Boot out armchair generals who led us to Afghan defeat

AS OF last week, Task Force Helmand is no more – the 5,000 remaining British troops now come under American command and will be gone by the end of the year.

We lost in Helmand, beaten by a few thousand men in flip-flops with a Kalashnikov in one hand and a Koran in the other. In the process, 448 British troops were killed and 2,173 wounded. The cost to the hard-pressed taxpayer was around £37 billion according to one estimate. All for nothing, as will become increasingly apparent over the next couple of years as the Taliban re-establish their control over the area.

This leaves us with a problem. How do we commemorate this war and honour its veterans?

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It’s not going to be easy. The British military doesn’t really do defeats – it’s unusual, if not unheard of, in modern times. There were some severe setbacks in the Second World War – the evacuation of the British Expeditionary Force from Dunkirk in May 1940, and the Fall of Singapore in February 1942, were humiliating episodes.

But in the end we got our own back; the British played a crucial role in the defeat of the Wehrmacht in the West, indeed a British general, Montgomery, was in overall command of the American, Canadian and British forces landing on D-Day.

In the Far East, the defeat of Japan owed much to American sea power and the atomic bomb but General Bill Slim’s 14th Army mastered their Japanese opponents on the battlefields of Burma - not through superior technology or more plentiful materiel (they were poorly supplied) but through superior fighting power. Put simply, Slim ensured that the troops he had the honour to command got better at fighting jungle warfare than the Japanese.

In more recent times the British military executed the withdrawal from Empire competently, defeating a communist insurgency in Malaya in the 1950s – something no other army has managed. It ejected the Argentines from the Falkland Islands in 1982, and fought Irish Republican murderers pretty much to a standstill.

In fact, the army’s achievement in Ulster would be much more apparent if Tony Blair (under American pressure) had driven a less one-sided bargain with the gangsters of the IRA, which he seemed sadly incapable of revising when funding and sympathy for Irish terrorism in America dried up overnight post-9/11.

We seem to have forgotten that thousands and thousands of soldiers did their duty to queen and country, in difficult and frustrating circumstances, for nearly 30 years, under wise military leadership from some top-class generals. Instead, we are reminded every day (at public expense) of Bloody Sunday – a rare breakdown in military discipline. And Cherie Blair enthusiastically kisses Martin McGuiness in public.

So how do we commemorate the Afghan debacle? There is no point in dressing up Afghanistan as some kind of success to avoid hurting the feelings of those who have served or died there and their next of kin - although the MoD’s propaganda department has done its best over recent weeks. No one is drinking the Kool-Aid anymore. There will doubtless be memorials and parades according to taste.

But the best way we can honour the veterans of Afghanistan is to allow them to take over the running of the army – immediately. And I don’t mean the generals and brigadiers in their air-conditioned Nissen huts. I mean the fighting soldiers - the lieutenants and majors commanding platoons and companies, and the commanding officers. The oldest would now be in their early forties.

Their erstwhile bosses, trained in the military art over a lifetime, selected for high rank through a rigorously competitive system, made unforgiveable errors in Helmand, dispersing their troops on the ground in hard-to-defend locations and failing to ensure they were properly equipped. They failed even to produce a proper mission statement.

Most unforgivably they were seduced by the prospect of medals and prestige galore, the swaggering interviews on television and the CVs filled with phrases like “commanded British troops during some of the bloodiest fighting since the Korean War” – the ultimate irresponsible cheap thrill, military glory without having to risk their own skins.

Supersede and bowler hat the lot. Let those who have fought decide how things are done in the future. Next time round we might have a chance of winning.