For the Record. David Cameron

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СКАЧАТЬ US, airbase covering the whole of southern Afghanistan. It was home to many of our fighter and helicopter pilots and our remarkable troops. Two miles long and right next to the city that is in some ways the spiritual home of the Taliban, it was subject to the occasional rocket attack and repeated ambushes.

      I had also seen what ordinary life was like for Afghan people. I’ll never forget watching children flying kites across the river from where we were staying, or visiting a school funded by the UK’s Department for International Development.

      I knew the lingo: a mixture of military-speak and banter. The heat: like a blazing fire that hits you the minute you step off the aircraft, made worse by the altitude that can leave you exhausted. The sand: it got everywhere; you’d come home with it still up your nose. The sounds at night: the constant coming and going of helicopters, the alarms when there was a threat of attack, and the endless sound of the diesel generators.

I even grew used to the tight, corkscrew take-offs and landings designed to evade rocket-propelled grenades and small-arms fire from the Taliban on the ground. Fortunately, I rarely had to contemplate the threat of a direct attack. My only brief taste of one was when our two helicopters were leaving the relative safety of Camp Bastion for a military outpost in the middle of Helmand. I was seated in the body of the second Chinook, looking out of the back, where the ramp is always slightly ajar, at the mountainous expanse below. Suddenly the helicopter turned back. There was good intelligence that the Taliban knew that someone senior would be coming in by helicopter.

      That feeling – of being in the crosshairs of the enemy – is what our troops lived with every day. I don’t know how they did it.

      I had a constant reminder of the tragic reality behind the growing death toll when I wrote by hand to bereaved families. So often were we losing men and women at the start of my premiership that I’d have one to write every few days. It was a task I would carry out at the kitchen table in the flat or in my study at Chequers. I would commend the soldier for their bravery and, carefully reading the citations made by their comrades about their service, I would take points from them. I would also use some of my own experience – particularly to parents – about losing a child. I tended to say that while there was nothing anyone could say to lessen the pain and grief, I knew that over time at least some of the clouds would part, and some of the happier memories from the past would come through. I would try to explain what we were doing in Afghanistan. It was a country far away, but the struggle against Islamist extremism and terror was something that affected us back at home.

      It was this, instead of any overarching ideology, which would inform the decisions I would take. My approach was hard-headed and pragmatic. I tried to make the choices that would best guarantee the stability of Afghanistan, the security of our country and the safety of our troops.

      As prime minister for less than a third of that thirteen-year war, I took some of its defining steps. There were three key things that I thought necessitated them.

The first was that the overall goal of our intervention had veered too much towards nation-building – ‘creating a Denmark in the desert’, as some put it – whereas we should be aiming for Pakistan-lite. We needed realism. A failing state would be better than a failed state. As I put it during that first visit to Afghanistan as prime minister: ‘We are not here to build the perfect society, we are here to stop the re-establishment of training camps.’

      The second thing we needed was time to build up a sufficient Afghan National Security Force and government so they could handle the civil war without our help. (In fact, the size of the ANSF – army plus police – doubled between 2009 and 2012, making it strong enough to manage the fighting largely without NATO from 2015.)

      The third thing was the need for a deadline. I could see the case against this. The Taliban could just wait for us to leave. But the counter-arguments appeared more compelling. Our military high command seemed to have settled on the idea of being in Afghanistan almost indefinitely. The Afghans had become far too reliant on our presence. And as we lost troops, public consent was dwindling. A date would force everyone’s hand to reach a satisfactory and stable position before support at home disappeared altogether.

      One of the early defining steps I took was recommitting Britain to the war, by making sure Afghanistan was our number-one security priority. On my first full day in Downing Street, I convened the new NSC. We were a country at war, I told the assembled ministers, and this would be our war cabinet. We wouldn’t just be setting the strategy and leaving the heads of the army, navy and air force to fill in the gaps. We would seek to shape events more directly and take urgent action. We would have monthly published reports on progress and quarterly statements – by a cabinet minister – to Parliament. This would not become a forgotten war. We started with a boost for the troops, doubling the operational allowance they were paid while on tour.

      I was clear where action was needed most urgently: Sangin. President Obama had rightly ordered a ‘surge’ in the number of US forces in 2009, increasing them from 30,000 to 90,000. Britain meanwhile had committed to an increase from 9,000 to 9,500 troops in Helmand, where we had taken over security in 2006.

      I didn’t object to the increase; I objected to how thinly spread we would end up being in comparison to the Americans. The advice was that our numbers would be sufficient. But I commissioned some figures that revealed that while the US would now have up to twenty-five soldiers per thousand members of the Afghan population, we would have just sixteen.

Sangin demonstrated this lopsided deployment. This small town is where we sustained nearly a quarter of all our losses during the conflict. I knew that we had to match America’s densities of troops. But we had carried more than our share of the burden – we made up only a tenth of the fighting force in Afghanistan, but suffered a third of the casualties – so the option of increasing UK troop numbers seemed wrong. Taken together, this meant getting out of Sangin. I overruled the advice and secured agreement for the withdrawal.

      The US Marine commander who took overall responsibility for Helmand was a splendid man called Brigadier General Larry Nicholson. As if marching straight out of Central Casting, he crushed the bones of my right hand with his handshake and declared that he had come straight from Fallujah – one of the toughest battles in Iraq – and was ready to take the fight to the Taliban. He proceeded to use a dried opium-poppy stick to point at the map on the wall and run through his plans. He recognised that our decision was a reasonable one, and US forces took over what remained one of the toughest jobs in the country.

      Partly because of this redeployment, our casualty numbers fell dramatically. In 2010, 103 British troops were killed. In 2011 and 2012, that fell to forty-six and forty-four respectively. For the final three years we were in Afghanistan, the British death toll dropped to single figures each year.

      The move also improved our performance in the rest of Helmand. But action wasn’t just needed in adjusting the force; it was needed on the state of our equipment, which had become something approaching a national scandal. I knew from my previous visits the key improvements needed: more helicopters, faster casualty evacuation, more rapid improvements in body armour. And, above all, better-protected vehicles.

      The Taliban’s weapon of choice was the improvised explosive device (IED), which was becoming ever more sophisticated. Every time we increased the armour on our vehicles, they would find a new way of burying more explosives. Every time we developed a metal detector with more sensitive scanners, they would find a way of using fewer metallic components. IEDs became the primary instrument for killing and maiming not just our troops, but local people, including children. Our forces’ ageing Snatch Land Rovers were no match for these roadside bombs. To be fair to my predecessor, plans were in place for improvements, but I did everything I could to add to them and speed up their delivery.

The action we took in the NSC – including expanding a new system that СКАЧАТЬ