rover, and drove around Mazar-e-Sharif to investigate these complaints. Davis recalls Atta as being reasonable and ‘a bloke you could do business with’. Dostum was altogether more difficult. Davis had to threaten Dostum’s prized 56th Division with aerial attack to get the warlord to climb down. With cautious support from the interim Afghan government, which was nervous about taking on such powerful warlords, the British got both sides to agree to surrender their heavy weapons, to be stored in cantonments outside of Mazar-e-Sharif. Atta honoured the agreement. To his amazement at the time, Davis recalls that all of Atta’s armour suddenly emerged from the desert, about two battalions’ worth. In contrast, Dostum did not play ball, only ‘handing over crappy stuff and in dribs and drabs’. Atta was rewarded by being appointed governor of Balkh, whereas Dostum was increasingly shunned by the Kabul government. Davis recalls that there was a huge amount of optimism after Atta’s demobilisation, and that ‘the PRT had almost rock-star status’ in Mazar-e-Sharif.69
Notwithstanding this early success, slow progress was made in disarming and demobilising the various militias across Afghanistan. In this respect, Atta was the exception and Dostum the rule. By the end of 2002, irregular militia still outnumbered the Afghan army. Formally, many of these militias came under the authority of the Afghan Ministry of Defence or Ministry of Interior. But in reality, they remained loyal to their respective warlords. In 2003, the Japanese launched a disarmament, demobilisation and reintegration (DDR) programme for these various irregular forces. The initial goal was to disarm, demobilise and integrate 100,000 militia. Official estimates put militia levels at over twice this amount, but there was considerable inflating of numbers in order to claim salaries for troops that did not exist. DDR had some success in getting militia to surrender heavy weapons. But the programme failed to break the link between warlords and militia that had entered the state security forces. DDR was replaced in 2005 by an Afghan-run programme called the Disbandment of Illegal Armed Groups, which fared little better. Of the 20,411 weapons surrendered in the first year of this new programme, only 13,500 were in usable condition.70 In this, as in so many other Western-funded initiatives, Afghans found ways to fool foreigners in order to get rich quick.
PRTs were supposed to help extend government services outside Kabul. For those aid agencies in Afghanistan that had long operated to fill the gap left by the absence of effective government, this was most unwelcome. Ironically, aid agencies had been calling for some time for ISAF to expand beyond Kabul; a rainbow alliance of seventy-two aid agencies warned as early as June 2003 that ‘unless security conditions improve, progress made to date in Afghanistan will be in jeopardy’.71 What they wanted was security. They had not anticipated that ISAF would stray into their lane. In its report on PRTs, Save the Children complained that ‘the engagement of these teams in relief activities … blurs the distinction between humanitarian and military actors’. In turn, this risked aid operators being viewed as working with the military ‘and therefore being seen as legitimate targets in the ongoing conflict’.72 Thus aid agencies grumbled when British PRT personnel drove around in unmarked white vehicles, making them indistinguishable from aid workers. The British PRT tried to develop a division of labour with the aid agencies so as to go some way to reduce this blurring of boundaries; thus, in response to protests from all aid agencies, the British PRT withdrew its mobile medical services for the local population in December 2003. Yet regardless of the concerns of aid agencies, PRTs became the primary vehicle for ISAF to expand beyond Kabul, and by June 2004 there were thirteen PRTs established across Afghanistan.73
Initially, ISAF expansion was off the cards. Like the United States, Turkey was opposed to such a move. Turkey’s views on this mattered because it took command of ISAF from the British in June 2002. The coalition government in Turkey was preoccupied with a financial crisis, and with the prospect of a US-led war on Iraq, which was expected to embolden the Kurdish separatists in Turkey. The collapse of the Turkish government in the autumn of 2002 resulted in the election of a brand-new administration for whom Afghanistan was even further down the list of priorities. Germany and the Netherlands jointly took over command of ISAF in February 2003. Both were more committed to Afghanistan than Turkey but they needed NATO’s assistance to generate the forces they required; in particular, NATO agreed to deploy a multinational corps headquarters. This was the first step that led to the Atlantic Alliance assuming responsibility for the whole ISAF mission.
The background to this development was a crisis within NATO in early 2003 over the impending war in Iraq. On 22 January, at a joint press conference on the fortieth anniversary of the Elysée Treaty, the French president and German chancellor pledged to stand together against the war, leading Rumsfeld to dismiss France and Germany as ‘old Europe’. This was not a transatlantic rift – seven European governments (including the British) published a joint letter of support for the Bush administration in the Wall Street Journal in late January – so much as a crisis within NATO. In February, France, Germany and Belgium blocked a request from Turkey for NATO to prepare to provide military assistance should Iraq retaliate in the war by attacking its neighbour. This led to ‘angry exchanges and shouting matches’ within the North Atlantic Council, NATO’s governing body.74 Writing in the Washington Post, Henry Kissinger observed that it was ‘the gravest crisis in the Atlantic Alliance since its creation five decades ago’.75 The US ambassador to NATO put it even more starkly, later describing it as a ‘near-death experience’ for the alliance.76
February was a pretty tough month also for the British government. As public opposition to a possible war with Iraq grew, Number 10 released a dossier providing evidence that Iraq was in breach of its obligations to disarm its chemical weapons, and that it presented a direct threat to the United Kingdom. Within days, it was discovered that much of this official dossier had in fact been plagiarised from the Internet. Mid February saw 1 million people come out against the war in a massive rally at Hyde Park. There was growing unease within British government, with the Development Secretary, Clare Short, openly criticising the prime minister for being ‘reckless’. The French government declared that it would veto any UN Security Council resolution approving use of force against Iraq; in the end, the British government claimed that the legal grounds for war were already contained in previous Security Council resolutions. The crisis played out through to 18 March, when the House of Commons voted on British military action in Iraq. The vote was a close-run thing, with strenuous lobbying of MPs by Downing Street. The Leader of the House and former Foreign Secretary, Robin Cook, resigned in protest from the Cabinet on the eve of the vote.77 Two days later, the Americans started the war without bothering to give their British allies advance warning.78
After the diplomatic disaster that was Iraq, the ISAF mission offered a way to mend the transatlantic alliance. As one study notes, ‘Going to Afghanistan, from the perspective of mid-2003, offered a relatively pain-free way of regaining American favour and getting NATO politics back on course.’79 It was also a good time to engage with the Americans about Afghanistan. In April 2002, Bush had made a major speech at the Virginia Military Institute in which he reaffirmed, ‘in the best traditions of George Marshall’, America’s commitment to help rebuilding Afghanistan. With its reference to the Marshall Plan, the multibillion-dollar aid programme to rebuild the European economies following World War II, Bush’s speech appeared to suggest a shift in US policy towards supporting nation-building in Afghanistan. As one analyst notes, ‘that’s how senior Afghan officials saw it’. However, within the US government, no major efforts were initiated ‘to assess the requirements for a successful reconstruction effort or to generate the funding that would be necessary’.80
This changed in mid 2003. Condoleezza Rice directed an inter-agency group led by Zalmay Khalilzad to develop a Marshall Plan for Afghanistan. Called ‘Accelerating Success in Afghanistan’, it recommended that $1.2 billion be spent on Afghan reconstruction (Congress would end up providing $1.6 billion). When the plan was pitched to the president for his approval, it transpired that he was not interested in the details and more animated by the prospect of Khalilzad becoming America’s first ambassador to Afghanistan since 1979. As Khalilzad recounts, ‘Once [Bush] had decided that he wanted me in Kabul, it seemed that he was willing to go along with my proposed plan and provide the necessary resources.’81
For Rumsfeld, the Khalilzad plan was not about America making a long-time commitment to Afghanistan but rather the reverse. He had been won over to supporting the plan by the argument, proven erroneous in retrospect, that pouring more aid into Afghanistan would actually enable the US military to pull out more quickly. As one senior US defence official notes, ‘the view inside the Rumsfeld camp was that Afghanistan had become a millstone around our neck and we needed somebody else to take over’. The solution for Rumsfeld’s team was obvious: ‘let’s put NATO in charge’. Thus, the expansion of the ISAF mission can be traced to European eagerness to repair relations with the United States combined with a US eagerness to offload Afghanistan.82 In mid August 2003 the NATO Secretary General quietly suggested to the Afghan government and UN Security Council that they might like to make a joint formal request to NATO for it to take charge of ISAF, which they duly did. NATO’s first operational plan for ISAF (OPLAN 10149) was focused solely on Kabul. However, in a matter of months, NATO forces began to deploy beyond the capital.
In October 2003, Germany announced that it would send 250 troops to northern Afghanistan to set up a PRT in Kunduz. This would be the first deployment of German military forces on operations outside of Europe since 1945. The pro-American German minister of defence, Peter Struck, was looking for a way to mend relations with the United States, and for this reason sought to get his country more involved in Afghanistan. At the same time, Germany was keen to draw a clear distinction between the ISAF mission and the counterterrorism Operation Enduring Freedom mission, the latter being associated in German minds with the hugely unpopular US global war on terror. Being focused on governance and development, the PRTs offered an acceptable alternative. Within NATO, Germany pushed for the expansion of ISAF beyond Kabul using the PRTs as the platform to do so. This idea was vigorously debated within the North Atlantic Council. Some member states, France in particular, were sceptical both of expanding ISAF and of the PRT concept. All the same, agreement was quickly reached within NATO in support of the German proposal. It would mean that PRTs would be de-linked from Operation Enduring Freedom and instead attached to the ISAF mission (but importantly not placed under ISAF Command). The ISAF mandate and operational plan were revised accordingly; in mid October, the UN Security Council approved the revised mandate to provide security assistance beyond Kabul, and by January, ISAF had a new operational plan. Some NATO ambassadors would later complain in private that the Germans had ‘steamrolled’ the alliance into taking on the wider Afghanistan mission. Nonetheless, this set the way for further PRTs, with Germany and the Netherlands setting up PRTs in Feyzabad and Baghlan respectively in 2004.83
Yet the NATO counterclockwise strategy for expanding ISAF beyond Kabul quickly stalled in 2004. All thirteen previous PRTs had been established in northern and western Afghanistan. These were non-Pashtun areas where the Northern Alliance had a strong presence, and so the teams faced no serious security threats. ISAF was next due to expand into the Pashtun heartlands of southern Afghanistan. Here history revealed that Pashtun tribesmen disliked foreigners and were not shy about expressing this through armed violence.84 Add to this the presence of large numbers of Taliban across the border in Pakistan, and the south looked less than inviting. Viewed from the MoD in London, ‘there was no appetite that it was possible to discern anywhere in NATO for taking the campaign into the South’.85 It was time for Britain to step up to the plate.
At the time, the British had a few hundred troops in Afghanistan, with two companies manning the British PRTs in tranquil Mazar-e-Sharif and Maymaneh, and a company on patrol duty in Kabul. The view in the MoD was that Britain was punching below its weight in Afghanistan. As Hoon’s successor as Defence Secretary, John Reid, put it: ‘there was a feeling that British troops … were not doing the task that was up to the level that British troops were capable of doing’.86 Besides, there was nobody else to lead the southern expansion of ISAF. As one senior British general noted, the Germans and Italians, who had contributed fairly large contingents to ISAF, ‘would screw it up if they deployed south’.87
The years 2004 and 2005 were fateful for Britain’s campaign in Afghanistan. At the NATO Summit in Istanbul on 29 June 2004, Blair announced that the British-led Allied Rapid Reaction Corps (ARRC, pronounced ‘Ark’) based in Germany would take command of ISAF. The prime minister’s statement took the ARRC completely by surprise. General Richard Dannatt, then commander of the corps, recalls that ‘it really did come out of nowhere’.88 The United States had requested that the ARRC be sent to Iraq to take command of the southern provinces, and so the headquarters was focused on preparing for this deployment. One senior Cabinet Office official remembers that there was ‘huge enthusiasm within the ARRC’ for going to Iraq.89 The Defence Staff in Whitehall took an altogether different view. The Iraq campaign lacked a driving strategic purpose; as one senior planner noted, ‘By September 2003, we were perfectly aware that there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.’90 Afghanistan was seen as the more vital campaign; it was also viewed as ‘a complete mess’ and desperately in need of some ‘unity of command’. Busy in Iraq, the Americans did not want to take command of ISAF, despite having the largest number of troops on the ground. This left the British as ‘the only people other than the Americans that could take charge of Afghanistan and command US forces’. Optimism was running high in the Ministry of Defence: it was expected that the ARRC would ‘achieve a transformative effect on the campaign’.91 The idea of sending the ARRC to Afghanistan won support from within the British Cabinet, especially ‘if it was not going to Iraq’.92 Thus, at ARRC headquarters staff ‘put away the Iraq maps and maps for Afghanistan came out’.93
This was followed in 2005 by British agreement to lead the ISAF expansion to the south. In January the Chiefs of Staff recommended to the Secretary of State for Defence that Britain agree to deploy forces to southern Afghanistan. Hoon in turn made this offer at the NATO ministerial meeting in Nice in February.94 The question was then: to which province should British forces go? There were three to choose from: Uruzgan, Kandahar and Helmand. Canada and the Netherlands also offered to deploy forces to the south. Sitting above Kandahar, Uruzgan was the smallest and least important of the three, and as such suited the ambitions and capabilities of the Dutch Army. Kandahar was the most important, as the birthplace of the Taliban, with the second-largest city in Afghanistan (Kandahar city), and as the main gateway for vital trade routes crossing the country between Pakistan and Iran. Thus it was the most challenging province to secure. However, the Canadians and not the British ended up with Kandahar. General Rob Fry, who as Deputy Chief of the Defence Staff for Commitments had responsibility for producing the military strategy for Afghanistan, later revealed that the Canadians had insisted on taking Kandahar as ‘their price’ for agreeing to deploy south. The Canadians wanted a big role in Afghanistan. Fry observed that ‘the Canadian military was in search of redemption, having had a long period of undistinguished activity’.95 Put another way by one Canadian expert, ‘taking on a serious combat role would do much to demythologize the Canadian forces as being just good for peacekeeping’.96 Fry’s account is confirmed by the former private secretary to the Defence Secretary, Nick Beadle: ‘How did we end up going to Helmand rather than Kandahar? I can offer nothing more as a reason than a failure to persuade the US to support us, as against the preference of the Canadians to go to Kandahar. The US rightly guessed that we would go into southern Afghanistan anyway.’97
This then left Helmand for the British. Covering almost 10 per cent of the country, it was the largest province in Afghanistan and also a power base for the Taliban. But compared to Kandahar, it was a complete backwater. Richard Dannatt, who by 2005 had become Commander-in-Chief of Land Command, and would a year later become Chief of the General Staff, subsequently claimed that ‘Helmand Province is the vital ground in southern Afghanistan. Control Helmand and you control Kandahar.’ This assertion does not make any sense; controlling Kandahar province is the best way to secure Kandahar city. General David Richards, who would command ISAF in 2006 and thereafter succeed Dannatt as Chief of the General Staff, later expressed the doubts that many held at the time. On hearing that the British would take Helmand, Richards recalled thinking: ‘Where’s Helmand? That’s not very important. Kandahar is what matters.’ A rationale was found for Helmand by linking it to Britain’s lead on counter-narcotics: some 46 per cent of the Afghanistan poppy crop was produced in the province in 2005. However, since counter-narcotics was not part of the ISAF mission, this was not a very good reason for sending the most capable force to Helmand. Certainly Richards was not convinced. He would later complain that ‘I’ve never yet had a good reason given me why that decision was taken’.98
Once taken, this decision remained unchallenged. As Beadle notes, ‘Ministers were advised not to try to reverse decisions that had been made in military circles some time previously.’99 However, the fact is that British defence chiefs knew hardly anything about Helmand or Kandahar before acceding to Canadian demands. White-Spunner, who by then was commander of Joint Force Headquarters, visited Kandahar in October 2004. His Chief of Staff, Colonel Gordon Messenger, followed up with a visit to Helmand in February 2005. Both trips were very short, lasting just a few days, and neither afforded much real understanding of the socio-political and security landscape of these provinces.100 The paper produced for the Chiefs of Staff when considering this decision stated bluntly that ‘we didn’t know much about either place’.101 This was hardly an encouraging start to what was to become Britain’s long war in Helmand.