‘You have the watches, but we have the time.’
(Taliban saying, possibly apocryphal, page 93)

Summary

This is a quite mind-blowing, jaw-dropping analysis of the incompetence, ignorance, narrow-mindedness, bad planning, profligacy, bureaucratic in-fighting, politicking, terrible leadership, lack of strategy, appalling mismanagement and ineptitude which characterised the British Army campaigns in Iraq (2003 to 2009) and Afghanistan (2004 to 2014). For the rest of my life, when I hear the words ‘British Army’ on the radio or telly or in movies, I’ll think of this devastating exposé and hang my head in shame and embarrassment.

All of the UK’s recent conflicts – Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya – have been total failures in spite of the efforts of our men and women…None of these conflicts has resulted in anything remotely resembling success. All have failed, and failed not badly, but catastrophically.

[Haven’t] the years of involvement in the post 9/11 wars [been], excepting the two world wars, the most expensive and least successful decade and a half in British military history?

The bulk of the responsibility for them [the failure] must be laid at the doors of our politicians who have little idea of conflict and consequences and no experience thereof…However, if Iraq in 2003 was Blair’s war the generals were complicit not only in its inception but also in its failure.

This book sets out to be one man’s reasonably well-informed view of why our forces, and our army in particular, have performed so badly in recent operations.

This isn’t a history of the British army campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan so much as a sustained 250-page analysis of why they went so very, very, very wrong. Extremely wrong. Mind-bogglingly wrong. In the introduction Ledwidge writes that he is ‘calling the high command of the armed forces to account for what I regard as nothing less than a dereliction of duty‘ (p.11) and he proceeds to flay politicians, civil servants, advisers and senior military figures with a cat o’ nine tails.

Then, in the longer second half of the book, Ledwidge analyses half a dozen major themes which emerge from the failed wars (the real nature of counterinsurgency, the changing face of military intelligence, the need for a more self-critical and reflective culture in the army) and suggests practical reforms to create an army fit for 21st century combat.

Ledwidge’s qualifications

Ledwidge is formidably well qualified to discuss the issues. He has had an impressively wide ranging career both in and outside the military, and served in all the countries under discussion.

Ledwidge began his career as a lawyer. After qualifying, he spent eight years practising as a criminal barrister in his home city of Liverpool. He then worked for a decade in the Balkans and throughout the former Soviet Union in international human rights protection, criminal law reform, and institution building at the highest levels of government. He developed particular expertise in missing persons, human trafficking and torture prevention.

Ledwidge explains in the introduction that he fancied diversifying and volunteered to join the Royal Naval Reserve, learning navigation and seamanship on minesweepers in the North Sea. He was commissioned in 1993 and went on to serve for fifteen years as a reserve officer with extensive operational experience, retiring as head of the Human Intelligence branch (p.267).

In 1996 he went to Bosnia to serve alongside the military in a team tasked with identifying and tracking down war criminals. In 1998 he moved on to Kosovo as part of a military/civilian peacekeeping unit and was there during the actual war, 1998 to 1999. After the Balkans he served with the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe, in states of the former Soviet Union, mostly Tajikistan.

In 2003 he was called back into regular military service and sent to Basra, in southern Iraq, leading one of the teams of the Iraq Survey Group, tasked with finding the mythical weapons of mass destruction. In 2007 to 08 he served as the first ‘Justice Advisor’ to the UK Mission in Helmand Province.

In 2009 he retired as a military officer. During and after the war in Libya (2011 to 2012) he performed a similar role at the UK Embassy in Libya. (He has also worked in Ukraine during the current war, a period obviously not covered in this book.)

Nowadays Ledwidge is an academic, a senior lecturer at the University of Portsmouth. He is the author of this and a number of other books about contemporary warfare, and regularly appears on the media as an expert.

The first three chapters of the book deal with 1) Iraq 2) Afghanistan and 3) Libya. They aren’t detailed histories of events such as you find in Jack Fairweather’s and numerous other chronicles. They cover just enough of the events to raise the issues and themes which he then addresses in the second, analytical, half of the book.

There are no maps. Shame. Obviously you can look it all up online, still… And it’s poorly copy-edited. Ledgewick repeats adjectives or adverbs in the same sentence. At one point he lists the countries involved in the Syrian conflict and includes Russia twice in the same list. Should have been better edited.

1. Basra

In the invasion of Iraq in March 2003 the Brits were assigned to take Basra, the second city of Iraq, close to the Gulf of Persia, sitting astride the Shatt al-Arab waterway which is formed from the junction of the rivers Tigris and Euphrates, and only 50k from the border with Iran. At one point he likens old Basra to cosmopolitan seaports like Liverpool or Marseilles (p.16). But the Islamic revolution in Iran, followed by 8 years of the Iran-Iraq War, followed by Saddam’s ill-fated invasion of Kuwait, followed by ten years of Western sanctions had made it a harder, poorer, bitterer place to live and brought out a fanatical strain in many of the mostly Shia Muslim population.

Once the invasion was complete the British Army was given responsibility for the occupation of Basra and the four southern provinces around it (Basra, Maysan, Al Muthanna and Nasariyah), the heartland of Iraq’s Shia community. However, almost immediately the city was taken it became clear that British politicians, the Ministry of Defence, the General Staff and senior planners had no idea what to do next:

‘It became very apparent to me shortly after crossing the border that the government and many of my superiors had no idea what they were doing.’ (Colonel Tim Collins, p.20)

‘There was no strategic planning or direction at all beyond the military invasion. There was no articulated strategic context nor end state. There was no campaign plan.’ (Major General Albert Whitley, adviser to the US commanding general)

‘[There was a] lack of any real understanding of the state of the country post-invasion. We had not done enough research, planning into how the country worked post-sanctions…None of this had been really thought through.’ (General Sir Freddie Viggers)

Numbers

In Kosovo NATO forces were able to secure order because they had the numbers to do so. In Basra and south Iraq British forces never had anything like enough boots on the ground to make society to secure, to ensure law and order. They lost control of the streets in the first few days when looters ran rampant, criminal gangs flourished, random street crime became endemic – and never recovered it.

The lack of any thought whatsoever as to how the army might deal with looters was to have disastrous consequences. (p.24)

George Bush and Tony Blair made speeches promising the Iraqis reconstruction of their country, peace and prosperity, a flourishing economy and democratic accountability. None of this was delivered and it turned out the invaders couldn’t even make the streets safe. Carjackings, kidnappings, rape, gang violence all flourished out of control within weeks.

More than any other factor, the restoration and maintenance of order requires numbers (p.24)

On 26 June politicians and generals were woken from their dreams when six military policemen were killed in the town of Majar al-Kabir, due to failures of communication, malfunctioning equipment etc. The real point was that the town, and the whole area, had a proud tradition of resisting invaders including Saddam Hussein’s own security forces, something which the British forces simply didn’t know about or understand (p.27).

Ledwidge arrived in September 2003 after the first honeymoon was over. British soldiers no longer wandered the streets in soft hats, stopping off at cafes. They were coming under increasingly sustained attacks: roadside bombs, ambushes, snipers.

Meanwhile Shia death squads emerged, assassinating former members of Saddam’s regime, terrorising Sunni Muslims into leaving entire areas under threat of death (i.e. ethnic cleansing à la Bosnia), kidnapping, torturing and murdering any possible opponents, and imposing a strict Puritan religious orthodoxy on the street (mostly against women) (p.31).

Instead of addressing any of this, British forces had enough on their plate simply defending themselves. In fact this became their main aim. Ledwidge says his utterly fruitless efforts leading a team looking for WMDs crystallised the way the occupying forces were interested entirely in their own concerns and didn’t give a monkeys about the million Basrawis whose city was turning into hell.

The Geneva conventions

Is an invading or conquering army responsible for securing law and order? Emphatically yes. It is a fundamental principle of the Geneva Conventions. Apparently Colin Powell summed this up to George Bush as ‘You broke it, you own it.’ None of the invading forces acted on this legal basis. Donald Rumsfeld joked about the widespread looting days after the invasion, apparently unaware that the coalition forces had an internationally binding legal duty to prevent it.

For a year after the invasion Shia militias, backed by Iran, took control of the streets. In an example of their complete lack of understanding, the British project for training new corps of Iraqi police ended up recruiting many of these militias who then, wearing uniforms supplied by British taxpayers and wielding guns paid for British taxpayers, set about terrorising, extorting, raping and killing Basrawi citizens – who then wondered why their British occupiers were allying with murderers. The British hoped that they were ‘incorporating’ the militias into a new police force. Instead they were legitimising the militias (p.35-36).

Rotations and reconstruction

The British Army had a policy of rotating units home every 6 months. The army saying has it that you spend the first two months learning the job, the next two months doing it capably enough, and the last two months hanging on and not getting injured, before rotating home for ‘tea and medals’.

This system guaranteed that just as any particular brigades or battalion and their senior officers was about to get an inkling of how local society functioned, had made important contacts and were building trust, they were abruptly whisked away. The system guaranteed a lack of continuity or consistency and prevented any kind of long-term planning.

Instead new brigades came in with senior officers determined to make a ‘splash’. Often they worked out one significant or ‘signature’ offensive, carried it out – some pointless firefight resulting in a hundred or so dead enemy militants and swathes of civilian homes and properties destroyed – then hunkered back down in their base till rotated home and a medal for the commander-in-chief (p.90).

This happened every six months as the actual city the British were meant to be policing slipped further and further into Shia militia control.

Jaish al-Mahdi

The biggest Shia militia was the Jaish al-Mahdi (JAM), loyal to the figure who emerged as the head of militant Shiism, Muqtada al-Sadr. To cut a long story short, despite the British Army’s best efforts, the JAM ended up taking over Basra.

By the end of 2006, control of the city had essentially been lost to the Shi’a armed groups. In September 2006 Basra was to all intents and purposes the domain of one of them – the Jaish al-Mahdi (JAM), the military wing of the Office of the Martyr Sadr (OMS). (p.39)

Attacks on British outposts intensified until by 2006 they were on a war footing. Given the complete collapse in security on their watch, absolutely no reconstruction of any type took place. The rubbish piled up in the streets, many of which were open sewers, electricity was rare and erratic, water supplies were unsafe, bombed schools remained in ruins. Nothing.

‘Basra was a political and military defeat.’ (Commodore Steven Jermy, p.40)

‘I don’t know how you could see the British withdrawal from Basra in 2007 in any other light than as a defeat.’ (Colonel Peter Mansoor, p.41)

Operation Sinbad

In September 2006 the British launched Operation Sinbad which aimed to take on the most corrupt ‘police’ stations and clear them out. Some measure of clear-out was achieved, at the cost of ferocious firefights, but as soon as the operation ended in February 2007, the Shia militias and gangs returned.

On the same day the operation ended, 18 February 2007, Tony Blair announced a major ‘drawdown’ of troops in Basra, from 7,000 to 4,000. Many of the officers Ledwidge quotes consider this the moment of defeat. It signalled to friend and foe alike that the British were giving up and running away.

Withdrawal

The incoming commander, General Jonathan Shaw, decided to withdraw the British garrison in Basra Palace to the heavily fortified allied airfield 10 miles outside of town. It was dressed up in fancy terminology, but it was giving up. The British did a deal with JAM whereby they notified the militants whenever they were going to exit the airbase and were only allowed to patrol Basra with the JAM’s permission. British rule in Basra had produced:

‘the systematic abuse of official institutions, political assassinations, tribal vendettas, neighbourhood vigilantism and enforcement of [Islamic] social mores, together with the rise of criminal mafias.’ (Middle Eastern Report number 67, 25 June 2007)

‘The short version is that the Brits have lost Basra, if indeed they ever had it…’ (US officer close to General Petraeus)

‘The military’s failure to provide a safe environment for the local population represented a strategic failure for the UK in Iraq.’ (James K. Wither, author of Small Wars and Insurgencies)

In defence of the British position are the arguments that: a) British occupation couldn’t go on forever b) the political and popular will back in Britain had turned against a demonstrable failure; but most of all c) it was felt that it was time for the Iraqi government to step up to the plate and take responsibility for security in its second city. So Basra was ‘formally’ handed over to the Iraqi government in December 2007. But the Iraqi government didn’t have the wherewithal i.e. army or neutral and functioning police force, to retake it.

There was a fourth reason British troops were drawn down in 2008. The politicians and generals both wanted to refocus their efforts on Afghanistan. This was:

1. a desert war i.e not mired in heavily populated cities
2. a ‘good’ and moral war i.e. against a defined enemy, the Taliban
3. offered the British Army the opportunity to redeem itself in the sceptical eyes of the Americans (stated in terms by General Sir Richard Dannatt, p.62)

More sinisterly, 4) some officers are quoted to the effect that the general staff needed to find something for the battalions coming free in Iraq to do in order to justify the military budget. ‘Use them or lose them’ was the motto.

And so the British campaign in Afghanistan was motivated, at bottom, by not just domestic British politics (Blair’s ongoing wish to suck up to Bush), but Whitehall bickering about the Ministry of Defence’s budget. Well, a lot of British soldiers, and thousands of Afghans, were to die so that the British Army general staff could maintain its funding in the next budget round.

2. Helmand

History

The British had ‘form’ in Afghanistan. During the Victorian imperial era we fought at least two wars against Afghans plus innumerable skirmishes. Afghanistan was a loose bundle of tribal regions between the north-west frontier of imperial India and the Russian Empire and so the site of the famous ‘Great Game’ i.e. extended spying and political machinations against Russia.

We had our arses kicked in the First Afghan War of 1839 to 1842 which featured the largest British military disaster of the nineteenth century, when a force of 4,500 soldiers and 12,000 civilians were forced to abandon Kabul and retreat through the Khyber Pass on 1 January 1842. One man, one man, alone survived. In the Second Afghan War of 1878 to 1880 the British lost the battle of Maiwand to a coalition of tribal chiefs.

The thing about Maiwand is that it’s about 60 miles from Lashkar Gah, the capital of Helmand Province where the British now went. Although nobody in Britain remembers the battle, the Afghans do: it’s the great moment when they took on the might of the British Empire and triumphed.  In Afghan history the battle holds something like the place of Agincourt in our national myth. The British were blundering into the heartland of Afghan pride and patriotism. Once again, ignorance.

‘We knew very little about Helmand Province.’ (Air Chief Marshal Sir Glen Torpy, p.69)

British soldiers arriving to police the area where they lost a famous battle to the great-great-great-grandfathers of the present tribal leaders was, in effect, a challenge to a rematch. Which is why Ledwidge quotes president of Afghanistan Ashraf Ghani saying that, if there’s one country from the entire international community which emphatically shouldn’t have been sent to south Afghanistan, it was Britain (p.66).

Situation in 2007

Some Brits had been in place since 2001 when small units of US and UK special forces were infiltrated into the north of the city and directed the campaign to overthrow the Taliban. A small British unit helped secure Kabul, and one had been quietly operating a provincial reconstruction team in the north of the country.

Since the overthrow of the Taliban in 2001 American special forces had been holding Helmand Province from a base in the capital Lashkar Gah, which, under their relaxed supervision, was completely peaceful. It was the arrival of the Brits which triggered the violence which was soon to engulf them, characterise their 3 years in the country, and lead to another crushing strategic defeat.

Bosnia and a proper force

When the Brits took part in peacekeeping in Bosnia they were part of a force 60,000 strong, in a relatively benign security setup (no Kosavars or Serbs attacked patrols), close to the European countries with large NATO bases i.e. easily resupplied. Many officers apparently thought Helmand would be the same sort of thing because Helmand Province is the same rough size as Bosnia and has a similar population, around 1 million. Hence Defence Secretary John Reid confidently asserting that the army would spend its 3 year mission supervising reconstruction projects without a shot being fired. Idiot.

The British deployed a small force of just 3,500 to cover an area two and a half times the size of Wales, with little or no infrastructure i.e. roads, 8,000 miles from home, with little or no knowledge about the local people, their ethnic or tribal makeup, culture or history (p.69).

Deposing the one man who held the province together

When the Brits arrived the chief power in the region was a warlord named Sher Muhammed Akhundzada or SMA for short (p.70). He practiced extortion and intimidation but he had suppressed all other rivals and so in effect kept the peace. SMA was also heavily involved in opium cultivation and heroin production, the leading component of the local economy. Well, in 2005 the British prevailed upon President Karzai to get rid of SMA, to the dismay of the Americans and aid workers.

The inevitable happened. With the local strongman who’d been keeping the peace removed, a host of smaller gangs and militias moved into the area, notably the once-cowed remnants of the Taliban. Removing SMA was the single act which triggered all the chaos which followed, it was equivalent to Bremer dissolving the Iraqi army and police (p.71).

Heroin

At international meetings British politicians had enthusiastically volunteered the British Army to lead on combating the drugs trade. Trouble was the British were also trying to mount a hearts and minds counterinsurgency campaign, and the two were diametrically opposed. Every time they shut down a poppy plantation and burned all the heroin, they made an angry enemy of the farmer and his workers and dependents. Worse, some operations were closed down while others continued to thrive, leading to the belief that the entire policy was just another form of extortion and corruption (p.71).

SAS advice

An SAS unit had been operating in the area in co-operation with the Americans for four years. They were tasked with writing a report ahead of the deployment of the 3,500 British forces. They advised we keep SMA in place, would need a significant increase in numbers and money in order to carry on the Americans’ effective hearts and minds campaign, and that the Brits should remain within the highly populated central part of the province (p.74).

Instead the Brits sent a small force with little money, got rid of the one man who could control the province and then took the decision to ignore the SAS advice and disperse the troops to small barracks set up in each town. The fancy ambition was to ‘disperse and hold’. Maps in HQ showed ‘inkspots’ of pacification which would slowly join up till the whole province was pacified and reconstruction could crack on.

Platoon houses under attack

Of course that never happened. Instead small forces found themselves trapped in what became known as ‘platoon houses’ in Helmand’s various towns, Lashkar Gah, Musa Qaleh, Sangin and so on. Ledwidge summarises the deployment in a devastating page of mistakes: The force deployed

with vulnerable Snatch Land Rovers, no real counter-IED capability, not enough helicopters, no air-to-ground fire capability, and only a limited ability to gather intelligence or carry out combat operations. This made it a very weak and blind force, and one that would depend entirely on the goodwill of the population and its leaders for its mobility beyond its bases and even its existence within them. (p.75)

The situation was made ten times worse by sacking the one man who knew and controlled the province and who they could have worked with, SMA.

3 Para

The 3,500 troops deployed to Afghanistan were 16 Air Assault Brigade, with one battle group of about 650 men based around the Third Parachute Regiment or 3 Para. These boys are trained to fight and were looking for a fight. Ledwidge thinks they were about the last possible troop you wanted to deploy to a region which required slow, subtle and careful relationship-building.

Testing new kit

The army had recently acquired some of the new Apache helicopters. These have awesome firepower and were designed for high intensity fighting against the invading Soviet Army on the North German plain. Army staff wanted to see them in action. So there was no hearts and minds strategy regarding the Afghan people. Planning was led not by long-term political or strategic considerations, but by operational considerations, which went: we’ve got these troops. We’ve got some new helicopters. We need to use them both or we’ll lose them in the next Treasury spending review. Let’s go!

Dispersing our forces

A long-term development plan for Helmand Province had been written but it was ignored in favour of faulty intelligence. Somehow the figure of 450 Taliban fighters came to the attention of the Brigade staff. This sounded like a number that 3 Para could eliminate. So, instead of concentrating their forces in the heartland as the plan and the small number of US troops who’d been quietly manning Helmand recommended, the decision was taken to deploy small, agile, light forces to each town ready to kill these insurgents (p.83). Ledwidge names the guilty general who took the decision to ignore the draft plan and all the best advice and split up his forces into small pockets scattered round small towns, but it’s such an indictment, such a fatally bad decision, that I am too cautious to name names.

Very quickly these little fortresses our boys were dispersed to became magnets for insurgents keen to show themselves worthy of their great-great-great-great grandfathers and their feats against the invading Angrez. Attacks on the platoon house began immediately and got steadily more intense. British troops found themselves fighting merely to hang on. All thoughts of pacification or security were abandoned. Plans for reconstruction and economic development were abandoned. The Brits proved unable to secure the peace let alone do any reconstruction. Barely able to supply themselves, all they could do was fight off continual attacks. This desperate plight was dignified with the title ‘force protection’. In reality it was hanging on for dear life.

It is this stressed and highly embattled situation which is chronicled in vivid accounts like ‘3 Para’ (‘Real Combat. Real Heroes. Real Stories’) and many other bestselling paperbacks like it. Ledgwidge has a humorous name for this entire genre – herographies, stirring accounts of our plucky lads, surrounded and fighting against the odds. He suggests there’s something in our national psyche which warms to the notion of the plucky underdog, the Battle of Britain, the Blitz. But it’s all rubbish. These embattled outposts were created by a commanding officer who went against the advice of the Americans and a handful of Brit SAS troops who had been quietly hunkered down in Lashkar Gah and kept the province void of violence from 2001 to 2006 when 3 Para arrived and stirred up a hornet’s nest.

Same with Sniper One, Sergeant Dan Mills’ vivid, Sun-style account of hanging on in a fortified base against sustained assault by ‘insurgents’ in al-Amarah, south-east Iraq. From the first page the account shows dazzling ignorance about the environment he’s been posted to. The entire narrative opens with the way that, on their very first day, on their very first patrol, of all the places to pull over their Snatch Land Rovers for a breather, they chose to park outside the local headquarters of the fierce and violent Shia militia, the Jaish al-Mahdi. The fiercely chauvinistic militants inside took this to be a calculated insult to their pride and manliness and so, with no warning, opened fire on the patrol and lobbed grenades at them, one of which severely injured a mate of Dan’s, leading to a sustained firefight. When relief vehicles were sent to ‘extract’ them, these were ambushed and proved unable to reach them etc.

It’s a dramatic story and would make the great opening scene of a movie but, having read Ledwidge’s high-level, strategic analysis, you could hardly come up with a clearer example of the blundering British ignorance of the situation on the ground, the subtleties and dangers of local power politics, feuds and rivalries which condemned our troops to the experience of being surrounded and besieged both in Basra and Helmand. Same thing happened in both places. No lessons were learned. Nothing was understood.

Dan Mills’ intense and violent experience of being besieged last four months until the entire garrison of his particular fortress, Cimic House, was evacuated and ‘extracted’ back to the more defensible base at the local airport. Mills is at pains to tell us they left with honour. But really, like the British army as a whole in Basra province and Helmand province, they were soundly beaten and ran away.

Only small numbers were actual fighting troops

A central and rather mind-boggling fact is that, of a deployment of 3,500 troops it may be that only a couple of hundred are available for actual patrols. In the Afghan chapter as in the Basra chapter, Ledwidge explains that a quite astonishing number of the ‘troops’ sent to these kinds of places have other roles to play apart from combat: from military police manning prisons, to cooks and engineers, from planners and general staff through the comms and media and press teams. There are the drivers who bravely bring in provisions and ammo to the central bases over long, exposed supply lines, there are the helicopter pilots and the scads of engineers and specialists required to keep them airborne. There are, of course, expert handlers, storers and maintainers of all the different types of ammunition, quartermasters and logistics specialists. The list goes on and on and explains the stunning fact that, out of a battalion of 3,500 men, only 168 were available for foot patrols (p.143). Thus the provincial capital, Lashkar Gah, a town of 200,000, was patrolled by just 200 British soldiers, of which only 20 were actually out on the street at any one time (p.83). Pathetic. Insignificant.

Ledwidge compares the British deployments in Basra and Afghanistan (8,000 and 5,000 in conflict zones with completely unreliable support from the ‘police’) to the well-known deployment to Malaya in the 1950s (which British officers never stopped boring their American colleagues with) which consisted of 40,000 troops working alongside a trustworthy local police force of 100,000. In other words a completely different situation.

The Taliban return

Ledwidge arrived in Afghanistan mid-2007, one year after the initial deployment, to find chaos on the streets and the Brits fighting for their survival in an archipelago of isolated, highly embattled strongholds (p.88). The army had completely lost the initiative and was reduced to hanging on in these forts, rarely able to leave them, their ‘presence’ and ‘authority’ non-existent more than a few hundred yards from the walls – all while the Taliban slowly re-established themselves among the general population as reliable providers of security and justice, albeit of a very harsh variety. Harsh but better than the random outbursts of extreme violence and destruction associated with the angry, frustrated British soldiers.

Sangin and the drugs trade

In Sangin, one of the world centres of the heroin trade the Brits found themselves drawn into drug turf wars without understanding the complex power politics between rival drug gangs, ‘police’, regional and central government, tribal allegiances and religious motivations. The Brits just labelled them all ‘Taliban’ and thought they achieved something when they killed 5 or 10 or 20 of them in a firefight; when of course such firefights had zero impact on the actual situation. All they ever did was destroy the centres of the towns where these kinds of firefights took place (‘destroying and depopulating town centres’ p.84) and kill lots of innocent civilians or else the populations fled these new centres of violence, nobody knew where: off into the desert, to other towns, many to the slums of Kabul.

All this reinforced the ancestral perception that the ‘Angrez’ were unwanted invaders who brought only destruction and death – as they did. New insurgents could be found or were created when their families were injured or killed or stepped in to replace fathers or brothers. The potential supply of ‘insurgents’ was limitless.

‘Killing insurgents usually serves to multiply enemies rather than subtract them…[something which] is especially relevant in revenge-prone Pashtun communities…’ (General Michael Flynn, former US army chief of intelligence in Iraq, p.206)

This wasn’t helped at all by the adoption of a ‘decapitation’ strategy, increasingly adopted (out of desperation) in Basra and Helmand. It meant targeting supposed leaders of the insurgency and then killing them. There are four obvious objections to this policy. One is that for every ‘Taliban leader’ you kill, at least one if not more male relatives will step into the gap. Two is that almost certainly you will kill innocent civilians in the process, thus inflaming the general population and recruiting more enemy. Three, more than one serving officer raised fears that these decapitation forces degenerated into little more than ‘death squads’, not unlike the notorious death squads which existed in many Latin American countries (p.233).

The fourth objection is that the entire policy relies on accurate intelligence i.e. knowing who these alleged Taliban leaders are. Accurate intelligence was something the Brits never had in either Basra or Helmand. None of them spoke the language. They had to rely on local sources and Ledwidge gives some bleakly funny examples of one or other gang of businessmen or drug barons ‘tipping the British off’ about dangerous ‘Taliban leaders’ who the Brits then dutifully arrested in a violent and destructive raid but when they interrogated them, slowly and embarrassingly discovered that so-called ‘Taliban leaders’ were in fact heads of a rival business or drugs gang. In other words, the Brits were routinely played for patsies, useful idiots who could be twisted round the little fingers of savvy local drugs barons and warlords.

So decapitation doesn’t work, you lose the moral high ground, and you multiply your enemy. But it was this desperate expedient, the tactic of a force which has lost the battle, which the Brits resorted to in both Basra and Helmand.

And these counter-productive and sometimes farcical efforts were then publicised by army press and media officers as successful raids, listing the amount of weaponry captured and ‘insurgents’ killed, puff stories and completely meaningless figures which were then reported in the British press, and passed up the chain of command to eventually be shown to naive politicians in PowerPoint presentations which proved how we were winning the war and would bring peace and plenty to Iraq and Afghanistan any minute now, we’re just turning the corner, just give us another billion to finish the job, Prime Minister.

Cause of the destruction

So many civilian deaths were caused because the Brits would go out on a patrol, almost immediately be ambushed and surrounded and start taking casualties, and so radio in for air support. Up would come an Apache attack helicopter armed with guns firing high calibre rockets designed to penetrate Soviet tanks into urban areas packed with houses built of breeze blocks or mud bricks. The choppers might have fought off the attackers but they also devastated all the buildings in a large area (p.82).

This destruction of the centres of every town in Helmand was the direct consequence of not sending enough troops. More troops could have defended themselves better without calling in death from the air. Inadequate troops had to call in what was effectively heavy artillery. The shitty British tradition of trying to do it on the cheap ended up destroying Afghan towns and massacring Afghan civilians.

Imagine your house was completely destroyed in one of the Brits’ pointless ‘pacification’ exercises, maybe your wife or son or brother killed or injured, and the local resistance offered you a stipend to take up arms and help drive these wicked invaders out of your homeland. It would not only be your patriotic, tribal and family duty, but you’d want to do it, to be revenged.

And so the Brits spent years devastating and destroying the very towns they said they’d come to rebuild and ‘develop’. Madness. This pattern continued for four years, ‘an operation that was in a state of drift, chaotically bereft of credible strategy’ (p.91).

Six months rotations

Everything was made worse by the Army’s policy of 6 months rotations. Every 6 months battalions would be rotated home and an entirely new troop came in with new officers and men who didn’t have a clue about their surroundings. The system tended to incentivise each new commanding officer to devise and carry out pointless engagements known as ‘signature operations’ (p.90). British commanders, like middle managers everywhere, have to be seen to be doing something, even if their violent and entirely counter-productive little operations worked against the long-term aims of the deployment i.e. securing the population (p.99). None of the officers had long-term interests. They were only there for 6 months which leads to loss of knowledge, loss of continuity, and continual chopping and changing of plans (p.144).

Allying with a corrupt government

And yet another fundamental flaw: the Brits were meant to be defending ‘the government’ but it took senior Brits many years to realise the ‘government’ in Kabul was no better than a congeries of gangs and cliques and criminals carving up budget money and resources among themselves and their tribes. The mass of the people despised and hated the so-called ‘government’ and we…allied ourselves with them (p.95).

Allying with criminal police

On the ground the Afghan ‘police’ were even worse than the Iraqi police. Iraqi police were notorious for corruption – under Saddam their main occupation was stopping traffic at checkpoints and demanding bribes. But the police in Helmand Province were significantly more vicious; they extorted money with menaces, notorious for raping women and boys. Every police station had a ‘fun boy’ or house catamite for the officers to sodomise (p.76).

Thus the British were seen to be supporting and helping murders, rapists and extortionists. Ledwidge quotes an aid worker getting a phone call from terrified civilians, after the British ‘secured’ an area of Sangin so that the ‘police’ could sweep through the area looking for the bad guys but, in reality, raping at will and extorting money at gunpoint (p.85). The British allied themselves to the most criminal element in Afghan society. Thus it is absolutely no surprise to learn that everyone, without exception, wanted the rapist-friendly, town-destroying ‘Angrez’ to leave as soon as possible (p.95).

The appeal of the Taliban

The British ‘strategy’ enabled the Taliban to present itself as the representatives of impartial justice and security. After all, that had been their achievement when they came to power in 1996: ending years of civil war between rival warlords. ‘The single most effective selling point of the pre-9/11 Taliban was justice’ (p.94). They could offer what the British couldn’t and slowly the majority of the population came to prefer rough justice to criminal anarchy.

‘The Taliban did not even have a bakery that they can give bread to the people, but still most people support the Taliban – that’s because people are sick of night raids and being treated badly by the foreigners.’ (Afghan farmer, quoted p.233)

Legacy

The deployment of 16 Air Assault Brigade had been nothing short of disastrous. Bereft of insight or perspective of any point of view except the most radical form of ‘cracking on’ they had left a legacy of destroyed towns, refugees and civilian casualties…They had set a pattern of dispersed forts, difficult to defend and even more difficult to support or supply. (p.87)

All this explains why, in 2010, the Americans had to bail the British out and come and secure Helmand, exactly as they had had to take over Basra after the British miserably failed there as well. The Yanks were cheered on arrival in Garmshir, not because they were American, but simply because they weren’t British.

A mission that had begun with high hopes of resurrecting Britain’s military reputation in the eyes of its American allies had resulted only in reinforcing the view that the British were not to be relied on. (p.105)

If Basra damaged the military side of the so-called ‘special relationship’, then Afghanistan destroyed it (p.106). The British ambassador to Afghanistan reflected that the entire campaign was ‘a half-baked effort’ (p.105).

In 2013 Prime Minister David Cameron declared ‘mission accomplished’ (these politicians and their lies) and by the end of 2014 almost all British combat troops had been withdrawn. What Ledwidge didn’t know as he wrote the second edition of this book in 2016 was that 6 years later Joe Biden was to withdraw the final US troops from the country which fell within a week to the same Taliban who the Brits cheerfully claimed to be eliminating in 2007 and 2008 and 2009. Was it all for nothing? Yes, except for legacy of bitterness and hatred it left behind. Ledwidge quotes journalist Jean Mackenzie:

I never met an Afghan who did not hold the view that the British were in Helmand to screw them. They hate the British viscerally and historically. Even if they had been competent there was no way the British were going to do well there. But when they came in with gobbledeygook about ‘robust rules of engagement’ and started killing Helmandi civilians, that was it. (p.107)

It is obvious what a huge gap separated the reality experienced by most Afghans and the story the Brits told themselves and, via their sophisticated Comms and Press teams, told the British people and the world. ‘Lies’ is the word that springs to mind. ‘Propaganda’, obviously. ‘Spin’ is the term that was used by New Labour and its media manipulators. But maybe closer to the truth to say comprehensive ‘self deception’.

The weak point of counterinsurgency theory

Counterinsurgency can only work in a state with a strong or supportive government. What the Americans and British in Iraq and Afghanistan told themselves they were doing was supporting ‘government’ forces against insurgents. The problem was that the ‘government’ itself was highly partisan or weak or both, and its representatives on the ground were corrupt and violent and ineffective. Under those circumstances the native populations made the rational decision to opt for the only force which had in the past ensured basic security, the Mahdi Army in Iraq and the Taliban in Afghanistan (p.108). Backing weak governments tends to encourage ethnic nationalism as the only viable alternative.

Sucking up to the Yanks

Damningly, the conclusion Ledwidge comes to is the reason there was never any coherent strategy in either Iraq or Afghanistan, the reason the British generals and majors and soldiers never really knew what they were meant to be doing, is because both campaigns really, in essence, had only one aim: Tony Blair’s wish to suck up to the Americans. Blair wanted to be a player on the world stage, to secure his fame, to stand shoulder to shoulder with the Yanks in their War Against Terror, thought Britain could be the older wiser Athens to America’s bigger richer but unsophisticated Rome, blah blah blah, yadda yadda yadda.

The goal of being America’s best friend may be despicable or admirable according to taste, it doesn’t really matter, because the practical outcome was that the British Army was pout to the test and failed, not once but twice, failing to provide security and something like peace in both southern Iraq and southern Afghanistan. Both times the American army had to move in and take over and did a much better job. So the net, high-level result was the exact opposite of Blair’s wish to be seen as America’s number one best friend. As Ledwidge puts it, if Basra damaged the so-called ‘special relationship’, Helmand destroyed it (p.106).

3. Libya

2011 the Arab Spring began in Tunisia and protests spread to Libya and Egypt. In Libya anti-government protests broke out in the eastern city of Benghazi. The West worried that Colonel Gaddafi was about to send armed forces to massacre protesters so France, the UK and US sponsored UN resolution 1973 justifying ‘intervention’ to save lives and establishing no fly zones, the concept pioneered in Iraq to protect the Kurds in 1991.

On this basis the French launched lightning air strikes against Gaddafi’s forces as they entered Benghazi and threatened to attack protesters, and in support of the rebel National Transitional Council. As usual, there was a lot of high-minded guff about protecting civilians and how regime change was the last thing on our minds, but there was steady slippage and the bombardments increased to actively support the rebels and quell the government forces.

In June 2011 Ledwidge was deployed to Libya as a ‘stabilisation officer’. On 20 October 2011, Gaddafi was tracked down to a hideout in Sirte, surrounded by the usual clamouring rabble, and beaten and shot to death. There’s grim, dispiriting footage of the event in this this American news report.

Anyway, the point is, you get rid of a long-ruling dictator who’s been holding his country together via repressive, feared security forces and…does it overnight turn into Holland or Vermont? No. It collapses into civil war between rebel factions and into the power and security vacuum come…Islamic terrorists. Exactly as happened in Iraq.

Thus, Ledwidge tells us, Libya under Gaddafi from 1969 to 2011 never harboured any Islamic terrorists. In the years since his fall it has become the North African base of Islamic State and other extreme Islamic groups who use it as a base to launch attacks into neighbouring countries.

Ledgewick’s thematic critique

Part two of the book (pages 117 to 281) moves on to consider general points and issues raised by the three wars. These are so many and so complicated that I’ll give only a brief selection. They’re addressed in chapters titled:

• Dereliction of Duty: the Generals and Strategy
• Cracking On and Optimism Bias: British Military Culture and Doctrine
• Tactics without Strategy: The Counterinsurgency Conundrum
• Managing Violence: the Question of Force
• Strangers in Strange Lands
• Fixing Intelligence
• Thinking to Win

The armed forces are top heavy. The army has more generals than helicopters. This in turn breeds groupthink. All senior officers are trained at one college where they are taught to think the same.

Another aspect of the overpopulation of generals is none of them stand up to politicians. Ledwidge gives examples from the Second World War and Malaya of generals demanding that politicians are absolutely clear about the goals and ends of campaigns. He also says generals from previous generations were blunt to politicians about risks. He describes the detailed explanation of the risks of failure give to Margaret Thatcher about the Falklands War. Whereas none of the umpteen senior generals overseeing the deployment to either Iraq or Helmand appears to have explained to the politicians (Blair, Brown) the very serious risk of failure. Trahison des généraux.

On the contrary, many suffered from optimism bias: ‘the tendency to overestimate our chances of positive experiences and underestimate our chances of negative experiences.’ Ledwidge gives examples of junior officers whose frank and candid assessments of situations were criticised as defeatist or even unpatriotic. Very quickly they learned to gloss over setbacks and accentuate the positive. If this pattern is repeated at every run going up the ladder, then by the time it reaches the politicians military reports tell them we’re winning the war when we’re in fact losing it. Or encourage them to take further bad decisions on the basis of bad intelligence (pages 160 to 170). John Reid later testified that the generals said it would be no problem having a major troop deployment in Iraq and Afghanistan simultaneously (p.162)

Politicians don’t understand the army. Blair went out of his way to praise the army in his appearances before the Chilcott Enquiry by saying they have such a ‘can-do’ attitude. Except that it turned out that they can’t do. At all. But clearly that’s not what they told him. In the war, in Malaya, in the buildup to the Falklands, generals made the political leaders very aware of the risks. But ahead of Iraq and Afghanistan they appear not to have. The attitude was ‘Yes, Prime Minister’, kowtowing and acquiescing. Craven.

There are a number of reasons for this. 1) One is pusillanimity i.e. generals being scared a) about their own careers b) about funding for their service, if they appeared reluctant. 2) Another is groupthink: they all agree and all fall in with political will.

3) Ledwidge explains another reason by quoting Max Hastings as saying that the British Army has a long and venerable tradition of failing to send enough men, of trying to do things on the cheap, with not enough troops – a policy which has resulted in a whole series of catastrophes, all of which are air-brushed out of history.

It’s connected to 4) the belief that the British Army is somehow special; that its role in World War Two, in various colonial pacifications, in Northern Ireland, then in Bosnia and Kosovo, somehow gives it a moral superiority, an integrity and decency and blah blah blah which don’t have to rely on banal details like having enough troops or the right equipment. British exceptionalism.

Itself connected to the long-held view that the British somehow won the Second World War, although the soldiers and logistics in the West were mostly American, and the war in the East was, obviously enough, won by the enormous sacrifices of the Russian Army. Yet somehow the belief lingered on through the generations that because we ‘stood alone’ against Hitler and suffered through the Blitz, we were the moral victors of the war. Which in turn leads to 5) the view that we’ll muddle through, that it will all come right because, well, we’re the good guys, right?

All of which explains why the narratives we tell ourselves (and government spin doctors and military press officers tell us) – that we are the good guys coming in to get rid of the terrorists and rebuild your country for you – are so completely at odds with the practical impact we actually had on the lives of people in Iraq and Afghanistan and, to a lesser extent, Libya. And why we couldn’t understand why so many of them came to hate us, tried to kill us, and rejoiced when they drove us out of their countries.

Red teaming

There is an established process to tackle this which is to deploy so-called ‘red teams’ which are simply a group of planners who you pay to think through everything that could go wrong and devise worst case scenarios. To think a plan through from the point of view of the enemy and consider what they’d do, where our weakest points are. In fact just before the deployment to Iraq the Defence Intelligence Staff did produce a red team report. It accurately predicted that after a short honeymoon period the response of the Iraqi population would become fragile and dependent on the effectiveness of the post-conflict administration, as indeed it did. But the report was ignored. As you might expect, Ledwidge recommends that ‘red teaming’ plans is made standard practice, as well as a culture of critique being encouraged at every level of the military hierarchy.

Clear thinking about counterinsurgency

Apparently the Yanks got sick of listening to British officers crapping on about what experts they were at counterinsurgency because of our great achievements in Malaya and Northern Ireland. So Ledgwidge devotes a chapter to extended and fascinating analyses of both campaigns, which demonstrates how they were both utterly different from the situations in Iraq and Afghanistan. Maybe the key difference in both was that Malaya and NI both had a functioning government and a large and reliable police force, neither of which existed in Iraq/Afghan. In Iraq and Afghanistan the army was tasked with fighting an insurgency and rebuilding a national government at the same time.

Divided aims

Having a functioning government in place meant that the military was free to concentrate on handling the insurgency and so were not distracted by requirements of state building or infrastructure reconstruction. Yet these were huge issues in both Iraq and Afghanistan and so split the priorities and distracted the strategies for dealing with the insurgency. The army always had two simultaneous but conflicting agendas, in fact three: 1) deal with the insurgency 2) support the creation of a new functioning civil government, along with a new police force 3) try to rebuild infrastructure, power stations and suchlike.

Dividing them into three separate aims like that helps you to understand that any one of those goals would have tested a military presence of modest size, but lumping all three together was an impossible ask. It was too much to ask of any army, but especially one that was undermanned from the start.

Because numbers: 40,000 troops in Malaya + 100,000 reliable police; 28,000 troops in Northern Ireland + tens of thousands of police; but in Afghanistan just 5,000 troops and useless corrupt police. Numbers, numbers, numbers.

More than any other factor, the restoration and maintenance of order requires numbers (p.24)

Ledwidge uses various experts’ ratios of troops to civilians to estimate that there should have been at least 50,000 British troops in Helmand, not 5,000 (p.205). At the height of the Troubles there were 28,000 troops in Northern Ireland (p.202).

In Malaya, contrary to myth, there was also a good deal of coercion, many rebels were shot, there were atrocities (village massacres) and something akin to concentration camps was used to round up the jungle population so as to starve the Chinese communist insurgents of support. I.e it was more brutal than rose-tinted legend depicts.

The importance of intelligence

In Northern Ireland the key was intelligence i.e. the British military and security forces got to know the enemy really really well. This in-depth knowledge allowed them to contain IRA campaigns but more importantly, paved the way for negotiations. And the negotiations which brought the IRA in were carried out by civilians not military.

Ledwidge has an entire chapter explaining traditional definitions of military intelligence, along with ‘the intelligence cycle’ (p.232), a lengthy explanation of why it worked in Northern Ireland (stable government, large reliable police force, length deployments – 2 years – similarity in background between army and IRA, same language), similar culture, values and experiences, down to supporting the same football teams (p.237). None of this applied in Iraq/Afghanistan, which triggers a chapter-long analysis of how modern intelligence seeking needs to be rethought and updated to apply to such demanding environments (pages 231 to 248).

With disarming candour, Ledwidge says sometimes the best intelligence isn’t derived from hi-tech spying but from just talking to journalists, especially local journalists; they often have far better sources than whip-smart intelligence officers helicoptered into a situation who don’t speak the language, have no idea of the political and social setup, and are asked to supply actionable intelligence within weeks. Read the local papers. Listen to the local radio stations. Meet with local journalists.

Ledwidge was himself an intelligence officer within the military, and then a civil rights worker for the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe i.e. as a soldier and a civilian, so is well placed to make this analysis.

All wars are, at bottom, political and require political solutions

Maybe the most important point of all is that counterinsurgency is a political activity. David Galula the French counterinsurgency expert thought that counterinsurgency operations should be 80%/20% political to military (p.177). The military effort only exists to support what must first and foremost be a political strategy (ideally, of negotiating towards a peaceful settlement).

This was the most important point about the Malaya Emergency, that it was run by a civilian Brit, with civilian ends in view.

If [the great military theorist Carl von] Clausewitz tells us nothing else he tells us this: overriding all is the political element. No amount of military nostrums or principles will make up for the lack of a workable political objective, rooted in a firmly realistic appreciation of national interest. (p.188)

The great failure of the British campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan was that they became entirely military, became narrowly focused on finding and killing the enemy. Ledwidge associates this with the failed American strategy in Vietnam. In Nam the Americans boasted at their daily press conferences about the number of enemy they’d killed. Military and politicians and public were all led to think that numbers of enemy dead equalled ‘success’. But of course it didn’t. The Yanks killed tens of thousands of the enemy but lost the war because it was a political struggle, for the allegiance of the people.

Thus Ledwidge says he knew the Brits were losing in Afghanistan when he arrived to find the army press conferences once again focusing on numbers of insurgents or ‘Taliban’ killed in each days skirmishes and firefights. Political engagement and discussion had been sidelined in favour of a purely military solution; but there was no purely military solution and so we failed.

Spiralling costs

Did you know it cost £400,000 per year to maintain one soldier in either of these countries? Or that one 1,000 kilo bomb dropped from a plane on a suspect target cost £250,000? Ledwidge says the campaign in Afghanistan cost some £6 billion per year (can that be right?). And for what? Ledwidge estimates the cost of both campaigns to the British government at £40 billion. For nothing.

Better education

The book ends with a chapter comparing the high education standards expected of American officers (and recruits) and the absence of such criteria for the British. He reviews the astonishing number of senior US generals with PhDs, something I noticed in Thomas Ricks’s book about Iraq, and which backs up Emma Sky’s experience that all the senior US officers she worked with are astonishingly well educated and erudite. Not only better educated, but more flexible in their thinking. Having attended civilian universities for several years they are used to free and open debate and to defending their opinions and analyses in open forums – something British army officers are actively discouraged from doing. Ledwidge gives names of British army officers who’ve written essays critical of the army whose publication has been blocked by MoD officials, or who have chosen to resign from the army altogether in order to publish their book.

Due to the US army’s encouragement and lavish spending on higher education for its officers, there are currently more American army officers studying for research degrees in British universities than British army officers (p.260).

With the ever-growing role of cyberwarfare, Ledwidge cites a contemporary Chinese military theorist, Chang Mengxiong, who says that future wars will be about highly skilled, well-educated operatives – not clever but conformist generals promising they can do anything to naive politicians, then ‘cracking on’ and muddling through the dire situation they’ve got their men into, killing more and more innocent civilians, retreating to embattled forts and finally retreating with their tails between their legs. It’ll be about fighting smart. (From this perspective, the Russian invasion of Ukraine seems even more blundering, brutal and outdated.)

Ledwidge’s recommendations

Our generals were not up to the job. We need better ones. The number of one-star and above generals across all three services should be cut from 450 to 150. We don’t need 130 major generals or 800 full colonels.

Senior officers need to be drawn from a more diverse pool, not just in terms of gender and race, but expert civilians should be encouraged to join the army, and take officer training.

To reach the rank of general you must take an in-depth course in strategy (currently not necessary). Parts of this could be offered by senior business people and academics who specialise in logical thinking.

The savings from getting rid of hundreds of senior officers who do little more than fill committees and shuffle paperwork would generate savings which could be invested in training courses at civilian institutions, such as universities, such as the US Army pays for its senior generals to take, in order to produce soldier scholars.

The army keeps buying ridiculously expensive hardware which turns out to be irrelevant to the kind of wars we are now fighting. Part of that is down to the blatant corruption of the senior staff who make purchasing decisions and who, upon retirement, take up lucrative directorships at the very companies they’ve awarded billion pound contracts to. They should be forbidden by law from doing so for at least five years after leaving the services.

The chances are the next really serious threats we will face to our security come from either a fully armed massive Russian army, or from lethal cyberattacks. Since successive governments have cut defence budgets and successive general staffs have frittered it away on expensive hardware, the more basic elements of a functioning military have been overlooked, most importantly the ability to think, process and adapt very fast to probably fast-moving threats.

Hence the need for a broad-based strategic education, and not the narrow, tradition and conservative fare dished up at Sandhurst or the Joint Services Command and Staff College (JSCSC) at Shrivenham.

Conclusions (mine, not Ledgwidge’s)

1. Never believe anything the British Army says about any of its campaigns.

2. Whenever you hear a preening politician or ‘expert’ journalist crapping on about ‘the special relationship’ between the UK and the US, remember the humiliating shame of the British Army having to be bailed out not once but twice by the American army from jobs it had volunteered to do and egregiously failed at. Remember the roster of senior US military figures Ledwidge lines up to testify that the Americans will never trust the British Army again.

3. Never, ever, ever send the British Army on any more ‘security and reconstruction missions’. They will not only miserably fail – due to lack of intelligence, planning, failure to understand the nature of the conflict, refusal to use modern intelligence approaches and above all, cheapskate paltry numbers and lack of resources – but they will make the situation worse, occupying wretched little platoon forts which become the epicentres of destructive firefights, devastating town centres, leaving thousands dead. And sooner or later they will have to be bailed out by the Americans.

In making and executing strategic decisions both senior officers and politicians should understand the basic limitations on capability and be fully apprised of potential failure. (p.138)

4. Dictators in Third World countries may be evil but, on balance, better than the alternatives, these being either a) the situation created by invading US and UK forces in Iraq and Afghanistan (insurgency, terrorism, devastation) OR the situation created by a failed attempt to overthrow a dictator, as in Syria, i.e. anarchic civil war, huge numbers of civilian deaths, millions of wretched refugees and the explosive growth of terrorism.

Maybe stick with the dictator. Evil, but limited and controllable evil, which is better than the other sort.

One-sentence conclusion

After the expensive failures in Iraq and Afghanistan and the hasty and counter-productive involvement in Libya (the 2011 bombing campaign to support Gaddafi’s opponents), two fundamental criteria must be applied to any thought of similar interventions in the future:

Before any military commitment it is essential that: 1) a clear political objective be set, and that 2) sufficient resources be made available to get the job done. (p.274)

Credit

Losing Small Wars: British Military Failure in the 9/11 Wars by Frank Ledwidge was first published by Yale University press in 2011. References are to the YUP paperback of the second edition (2017).

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