WAS ‘BEST LITTLE ARMY IN THE WORLD’ MISLED BY FOG OF WAR?
The Changing Of The Guard
Simon Akam Scribe €29 ★★★★☆
The British Army, according to journalist Simon Akam, went into the ‘wars of choice’ in Iraq and Afghanistan convinced that it was ‘the best little army in the world’. It came out of them, he says, with its reputation diminished, both in its own estimation but also – and importantly – in the view of the UK’s American allies whom, embarrassingly, the British had hubristically denigrated at the start of the Iraq operation.
There is little doubt that ultimately the British military failed badly in Iraq by ceding control of Basra, in 2007, to the sectarian Shia militias that they had hitherto been fighting. It took an operation – ‘Charge of the Knights’ – by the poorly regarded Iraqi security forces and their US advisers, in the spring of 2008, to regain control of the city. This was the nadir, but there had been some successes earlier in the campaign, political rather than military, before the population began to realise that the British simply didn’t have the resources or the will for the amount of reconstruction that the infrastructure and civil society of southern Iraq required.
Afghanistan was little better. Until 2006, the relatively small contingent of UK forces had been focused on Kabul and the north of the country, which was a relatively permissive environment. Helmand was a different matter. It has been persuasively argued – and Akam rehearses the argument here – that what the British had stepped into was not an insurgency but a decades-old tribal and civil conflict that neither the British nor the Americans understood and in which the Taliban were, at first, only bit players. Ultimately British involvement enabled the Taliban to gain influence, power and a leadership role that it had not previously had.
The consequence, of course, was that lives were lost, many more were blighted by injury, and a vast amount of money was spent to no apparent benefit.
There has been a moral cost too. Since the early stages of the Iraq War, rumours have continued to surface of abuses by British personnel in both Iraq and Afghanistan. While many of these were demonstrably false, some were not. Akam also covers the ‘lawfare’ (legal actions directed at soldiers), which has cast a shadow over the lives of many military personnel.
The Changing Of The Guard is an uncomfortable read, deliberately controversial, and many will disagree with Akam’s conclusions, but it is important that arguments like his are given a proper airing. It’s compellingly written and it is certainly worth the effort.
Oddly enough, when all the dust has settled, there is still a very strong argument that the British Army is ‘the best little army in the world’ but Iraq and Afghanistan have reminded the British that – as the saying attributed to everyone from Napoleon to Stalin has it – ‘Quantity has a quality all of its own’ and they ignore this reality at their peril. l Adrian Weale is a historian and former Army officer.