Before the British burst onto the scene, Helmand was ‘stable’ in the sense that there was almost no Taliban presence and little prospect of any. After three years of British presence, the province was the most savage combat zone in the world. With British forces and their commanders out of their depth, it was only the intervention of a powerful US force of marines that brought some level of control to the situation.
(Investment in Blood, page 217)
This is by way of being the sequel to Ledwidge’s critically acclaimed book Losing Small Wars: British Military Failure in the 9/11 Wars (2011). Ledwidge is formidably well qualified to discuss the issues. He has had an impressively wide-ranging career both in and outside the military. He started life as a barrister, then served as an intelligence officer in the naval reserve in Iraq before going on to act as a civilian justice adviser in Afghanistan. These days he’s an academic.
The true cost
Nowadays you can just google ‘cost of Afghan war’ and get a host of topline figures. Delve into a few articles and you quickly get a sense of the quagmire of conflicting estimates and figures.
According to the top result, from Brown University, as of 2023, since invading Afghanistan in 2001, the United States has spent $2.313 trillion on the war, which includes operations in both Afghanistan and Pakistan.
As to the UK, I came across this BBC page ‘Afghan withdrawal a dark chapter for UK, says Defence Committee chair‘ which puts the cost to Britain of its Afghan adventure at nearly £30 billion. Everyone has an axe to grind, everyone has an angle.
So why read a book about a subject so readily available on the internet? Well, for two reasons: 1) because books give context, angles, interpretations and, above all, ideas, in ways which ‘objective’ sources like the BBC, Wikipedia, newspaper articles, generally don’t. And 2) for the style and personality and character of the author, enjoyable, fluent, enlightening or dim and patronising, as they may be.
Investment in Blood is in three parts.
Part 1. Casualties
Chapter 1. Why we went there
And why a small peacekeeping force found itself thrown into a full-scale war. For Ledwidge a leading reason the heads of the British Army wanted to deploy to Afghanistan had nothing to do with peacekeeping or tackling the opium trade, it was a self-interested wish to keep Treasury funding coming, to bolster the business case for maintaining the army the size it was, to hang on to battalions which were threatened with being disbanded, on the principle of ‘use them or lose them’ (pages 21 and 120).
Chapter 2. The human cost i.e. army casualties
Starting with the 454 British dead, then the thousands who suffered life-changing injuries, especially amputations, and then the psychological impact, especially the much-vaunted post-traumatic stress disorder.
Chapter 3. Afghan civilian casualties
Abdul Zia has been living for six years in the dirt-poor camp of Nasaji Baghrami, set in sea of mud, excrement and pathetic tarpaulins…It is located in Kabul’s particularly dirty and unpleasant fifth police district…There was a time when life for Mr Zia was much better: he used to have a small farm and seven children. That farm was in the Lashkar Gah district of Helmand. But then one day in 2006, shortly after the British entry into Helmand, for no reason that he can fathom his house was hit by a missile or a bomb from a NATO plane. Whatever it was, it killed six of his children. (p.94)
Afghan dead
Ledwidge explains his methodology which restricts itself to Afghan civilians killed by NATO forces according to reliable, certifiable sources then proceeds through each year, carefully accrediting the numbers. He reaches a total of at least 542 Afghan civilians killed by NATO forces. Compare and contrast with these figures from the US Institute of Peace: 70,000 Afghan military and police deaths, 46,319 Afghan civilians (probably a significant underestimation) and some 53,000 opposition fighters.
Afghan wounded (p.91).
He has no figures and so gives anecdotal evidence of the number of wounded civilians attending the NGO-run civilian hospitals. Other sources claim numbers to be in the hundreds of thousands.
Afghan refugees
Then there are the refugees forced to flee their homes (p.93). According to the UN Refugee Agency, as of December 2021, the total number of people displaced by conflict inside Afghanistan is 3.5 million.
Part 2. Financial costs
Chapter 4. The cost of the vast logistical effort of installing and maintaining a brigade in Afghanistan
The American government is admirably open about the money it spends on its military campaigns, the British government is secretive and hostile to researchers.
This turns out to be impossible to ascertain because of the byzantine and different methodologies used by the Ministry of Defence and the Treasury. Ledwidge quotes several army officers and civil servants saying nobody really knows the cost of a war like this. Instead there is a confusing range of estimates depending on accounting methods and definitions, but some of the figures cited are staggering.
According to the MoD’s own figures it costs about £400,000 to keep one soldier in the field for one year, plus about £60,000. In 2012 a parliamentary question revealed the ‘net additional cost’ of military operations since 2001 as £17.3 billion. Between 2006 and 2012 it cost about £15 million per day to maintain the UK’s presence in Afghanistan.
The most gobsmacking fact, for me, was the chief of logistics to General Petraeus saying the cost of air conditioning alone to all US army bases in Iraq and Afghanistan was over $20 billion.
He has a passage describing the scale of the vast Camp Bastion in Helmand which, at its peak, was home to 22,000 troops and support personnel for 12 different nations.
The blackly Catch-22 aspect of the war is that most of the supplies are not flown in but driven into landlocked Afghanistan by brave lorry drives, much of it contracted out to security companies. Much of this is through Taliban-held territory so many of the security companies have come to arrangements with local tribal and Taliban leaders, paying them retainers not to attack their convoys. So UK taxpayers money goes to the Taliban to bribe them into not attacking the supplies being sent to the British Army so they can carry on fighting them (p.113).
Billions of pounds were spent on kit – transport, guns, ammunition – which we handed over to the Afghan police and army and which, in 2021, they handed over to the Taliban without a fight. Ledwidge predicted this would happen in 2012 (p.117).
Chapter 5. The cost of caring for the wounded and the role of charities
There used to be a number of hospitals run by the armed forces solely for military casualties. One by one these have been closed due to government cuts and now there are none. Instead there are Ministry of Defence Hospital Units, or MDHUs, embedded within civilian National Health Service hospitals. Ledwidge explains why it is quite a loss in security and psychological well-being for veterans not to be treated in units entirely staffed by their own people, who understand what they’ve been through. Ledwidge repeats reports that some wounded veterans have been barracked by other patients in NHS hospitals.
A lot of care for wounded soldiers, whether physical or mental, has been funded by charities, especially the high profile and successful Help for Heroes, founded in 2007, which complements the work of older service charities such as the Royal British Legion.
In his Afterword, written in March 2014, Ledwidge explains his methodology for calculating that the cost of supporting the nearly 3,000 troops who were evacuated from Afghanistan and the thousands more who will apply for medical and psychiatric help, for the rest of their lives, will probably cost some £10 billion (p.238).
Chapter 6. The civilian efforts i.e. the cost of development: has it really gone to help ‘the poorest of the poor’?
An eye-opening account of the work of the Department for International Development which Ledwidge calculates to have spent over £2 billion in Afghanistan. The obvious problems are that the majority of that has gone to the Afghan government, which is a byword, both among its population and internationally, for corruption. In fact it’s debatable whether it is even a government at all in the normal sense of the word or a collection of regional warlords and narco-bosses (of ‘gangsters and warlords’, in Ledwidge’s words, p.170). So that, in the words or a security officer:
‘The only Afghan lives I’ve seen transformed by western aid agencies are warlords who’ve used siphoned funds to build mansions, amass huge overseas property portfolios and arm private militias.’ (p.148)
The other thing about aid money is the surprising amount of it which is spent on freelance aid consultants, earning £500 to £1,000 a day. Whenever these leave a fortified camp i.e. Camp Bastion, they must be accompanied by armed security guards who cost much the same amount, per guard, per day. The fatuousness of so many misguided ‘development’ projects is brought out by the next chapter.
Neocolonialism not colonialist enough
Ledwidge makes a point also made by Jack Fairweather, and quotes Rory Stewart among others making the same point: which is that, in imperial times, imperial administrators of a province would make it their life’s work, often stayed in post for a decade or more, learned the language, got to really know the local people, culture, religion, economy and maze of feuds and tribal allegiances. Slowly they built up a sense of what is possible and how to do things with the locals’ consent.
That entire approach has been lost. In modern ‘nation building’, advisers and consultants and experts are flown in for short-term placements, often with little understanding of the local culture, to implement off-the-peg ‘development projects’ which they’ve applied in Sierra Leone or Uruguay or some other completely different culture (p.157).
Thus Ledwidge gives the comic anecdote of a senior British woman official instructing a provincial governor what to do in front of his Pashtun colleagues, which amounted – in their culture – to a public humiliation and guaranteed that he would not do what she was telling him (p.153).
He also hints that so-called ‘experts’ hired for development and nation building don’t know what they’re talking about. He met experts in his own specialist subject, international law, who had never done a day’s work abroad i.e. hadn’t a clue (p.157).
To return to the first point: we laugh at them, we criticise them, we abhor them; but our imperial forebears were much, much better at this kind of thing than we are. The British government spent £40 billion, lost 440 soldiers and killed thousands of civilians and…for nothing.
Part 3. Assessment of what was won or lost
Chapter 7. What was achieved in Helmand?
Did the British Army presence bring peace and security? Did it eliminate the Taliban threat? Is the improvement, if any, sustainable? Did we eliminate opium as the mainstay of the economy, as Tony Blair promised we would? The answer to all these questions is a resounding no.
At the time of writing, Afghanistan had received tens of billions of dollars in international development assistance plus at least $900 billion from the international community and yet: according to the UN development index the country was ranked 181 out of 182; it was the poorest country for which reliable figures exist; it came bottom on lists for access to safe water and enrolment in all stages of education. It had the third highest infant mortality rate in the world and the lowest life expectancy, at 43.6 years. 42% of the population live on less than a dollar a day (p.168).
More importantly, the relentless focus on finding a military solution i.e. fighting the Taliban, has led to a new level of the militarisation of society.
The executive director of the charity War on Want believes that ‘Western intervention has managed to produce a country which, even after the 20 years of civil war which preceded it, is even more fractured and militarised than it was before’. (p.170).
One of the many reasons for the failure of Western efforts is because they were built around the idea that the central government was ‘elected’ and therefore had a ‘democratic mandate’, and all efforts flowed from this premise, two leading ones being a) training the Afghan police force and b) giving the majority of aid money to this government and training them how to run a country and disburse it responsibly.
Unfortunately, the ‘democratically elected’ government is little more than a bunch of ‘gangsters and warlords’ (p.170), who sent their aid money straight on to their Swiss bank accounts or to buy real estate in Europe or to pay their tribal supporters, while the Afghan police continued to be a byword for uselessness and corruption with a lot of rape and child abuse thrown in.
Afghan legal officers – Ledwidge’s area of expertise – had a habit of being assassinated (p.172). In practice, lots of local legal officers and enforcers quietly made deals with the Taliban about what they were or weren’t allowed to do i.e. in effect, the Taliban ran law and order (p.172).
Ledwidge says policy makers in theses nation building efforts bang on about building schools and hospitals to win over hearts and minds, but this policy has two very obvious flaws: 1) it’s relatively easy to build the buildings, but then who staffs them? Training doctors and teachers will take years and years. In fact, the allies had to stop building schools and hospitals in Afghanistan because there was no-one to man them, a problem euphemistically referred to as ‘overbuilding’ (p.173).
2) Northern Ireland had an insurgency for 30 years and it had all the schools and hospitals you can imagine. That wasn’t what the people needed. What they needed was a political settlement which would offer security for all. That’s what the people in all these trouble spots want first and foremost. Security. And that’s what the coalition forces failed to provide in either Iraq or Afghanistan (p.173).
Fascinatingly, the Soviets did understand the long-term nature of this kind of commitment and took tens of thousands of Afghan doctors, lawyers, soldiers, policemen, prison officers and so on back to Russia and trained them over many years. With the result that many of the current Afghan officials Ledwidge met as part of his work spoke fluent Russian. But none of the occupying powers were prepared to make that kind of commitment (p.174).
He tells a funny story about UK Foreign Secretary David Miliband visiting Helmand and inviting two Afghan ministers for dinner. In all innocence he asked these ministers how long he thought central government officials, civilian and military, would remain in the provincial capital, Lashkar Gah, after the NATO forces withdrew, and they replied…about 24 hours (p.174). Exactly. And this is indeed what happened when the Americans withdrew their last forces in August 2021. The security forces fled or melted away and the Talinan was back in power within days.
Opium
The Taliban almost completely banned Afghan farmers from growing opium (p.176). As the incoming NATO forces pushed the Taliban out, opium growing returned and, Ledwidge asserts, this time around the Taliban allowed it to and took a cut to pay for their weapons.
By 2007 Helmand, just one of Afghanistan’s 34 provinces, supplied over half the world’s poppy crop. He makes the basic point that, at the time of writing, a hectare of wheat was worth £475 to an Afghan farmer, whereas the same area of opium might be worth £6,500 (p.177).
Ledwidge has a good handle on this because when he served as a ‘justice adviser’ in Afghanistan he was actually paid out of the UK’s counter-narcotics budget (p.178).
Women’s rights
After the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan they attempted to develop its economy and modernise its society. A key aspect was promoting women’s rights in this fantastically conservative, patriarchal society. By the time they quit the country in 1989, some 70% of teachers, 50% of government workers and 40% of doctors were women (p.184). The point is, the West armed the mujahideen for ten long years in order to overthrow the Soviet occupation and eventually succeeded. Whereupon the country collapsed into civil war, from which chaos emerged the Taliban who, as we all know, plunged the country back into the Dark Ages, part of which was sacking all women from all jobs and banning them from leaving the house unless accompanied by a male relative.
Which regime was better for women, Soviet rule or Taliban rule? Their Afghan adventure was seen as the Soviets’ Vietnam, and the long drag on their national resources, and the social unrest it caused contributed, maybe, to the final collapse of the Soviet Union. Still. It makes you wonder whether life for many Afghans, and pretty much all Afghan girls and women, would have been immeasurably better if the Soviets had been allowed to continue their rule of the country.
By the end of this withering chapter it’s hard to avoid the thought that Afghanistan exists as a kind of mockery of all notions of international development, state building, foreign aid and so on. Or, as Ledwidge puts it:
The attempt to impose Western-style government and legal systems on a country that has no real inclination to adopt either – and to do it a matter of a decade or so – was always doomed to failure. (p.187)
Poll results
Ledwidge shares the hilarious results of opinion polls which have been from time to time carried out on the Afghan population. In one just 8% of Afghans living in Helmand Province (Helmandis) had even heard of the 9/11 attacks in New York. This is really important because it indicates the way that hardly any of the population understood why the NATO forces were there; most of the population thought they were just the latest in a long line of murderous invaders. Further, only 30% believed that NATO protected the population from attack, while 65% believed NATO killed more of the population that the Taliban did. When informed that the main aim of NATO forces was to introduce democratic values, 72% of those polled couldn’t explain what that meant (p.188).
These and other stats help explain why so many young Afghan men didn’t understand any of our high-falutin’ ambitions about nation building and development and democracy and all the rest of it, and just thought of themselves as patriotic heroes combating the latest wave of brutal, destructive invaders, like their fathers and their grandfathers before them.
Chapter 8. Have we in Britain been made safer by both wars?
Are we ‘safer’ as a result of Britain’s involvement in the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, as Tony Blair and Defence Secretary John Reid claimed? Was it ever in out best interests to pursue these wars?
No. Ledwidge claims that most army officers know the simple truth: that both the wars, in Iraq and Afghanistan, were fought primarily to satisfy Tony Blair’s misguided wish to keep in with the Americans (p.205). The second campaign, in Afghanistan, was mainly fought because the army desperately wanted to rehabilitate itself in the eyes of our American masters after ballsing up big time in Basra. Neither had any relevance at all to Britain’s actual, present or future security needs. Fighting the Taliban was always a stupid, stupid thing to do. Ledwidge quotes a former NATO official at the time:
‘[The Taliban] pose no threat to Britain and not one Afghan has ever been involved in any terror attack in Europe or the US. It is simply rubbish to assert that British soldiers are fighting impoverished opium farmers and $10 a day gun-for-hire insurgents in Helmand Province to protect the British people from terror attacks. These Afghans are fighting our soldiers because they just don’t like foreigners and never will.’ (quoted page 198)
In the event, both Ledgwidge and Jack Fairweather give plenty of evidence that the British Army’s dismal failures in Basra and Helmand irreparably damaged the so-called ‘special relationship’ with America. Ledwidge cites former Chief of Staff of the US army, General Jack Keane, addressing a conference at the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst in 2013:
‘Gentlemen, you let us down; you let us down badly’ (quoted page 233)
And this is the view widely held in the US military. Then again this may be no bad thing if it forces the UK political and defence establishments to distance ourselves from America and think through our likely defence threats and strategies from a purely British position. Don’t hold your breath, though. The ludicrous embarrassment of Brexit was proposed partly by Conservative politicians convinced that our future lies with America, 4,000 miles away, rather than with the continent just 20 miles away.
The people who run the British establishments, in politics, the military, the arts and media and many other sectors, will continue to kiss American arse for the foreseeable future. As Ledwidge puts it: ‘The results of this are toxic and go far beyond the military’ (p.206).
The so-called ‘special relationship’ has led Britain into the invasion of two Islamic countries. Her confused and inconsistent strategy (or the lack of any strategy) in the ensuing wars and her over-enthusiastic and totally uncritical following of US policy have been intensely damaging to British (and Afghan) interests. The policies pursued have been entirely counter-productive and literally self-defeating. (p.208)
As a result of tagging along behind America on these two misguided interventions we in Britain have been made less safe in two ways. 1) We have generated a home-grown generation of angry young men here in the UK, outraged by our invasion of Muslim countries and killing of Muslim civilians. Some of these have carried out terrorist attacks on our own soil as a result of British intervention in Iraq and Afghanistan. As Pakistan and security expert Anatol Lieven puts it:
‘UK policy has been an absolute disaster in the perception of the Muslim population and has produced a significantly increased terrorism threat.’ (quoted page 210)
The second way in which these disastrous wars have made us less safe is we have wasted billions investing in the wrong kind of armed forces. In particular all the money has gone to the army (which, it turned out, was incapable of supplying its soldiers with the kind of equipment they needed) at the expense of the other two branches of the armed service, the navy and air force.
This explains why, when NATO wanted to support the anti-Gaddafi forces in Libya, it was the French who led the attacks – because they have a fully functioning aircraft carrier and lots of planes; we don’t.
By emasculating the Royal Navy to pay for the army and its operations in the Afghan desert, the UK has jeopardised the defence of our island nation’s vital interests. (p.213)
All the time, intellect, energy, money, material and resources ploughed into fighting badly organised peasants 5,000 miles away have completely distracted attention from the very real threats we face from a) larger, more conventional armies i.e. Russia, fighting in Europe and b) the serious emerging threat of cyber-attacks.
Thoughts
Out of date
The most obvious point is the book is fabulous as far as it goes, but is now out of date. Ledwidge wrote it in late 2012-to-early 2013 i.e 10 long years ago. Since then, residual units of the British Army racked up more time in Afghanistan alongside the much bigger US presence, and the fight against the Taliban ground on, with accompanying NATO losses and civilian collateral damage, for another 8 years. And it all led up, of course, to the humiliating US withdrawal which concluded in August 2021.
So most if not all Ledwidge’s figures are out of date. What remains valuable, though, on a procedural level, is his careful structuring of the entire subject and his explanations of the methodologies he used; and on a conceptual level, the questions he asks and the searingly critical conclusions he comes to. All of these shed new light and angles on the story of the war.
Slow starting, ferocious ending
The second point is that, at least to begin with, this is a less impressive book than its predecessor. It feels more hurried. In the first book he took the reader with him, his points were carefully argued, we shared his slowly growing sense of disgust and horror, so there was a dynamic aspect to the narrative.
In this book he takes his anti-war attitude for granted and so doesn’t so much take us on a journey but just restates his disgust. An example of this is the way he uses the same small number of negative quotes from people involved in the wars not as the punchline of extended arguments, but as short-hand, as quick reminders, and uses them repetitively. So he tells us more than once that the former UK ambassador to Afghanistan Sir Sharrard Cowper-Coles thought the war was a waste of time. These kind of quotes are used as a kind of shorthand, summarising the more extended forms of the arguments he gave us in the preceding book.
That said, the final two chapters, 7 and 8, finally become really angry, rising to the level of evidence-based excoriation found in the first book and leaving you shaking with fury at the idiocy and incompetence of British politicians and army leaders. What a shambles. As an Afghan friend of Ledwidge puts it:
‘We were promised good governance: where is it? We were promised economic growth: where is it? We were promised stability: where is it? (p.190)
454 British troops killed, thousands badly injured and crippled. Tens of thousands of Afghan dead. Tens of billions of pounds wasted. And a week after we left, the Taliban rolled back in and took power again, as if nothing had happened. It’s hard to think of a more complete definition of futility.
Credit
Investment in Blood: The True Cost of Britain’s Afghan War by Frank Ledwidge was published in 2013 by Yale University Press. References are to the 2014 YUP paperback.
Books & Boots 