bobdina
06-09-2010, 04:50 PM
Cut off, outnumbered and short of kit: how the Army came close to collapse
Tom Coghlan, Deborah Haynes, Anthony Loyd, Sam Kiley and Jerome Starkey
Full multimedia coverage on The Times's new website:
They held on, but only just. The courage of 16 Air Assault Brigade’s defence of the “platoon houses” is now the stuff of military folklore.
But the first six months of the Helmand campaign were a disaster for a British mission beset from the start by poor planning and resourcing, weak intelligence, departmental infighting, charges of tactical recklessness, a dysfunctional command structure and an unforeseen Taleban resurgence.
As British televisions broadcast the World Cup from Germany through the summer of 2006, 33 British servicemen were killed and about 100 more injured in the most intense period of fighting endured by British Forces in 50 years. While they were cut off in small bases, or platoon houses, there were extraordinary episodes of resistance and bravery. At Naw Zad, 40 Gurkhas held off 28 assaults in two weeksÍ at Sangin 100 paratroopers fought off 44 attacks in 25 daysÍ at Kajaki eight British soldiers and two dozen Afghans repelled 30 attacks in ten days.
It was a world away from what the planners in London had conceived as a limited cross-government development project focused on a triangle of territory around Lashkar Gah, the provincial capital. Instead, the British mission came close to collapse. To prevent themselves being overrun, British troops were forced to call in hundreds of air and artillery strikes on the towns that they were supposed to be defending. By the end of their six months they had fired hundreds of thousands of bullets but done nothing to win the support of the people.
“Did we get ourselves into a position where we could do nothing except defend ourselves and have to employ a significant amount of firepower, often from the air, to do so, and couldn’t bring any of the benefits, then yes, that is the case,” said Colonel Stuart Tootal, then the commander of 3rd Battalion the Parachute Regiment.
“We knew we were right on the edge,” agreed Brigadier Ed Butler, who commanded Task Force Helmand. “But my judgment was that the only way we could keep the Afghan flag flying, and at the same time achieve some of our mission, was by having platoon houses in the key centres of population . . .It was extraordinarily tight, the Paras were extraordinarily courageous. We red-lined everything in terms of resupply, water and food and fuel and casualties and everything else but we managed it. We hung on in there.” Brigadier Butler would subsequently claim that he was ordered into the platoon house strategy by the Afghan Government, represented by Mohammad Daoud, then the governor of Helmand. Mr Daoud denied this: “The decisions were made jointly,” he told The Times. “The minutes of the meetings are there ... the British were not under our control.”
Both Brigadier Butler and Colonel Tootal pointed to a critical under-resourcing of their mission. “Did we take casualties because of a lack of resources, because that increased risk?” asked Colonel Tootal. “The answer is undoubtedly yes in a number of areas. Is it tragic, is it regrettable, of course it is. But soldiers recognise that risk and losses are part of what we do.”
He also acknowledged that intelligence had been desperately limited: “We didn’t understand the tribal dynamics of Helmand, we didn’t understand the dynamics of drugs production, we didn’t have the information, we didn’t even know who to talk to.” Colonel Tootal reached Helmand to find himself hamstrung by the delayed arrival of much of his combat power. He said that he got a single battery of guns in May, and light tanks arrived only in July. He was told that London was delaying parts of the deployment because of concerns over “brown water and cooking facilities” at Camp Bastion, the main British base.
He had just six transport helicopters, but at any one time two of them were required for medical evacuation and two for maintenance. “We were questioning the number of helicopters and the limited [flying] hours right from the start, before we even deployed,” he said. It was only in June 2006 that it was explained to Mr Daoud that the British force was not 3,300 infantrymen, but 700 fighters with the rest made up of logistic and support troops. The same mistake was being made in London, where one senior adviser to Tony Blair was reported to have been incredulous on hearing the news. “You’re s****ing me,” he is reported to have said. To field 3,300 frontline troops, it is estimated, would have needed a total force of at least 10,000.
Deep tensions were present between the military and the civilian agencies — the Foreign and Commonwealth Office and the Department for International Development (DfID) — that they were supporting. According to one civilian based in Helmand, on June 27 a meeting was held in Kabul to ease the tensions, but it ended badly after the civilians accused the military of exacerbating the insurgency. Both Brigadier Butler and Colonel Tootal remain furious with what they regard as abandonment of the mission by the civilian institutions. “We hadn’t resourced it,” said Brigadier Butler, “and DfID had no resources — about three or four people sitting in Lashkar Gah. They didn’t have the money. They never thought about it, they never planned it and they never resourced it.”
British military chiefs complained that they were undermined by a structure that placed David Fraser, a Canadian brigadier, in command of British Forces while Brigadier Butler occupied an ill-defined parallel position answering to the higher British Permanent Joint Headquarters. Colonel Charlie Knaggs, who had had no dealings with the Parachute Regiment, was technically the tactical level commander of the British Battle Group. Several witnesses spoken to by The Times accused Brigadier Butler of undermining and ultimately ousting Colonel Knaggs. One civilian, based in Lashkar Gah, said: “It was almost a coup that Butler effected. The problems between them became clear. Charlie Knaggs was trying to assert himself as a decision maker and, at times, taking rash decisions to show he was in charge.”
The original comprehensive plan that envisaged British Forces creating an Afghan development zone around Lashkar Gah was quickly abandoned. “Butler went down there and said, ‘F*** this’,” said one senior officer. “He had a group of Paras, whose overconfidence can work miracles. But it didn’t. They proceeded into five Rorke’s Drifts [the battle of the Anglo-Zulu war] when they only had enough helicopter assets to deal with simultaneous casualties in two. At that point the military — cocky, ambitious, having merrily ended up over-extending themselves in an area too large for too few troops — turned around and said they were under-resourced.”
US commanders were deeply concerned that the British had “become fixed” in the platoon houses. But General Benjamin Freakley, who commanded the British force from Kabul, felt, according to one senior British officer, unable to order the abandonment of the strategy because it was “a British mission”. It was eventually decided that it would be too damaging to retreat. With more restraint, a retired senior officer involved in the deployment said: “I would ascribe the causes of that [the platoon house sieges] to less than complete reconnaissance, a less than complete intelligence picture and a certain amount of adventurism in terms of the tactical commander at the time.”
Colonel Tootal defends Brigadier Butler’s reputation: “Some people have pointed the finger at Ed Butler. Ed Butler was the poor f***er trying to pull all the strands together. DfID had bailed on him. The FCO had bailed on him. Ed Butler was in an impossible position — damned if he did, damned if he didn’t.”
But others are less forgiving of Brigadier Butler and accuse the higher command of the mission of failing to “grip” the commanders on the ground. None of those involved, who were interviewed as part of The Times’s investigation, believed that there were not “stark lessons” to be learnt from the Helmand deployment before the forthcoming Strategic Defence Review. “I think people’s personalities, their agendas, the politics, the resourcing was quite a sort of toxic cocktail,” said Brigadier Butler. Another retired officer argued that the problems in Helmand were symptoms of a structural failure within the Army, springing from an “exaggerated reverence for the opinion of the tactical commander on the ground”.
He criticised a campaign in which there were huge tactical shifts every six months under new commanders. “It seems to me that that is not the way that you should go about your business,” he concluded.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/afghanistan/article7146458.ece
Tom Coghlan, Deborah Haynes, Anthony Loyd, Sam Kiley and Jerome Starkey
Full multimedia coverage on The Times's new website:
They held on, but only just. The courage of 16 Air Assault Brigade’s defence of the “platoon houses” is now the stuff of military folklore.
But the first six months of the Helmand campaign were a disaster for a British mission beset from the start by poor planning and resourcing, weak intelligence, departmental infighting, charges of tactical recklessness, a dysfunctional command structure and an unforeseen Taleban resurgence.
As British televisions broadcast the World Cup from Germany through the summer of 2006, 33 British servicemen were killed and about 100 more injured in the most intense period of fighting endured by British Forces in 50 years. While they were cut off in small bases, or platoon houses, there were extraordinary episodes of resistance and bravery. At Naw Zad, 40 Gurkhas held off 28 assaults in two weeksÍ at Sangin 100 paratroopers fought off 44 attacks in 25 daysÍ at Kajaki eight British soldiers and two dozen Afghans repelled 30 attacks in ten days.
It was a world away from what the planners in London had conceived as a limited cross-government development project focused on a triangle of territory around Lashkar Gah, the provincial capital. Instead, the British mission came close to collapse. To prevent themselves being overrun, British troops were forced to call in hundreds of air and artillery strikes on the towns that they were supposed to be defending. By the end of their six months they had fired hundreds of thousands of bullets but done nothing to win the support of the people.
“Did we get ourselves into a position where we could do nothing except defend ourselves and have to employ a significant amount of firepower, often from the air, to do so, and couldn’t bring any of the benefits, then yes, that is the case,” said Colonel Stuart Tootal, then the commander of 3rd Battalion the Parachute Regiment.
“We knew we were right on the edge,” agreed Brigadier Ed Butler, who commanded Task Force Helmand. “But my judgment was that the only way we could keep the Afghan flag flying, and at the same time achieve some of our mission, was by having platoon houses in the key centres of population . . .It was extraordinarily tight, the Paras were extraordinarily courageous. We red-lined everything in terms of resupply, water and food and fuel and casualties and everything else but we managed it. We hung on in there.” Brigadier Butler would subsequently claim that he was ordered into the platoon house strategy by the Afghan Government, represented by Mohammad Daoud, then the governor of Helmand. Mr Daoud denied this: “The decisions were made jointly,” he told The Times. “The minutes of the meetings are there ... the British were not under our control.”
Both Brigadier Butler and Colonel Tootal pointed to a critical under-resourcing of their mission. “Did we take casualties because of a lack of resources, because that increased risk?” asked Colonel Tootal. “The answer is undoubtedly yes in a number of areas. Is it tragic, is it regrettable, of course it is. But soldiers recognise that risk and losses are part of what we do.”
He also acknowledged that intelligence had been desperately limited: “We didn’t understand the tribal dynamics of Helmand, we didn’t understand the dynamics of drugs production, we didn’t have the information, we didn’t even know who to talk to.” Colonel Tootal reached Helmand to find himself hamstrung by the delayed arrival of much of his combat power. He said that he got a single battery of guns in May, and light tanks arrived only in July. He was told that London was delaying parts of the deployment because of concerns over “brown water and cooking facilities” at Camp Bastion, the main British base.
He had just six transport helicopters, but at any one time two of them were required for medical evacuation and two for maintenance. “We were questioning the number of helicopters and the limited [flying] hours right from the start, before we even deployed,” he said. It was only in June 2006 that it was explained to Mr Daoud that the British force was not 3,300 infantrymen, but 700 fighters with the rest made up of logistic and support troops. The same mistake was being made in London, where one senior adviser to Tony Blair was reported to have been incredulous on hearing the news. “You’re s****ing me,” he is reported to have said. To field 3,300 frontline troops, it is estimated, would have needed a total force of at least 10,000.
Deep tensions were present between the military and the civilian agencies — the Foreign and Commonwealth Office and the Department for International Development (DfID) — that they were supporting. According to one civilian based in Helmand, on June 27 a meeting was held in Kabul to ease the tensions, but it ended badly after the civilians accused the military of exacerbating the insurgency. Both Brigadier Butler and Colonel Tootal remain furious with what they regard as abandonment of the mission by the civilian institutions. “We hadn’t resourced it,” said Brigadier Butler, “and DfID had no resources — about three or four people sitting in Lashkar Gah. They didn’t have the money. They never thought about it, they never planned it and they never resourced it.”
British military chiefs complained that they were undermined by a structure that placed David Fraser, a Canadian brigadier, in command of British Forces while Brigadier Butler occupied an ill-defined parallel position answering to the higher British Permanent Joint Headquarters. Colonel Charlie Knaggs, who had had no dealings with the Parachute Regiment, was technically the tactical level commander of the British Battle Group. Several witnesses spoken to by The Times accused Brigadier Butler of undermining and ultimately ousting Colonel Knaggs. One civilian, based in Lashkar Gah, said: “It was almost a coup that Butler effected. The problems between them became clear. Charlie Knaggs was trying to assert himself as a decision maker and, at times, taking rash decisions to show he was in charge.”
The original comprehensive plan that envisaged British Forces creating an Afghan development zone around Lashkar Gah was quickly abandoned. “Butler went down there and said, ‘F*** this’,” said one senior officer. “He had a group of Paras, whose overconfidence can work miracles. But it didn’t. They proceeded into five Rorke’s Drifts [the battle of the Anglo-Zulu war] when they only had enough helicopter assets to deal with simultaneous casualties in two. At that point the military — cocky, ambitious, having merrily ended up over-extending themselves in an area too large for too few troops — turned around and said they were under-resourced.”
US commanders were deeply concerned that the British had “become fixed” in the platoon houses. But General Benjamin Freakley, who commanded the British force from Kabul, felt, according to one senior British officer, unable to order the abandonment of the strategy because it was “a British mission”. It was eventually decided that it would be too damaging to retreat. With more restraint, a retired senior officer involved in the deployment said: “I would ascribe the causes of that [the platoon house sieges] to less than complete reconnaissance, a less than complete intelligence picture and a certain amount of adventurism in terms of the tactical commander at the time.”
Colonel Tootal defends Brigadier Butler’s reputation: “Some people have pointed the finger at Ed Butler. Ed Butler was the poor f***er trying to pull all the strands together. DfID had bailed on him. The FCO had bailed on him. Ed Butler was in an impossible position — damned if he did, damned if he didn’t.”
But others are less forgiving of Brigadier Butler and accuse the higher command of the mission of failing to “grip” the commanders on the ground. None of those involved, who were interviewed as part of The Times’s investigation, believed that there were not “stark lessons” to be learnt from the Helmand deployment before the forthcoming Strategic Defence Review. “I think people’s personalities, their agendas, the politics, the resourcing was quite a sort of toxic cocktail,” said Brigadier Butler. Another retired officer argued that the problems in Helmand were symptoms of a structural failure within the Army, springing from an “exaggerated reverence for the opinion of the tactical commander on the ground”.
He criticised a campaign in which there were huge tactical shifts every six months under new commanders. “It seems to me that that is not the way that you should go about your business,” he concluded.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/afghanistan/article7146458.ece