The result of British amnesia about the failed wars in Afghanistan and Iraq

An uproar raised by Prince Harry over the killing of 25 "Talibans" exposes his critics more

• British forces patrol in Helmand.

  Reuters

• Boris Johnson.

  A.F.B

• Harry said he was flying an Apache helicopter in Afghanistan, where he killed 25 Taliban militants.

  archival

picture

The uproar caused by Britain's Prince Harry Windsor, who came under fire for his role as a helicopter pilot in the 2012 Afghanistan war, says more about his critics than it does about him.

Many of the abuses were hysterical or remarkable, but stemmed from British amnesia about the failed wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Harry said in his book that "Afghanistan was a war of mistakes, a war marked by a lot of collateral damage, where thousands of innocent people were killed and maimed, and this will always haunt us."

Indeed, these missteps must affect Britons at home most, as Britain's senseless intervention in Afghanistan, much of it in Helmand province, is fading fast from collective memory.

A self-destructive national disease

It seems that no country wants to dwell on its failures, but the refusal in Britain to acknowledge and learn from past mistakes has become a devastating national disease.

Its worst symptom is the shallow bragging, the pretense that Britain holds the trump cards in its hands and knows how to play with them, something that came to a head during the years of former Prime Minister Boris Johnson, and his successor, Liz Terrace, last year.

But the poisons with which Harry's somewhat reasoned comments about his war in Afghanistan have shown the power of taboos in the face of any real assessment of Britain's ability to wage war.

There are touches of naivety in Harry's description of an Apache flying combat missions, but there are also interesting insights into what he was doing. And that my targets were correct, and that I was shooting at (Taliban) elements only, without harming any civilians.”

bitter experience

But the experience of Afghanistan and Iraq has shown time and again that the people targeted by the Air Force, whether it be fixed-wing warplanes, helicopters, drones, and surface-to-surface missiles, are often not the people the pilots thought they were targeting.

Instead of targeting the Taliban, the Islamic State fighters turn out to be the tribal enemies of the provincial governor, or perhaps they are farmers trying to resist the armed robbers sent by the local police chief.

The main motive for volunteering with the Taliban was the heavy civilian casualties caused by the wrong air strikes.

Unconfirmed intelligence information

Harry says he killed 25 Taliban fighters, but I doubt that very much.

And when the impact of air strikes on civilians in northern Iraq, where the air war was similar to that in Afghanistan, was investigated by American journalists Azmat Khan and Anand Gopal in 2016-2017, they discovered a huge discrepancy between what the military claims. between the truth.

And in a study of 150 airstrikes, published in the New York Times on November 16, 2017, it was discovered that “one out of every five raids carried out by the coalition resulted in the death of civilians.”

The West relies, as in the past, for its claim to be able to distinguish between soldier and civilian in contemporary air campaigns, on anecdotal intelligence on targets.

In one of the residential areas outside the city of Mosul, the Western air force claimed that it had killed only one civilian near the town of Qayyarah, and the Iraqi forces said that they did not kill anyone, and it turned out that there were about 40 air strikes in the area that killed 43 civilians, including 19 men. , eight women, and 16 children under the age of 14.

In a third of these raids, ISIS fighters were near civilians, but in half of the cases there were no militants in the area.

Harry's abuse focused, at times, in his false claim that he boasted of killing 25 Taliban fighters, that he had broken some military rules by giving a number to dead enemy personnel.

Apparently, in the age of Apache helicopters and laptops, he can count the people he's killed, he says.

Iraq

In fact, Harry may not be able to do this, even if modern weapons are accurate, but it still depends on the correct aiming.

And if Harry is correct about all of his targets being Taliban, that would imply an exceptional level of valid intelligence.

Yet he at least thought about what he was doing, though in the "heat and fog of combat, I didn't think of those 25 people," and he made the nasty analogy between dead Taliban fighters and chessmen being removed from the board.

And he's absolutely right about that, though not in the way he means it.

Militaries often lie or deceive themselves about the number of civilians, compared to enemy combatants, that they kill.

It rarely admits to itself or to others the reasons that led to the emergence of resistance to the military occupation.

During the preparation for the arrival of the British army in Helmand in 2006, one intelligence officer confidently said, "There is no war in Helmand now, but this war will happen if the British army goes there."

Of course, the grim facts of the British military's direct involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan are no secret.

One retired British ambassador said that the worst mistake on the part of the British government that he had witnessed during his entire diplomatic career was the British intervention in Iraq, and was second in the worst to the British intervention in Helmand.

The main reason for each of these interventions was to convince the United States that the British were an ally on which the United States could count.

The Afghans Harry killed

This provides at least a rational incentive to send small and insufficient armies to Basra and Helmand, where they encounter a hostile population, well trained in arms.

Most of the errors committed in Britain's wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were investigated by government or parliamentary reports.

Although the reports are good for historians, the lessons of them are routinely ignored.

The most important of these lessons is the conclusion reached by Britain and the United States, to the effect that waging wars by relying largely on air power does not work.

If it had succeeded, the Taliban would not be in Kabul now.

Perhaps Harry's description of what he is doing in Afghanistan will spark a useful debate about the British Army's record in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Although there is no evidence of this in light of the rush to demonize Harry because he abused his family.

And there are two important questions that may remain unanswered, who were the people that Harry killed?

How did so many Afghans join the Taliban because their relatives and friends were killed?

• The refusal in Britain to acknowledge and learn from past mistakes has become a devastating national disease.

Its worst symptom is the shallow bragging, the pretense that Britain holds the trump cards in its hands and knows how to play with them, and this reached its peak during the years of former Prime Minister Boris Johnson, and his successor, Liz Terrace, last year.

• The experience of Afghanistan and Iraq has shown time and again that the people targeted by the Air Force, whether it be fixed-wing warplanes, helicopters, drones, and surface-to-surface missiles, are often not the people the pilots thought they were targeting.

• The grim facts about the direct involvement of the British army in Iraq and Afghanistan are no secret.

Patrick Cockburn ■ British journalist interested in the Middle East

Follow our latest local and sports news and the latest political and economic developments via Google news