Arrogant British Officers…..

There was a very interesting piece in yesterday’s Times: ‘Arrogant army chiefs blamed for ‘messy’ campaign in Afghanistan‘.

In it, Deborah Haynes details an internal army report that states that coalition partners found British officers arrogant and unwilling to accept new ideas. This is true, and was also the case in Iraq, where US officers laughed at British officers when they gentled intoned that they knew what they were doing because of Northern Ireland and Malaya. Shortly afterwards, Basra (in the British area of control) descended into chaos.

And the Helmand campaign was born out of the mess in Basra. The British realised that they would need to salvage their reputation in the eyes of the Americans and so they agreed to play a larger role in Afghanistan, including tackling Helmand, and adopting various rotating command positions, including command of ISAF itself.

But as Helmand started to go wrong, the British found themselves in the terrible position of having to welcome American troops to the province to help out. This quickly progressed to being subordinated to US command structures there. But by the time that the Americans were surpassing the British in numbers–around 2009/10–the British were gaining a level of socio-cultural knowledge and subtlety that was allowing them to situate the ‘Taliban’ in Helmandi society. The British understood the grey, if you like, and that the conflict was not a black:white government:Taliban conflict.

But in an irony inside other twisted ironies, the Americans didn’t want to know. To be fair, they looked at British performance in Basra, and in Helmand, and assumed that they didn’t know what they were talking about. And when they arrived in Helmand, they set the clock back to that dichotomous distinction between good and bad, leading to such gems of analysis as ‘the Taliban are bad, and drugs are bad, and so they must be linked’.

My conclusion? Yes, the British were incredibly arrogant, and didn’t have a clue about the society they found themselves in (another key point made in the article and also repeatedly by me). But neither did any of our allies, least of all the US.