100 dead in Afghanistan

We have now had 100 dead in Afghanistan. A grisly landmark.

Our soldiers are heroes.

They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old;

Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn

At the going down of the sun and in the morning

We will remember them.

For the Fallen, by Laurence Binyon

Musa Qala falls to Afghan army forces

The Afghan army backed by NATO forces, particularly British and American, have retaken Musa Qala. Taleban forces took the town in February after the British withdrew having made a deal with local elders. That did not hold the Taleban back.

The Taleban melted away once it was clear that they were surrounded by superior forces.

The significant fact here is that the actual assault was led by Afghan forces. It is vital for Afghanistan's future that it has a battle ready and battle hardened army that has the confidence to operate in its territory against insurgents.

The BBC has this.

For more on Afghanistan see here.

Gurkha's make Taliban melt away.

I just saw an interesting report on BBC news 24. Our last remaining Gurkha battalion is serving in southern Afghanistan, on foot and deep into Taliban territory. However, the Taliban seem somewhat reluctant to engage.

I wonder why? Could it possibly be that the Gurkha's are above all one of the most feared fighting forces on the planet?

You have to ask why we are now only down to one Gurkha battalion when we did have five, and we could have twenty. The Taliban will not mess with the Gurkha's, they now better.

The Retreat From Basra. Is it a defeat?

Well, it does depend on how you look at it.

If the victory condition was clearing out Ba'athist forces and liberating Basra, then job done, but that was done in 2003.

If the victory condition was to leave the place in some sort of viable state then this is a abject failure. The Sun leads with the headline "The Lions of Basra" and rightly so, the failure was not of our troops making but our politicians, and indeed American ones. (Article not available online yet)

Our troops have been brave. Very brave. They have also fought well. The trouble is there has never been enough of them and they have not had the support they need.

We have never had the troops on the ground to do the job properly. We also don't have the troops on the ground in Afghanistan either, but that is a whole other disaster waiting to happen.

The Times report here highlights the mixed feelings of people on the ground. Some welcome the "end of the occupation" whilst others are in fear not knowing who will protect them from the militias.

Let us make no mistake here. We chose to go into both Afghanistan and Iraq. Practically we did have to go into Afghanistan, but we have resourced neither sufficiently to do the job.

MOD admits military overstretch

After Sir Richard Dannatt's memo talking of military overstretch was leaked last Sunday a government minister has admitted that the military is a bit stretched. Bob Ainsworth said that the view was both widely spread and known.

"I don't think it's any secret that with the amounts of people we have deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan that there are not huge resources around for contingencies and other things that might arise," he told the Commons defence committee.

That's nice. Any chance of the more resource for our military, and please don't send them into wars your not prepared to pay for.

For more, see yahoo news here.

Hat tip to Yokel for the link.

Army short of troops and equipment

The Daily Telegraph has been leaked a memo by Sir Richard Dannatt Chief of the General Staff to other senior defence chiefs.

The situation is that our military is severely overstretched and has not got any capacity to handle the unexpected.

To put this in perspective during the cold war, and at the time of the Falklands war we had something like 250,000 men in the army, now we have about 100,000.

What is more regiments are no longer moving with their equipment, for example the Parachute Regiment has had to leave most of its equipment in Afghanistan so that their replacements can use it. This has two knock on effects. Firstly it means that can't train with their own equipment out of theatre, to ready themselves for a return, and secondly the equipment gets worn out, because it is in constant use without the downtime for maintenance. There seems to be little or no budget to replace battlefield losses either.

Being engaged in a long war does involve a lot of expense, as well as extra equipment. Despite promises the forces in Afghanistan still do not have what they need to fight and do the job.

In short, the problem is we have peace time defence spending whilst we are fighting wars on two fronts. In short, it is nuts.

The BBC also has this.

Failing our troops at the front

I have to say that I am shocked to learn that our troops can take up to 7 hours after being wounded in Afghanistan, and an hour and 50 minutes in Iraq.

This is not how long it takes to get treatment but how long it takes to get them collected from the battlefield. Apparently there is not a dedicated helicopter force to do the job.

The Sunday Telegraph has this, about a report by Lt Col Paul Parker in the Royal Army Medical Corps Journal. It seems that he believes many have died who need not have died for the lack of availability of helicopters dedicated to evacuating the wounded.

It should be noted that whilst we take hours to get a casualty to hospital, in Vietnam the Americans managed to do it on average in 25 minutes. That was 40 years ago.

Whilst the MOD are trying to trash the report Lt Col Paul Parker's colleagues agree, apparently though off the record.

And all this after Tony Blair's promise that our boys in Afghanistan could have whatever they needed. Lying scum.

Mullah Dadullah killed in Helmand

Reports say that Mullah Dadullah, one of the main military leaders of the Taleban has been killed in Helmand. His body has been moved to Kandahar so hat this can be confirmed to the world.

Mullah Dadullah was not a nice man. In fact he was one of the most hardline and bloodthirsty in the Taleban. NATO are pleased and cite this as a major blow to the Taleban.

How much of a blow this represents is hard to tell. He certainly seemed a capable leader but then the Taleban operates a loose command structure so the loss of one leader may make little difference.

Where it will make a difference though is effectively shifting the center of gravity in the Taleban command away from the ultra hard liners.

We can but hope.

The BBC has this.

How our returning soldiers should be treated

Whether you agree with the Iraq or Afghanistan conflicts, our soldiers fight for us, and are prepared to die for us. This surely is how they should be treated when they get home, not left lying in their own excrement in an NHS hospital with people popping by to tell them how bad they are.

Yes I know it is a commercial, but the point still stands.

Hat tip to Iain Dale, who also has it here.

Remember the promise in Afghanistan?

I wrote about it here, where Tony Blair promised that our troops in Afghanistan would get what they needed to defeat the Taliban.

At the time I said this:

It is interesting to note that Tony Blair felt it politically necessary to go public with a pledge to provide anything our boys needed in Afghanistan. I suspect the idea was to look good in the media.

What is fascinating is that the response "We could do with more helicopters" came back over the megaphone that is the mass media. You have to wonder if the commander concerned thought St Tony may have been spinning so thought he would pin the fella (or words to that effect) down.

Well, according to the Sunday Telegraph here, the promise has not been kept. Our troops are short of all sorts of equipment and requests for more seem are being turned down on cost grounds.

For example requests for more helicopters and thermal imaging equipment. What is more, the 4 armoured vehicles for getting troops out of mine fields in Helmand province are all broken down.

This is a disgrace. We need to win in Afghanistan as Tony Blair indeed said, and we can't with out the right kit.

Megaphone conversation goes on, this time from Iraq

I wrote here about what I thought was the bizarre megaphone conversation between Tony Blair and our troops in Afghanistan here. He said they could have what ever they wanted, through the press and the answer came back through the press.

We now have the commander of British forces in Southern Iraq, Major General Richard Shirreff, adding his tuppence worth here.

It appears he feels the armed forces are under resourced. He puts it down to a generation of under funding and to be fair blames both this and past governments.

This all started with the peace dividend. This was the stupid idea that the end of the cold war would lead to a fluffy cuddly world where we did not need quite the military we had before. Of course the cold war was swiftly followed by the first Gulf war, chaos in Somalia and Afghanistan, the Balkan wars and lots of other conflicts.

You would have hoped that at some point in this obvious lack of peace politicians would have stopped taking the peace dividend and realised it was a folly from start to finish, but the fact is that our troops are now engaged in more places at one time than they have been since the Second World war. We just do not have the troop numbers and I don't care what the MOD say, the equipment to do the job at hand.

Not only do we need to look at defence spending again, but it is also clear that we need to un merge some regiments and rebuild our army.

Meanwhile whilst our boys are dying in the field the Defence budget is cut

Yes, according to this story in today's Sunday Telegraph the MOD is looking to save £1 billion.


You just could not make this up.

It should be noted that is to keep the MOD on budget, with cuts already announced rather than a new cut, but it is clear that there is not enough cash being spent on these wars to win them.

Hat tip to Alex on politicalbetting.com for the link.

Afghanistan. Have we got the tactics wrong?

I don't wish to bash our troops, they are doing a fine job with the troop numbers and equipment they have but I can only see problems in the tactics used.

Firstly I don't like the way platoon houses are being operated. This is where a number of troops hold a government compound in an important town or village.

These platoon houses get attacked on a regular basis as indeed such defensive positions have been attacked throughout the thousands of years of war. That would be OK if there were enough men and material to go out and meet the threat. There isn't so a firefight ensues between the waring parties catching much in the cross fire, until air support becomes available destroying where the enemy are.

This has two key problems. Firstly that which is caught in the cross fire and secondly which ever building the Taliban were holed up in gets destroyed possibly after they have left.

In short there is not enough military power about to prevent the Taliban taking up positions in towns as and when they like causing havoc for the civilians when fire fights start.

The second tactic used is long range patrols. In many ways these seem to work well in drawing out ambushes but the Taliban use the cover of other peoples houses to fight and they get destroyed. There is not a huge amount that can be done about this other than to bring each individual firefight to an end as soon as possible. They normally end with the dropping of a bomb. It looks like the Taliban know how long it takes to muster a plane with a bomb and frequently may be gone before it is dropped.

It both the platoon house and the long range patrol situation rapid air cover would be very useful. This will mean many more planes in the sky at all times on patrol, but it will help in both circumstances.

In short we lack men, armoured vehicles and aircraft. The government is trying to do Afghanistan on the cheap and if it continues on this path it may well fail.

It should of course be noted that attacks are down month on month, but the Taliban will use the winter to regroup and rearm. We need to cut off their cash and supply, which is a difficult job, as well.

What happens here is the future of the world's security in the 21st century

cool!

Any chance of some more kit?

Troops?

Armour?

Helicopters?

Anything?

I have just read this from the BBC on Tony Blair's visit to Afghanistan. We already know that he communicates with his commanders in the field by the press megaphone, we also know that the only way they think they can reply is also by the press megaphone. You can read my article on the subject here.

It is just a bit of a shame Tony has only just noticed.

Having said that I like this quote:

"So what do you do?" Tony Blair asked one of the snipers, lined up to represent the garrison for a 90-minute trip to Camp Bastion.

He looked down at his long-barrelled rifle, shrugged as if to say "what do you think?"

No, go on Tony, tell us what you think a sniper does with a snipers rifle?

Iran and Syria the Axis of peace?

You just could not make this up.

When the Taliban were overthrown, Iran helped, because the Taliban were the enemy and more so than America. They got nothing for it other than the most bizarre accusations that Iran, a Shia theocracy would be hosting Sunni extremists so hard line that they executed Shia Muslims in Afghanistan.

Syria has been cold shouldered as well.

This is because Donald Rumsfeld's plan was going to impress them so much, they would be left quaking in their boots.

Umm...

Looks like utter arrogance to me.

You can read my take on why we are in this mess in Iraq here, All my articles on Iraq here, and on Afghanistan here. You can read this article from the Libdemograph Independent here.

However, one thing I would say, is this:

• If you are going to bluff, make sure they don't see you (and they have)
• If you are going to negotiate do so from strength, before they have seen your hand.

We are completely buggered as far as the Middle and near East is concerned because we look like a busted flush.

It need not have been this way. We could have used our brains.

Winston Churchill said "Jaw jaw is better than war war". He was right. You talk right up until the time you have to present a war ultimatum. Then you go to war. You can't sit around picking and choosing who you do and don't talk to or else you end up looking like a bunch of pratts.

Never was so much owed to so many by so few

I wrote an article on the promises made to our troops in Afghanistan here.

Some one on politicalbetting.com linked to this graphic I thought I would share.

Hat tip to an artist with imagination, Beau Bo D'Or whose blog is here.

Talking tactics on Iraq

Apparently George Walker Bush, The Pratt of the United States of America is discussing tactics in Iraq with his generals, and his defence secretary and legendary pratt Donald Rumsfeld. You can read the BBC's article here.

The date? The 21st of October 2006.

Should this not have been done in 2002 and 2003? I wrote about the mess in Iraq here, many people (including me) doubted the troop numbers and tactical planning ahead of the invasion as well. Meanwhile people are dying in large numbers, and we are not resourcing Afghanistan properly either.

The promise in Afghanistan

It is interesting to note that Tony Blair felt it politically necessary to go public with a pledge to provide anything our boys needed in Afghanistan. I suspect the idea was to look good in the media.

What is fascinating is that the response "We could do with more helicopters" came back over the megaphone that is the mass media. You have to wonder if the commander concerned thought St Tony may have been spinning so thought he would pin the fella (or words to that effect) down.

Do our commanders in the field have so little confidence in our political leadership?

Which leads me on to another point. I wrote an article on why we were in the mess in Iraq which is here.

So why are we in this mess in Afghanistan? Because we were far too keen to get in to the mess in Iraq without having the resource to complete the task we had already taken on, or indeed Iraq.

Incedently we could also do with more infantry, armoured fighting vehicles and just about more of everything in Afghanistan.

Folks, I am afraid we are being led by gibbering idiots.

Is it just me or is the world mad?

We are in Afghanistan as a result of the attacks of the 11th of September 2001. In many ways we have removed a very unpleasant government from that land and that is good. We are working on rebuilding the country and making it stable.

We are also trying to eradicate the opium poppy crop. Seemed like a good idea to me until I read this in the Guardian

Just to summarize:

• Every time we try to eradicate poppy farming it causes a backlash and helps the Taliban.
• There is a world wide shortage of medical opiates, some in the UK.
  
• Heroin production in Turkey was halted not by eradication of poppies but by licensing growing it.

Firstly, it is good that a Conservative has pointed out this madness, but why has this not been dealt with before? Why are we spending so much money destroying something we need?