I’d love to know if the Sun has passed money to Mrs Janes. I don’t begrudge her it, but if the PM called me up out of the blue, I doubt I’d have the presence of mind to record the conversation. It’d take me a minute or two of fiddling with the phone to work out how to do it. Unless, of course, I’d been primed to do it by person or persons unknown.

I think putting a private letter in the press is a little tasteless. I do wonder how this ended up in the Sun’s hands; was it sent from Mrs Janes’ initiative or were the Sun speaking to each bereaved family, just on the off chance?

It’s no great secret that Gordon Brown is visually impaired and doesn’t write particularly legibly. Perhaps he should have rewritten the letter; perhaps not. If it has be checked by someone else, it probably would have been rewritten; there’s the rub. Instead of the PM’s honest & personal feelings, future letters will be drafted, scrutinised and typed up by a Wykehamist and then just signed by the PM, with all trace of human emotion and fallibility erased lest it end up on the front page of the gutter press.

The Sun seems to be using the anger occasioned by the loss of a son and soldier to score party political points. That dishonours his memory.

xD.

UPDATE 2150 – lots of other people have expressed similar sentiments to me, but there are a couple of particularly apposite posts by Bob Piper that I’d like to flag up. One is also called Exploiting Grief; the other is a fill-in-the-blanks form from 1916 that passed for a letter of condolence.

10 troops died and ‘only 150 Afghans voted’

Note the quotation marks. What’s inside them is never referenced to anyone.

The ‘story’ is that only 150 people voted in Babaji. A second story is that ten British soldiers died in Operation Panther’s Claw. The new, positive London Evening Standard forgets to mention that

• it is not comparing like with like (votes in one part of Helmand against British deaths across the whole of Helmand)
• does not say where or what Babaji is (are we talking about the area or the village, and what are their populations?)
• it does not have confirmed figures (because they’re not available yet)
• it doesn’t say that enabling people to vote was not the main aim of Operation Panther’s Claw (which was to secure a permanent ISAF presence in Helmand)
• it doesn’t say that one of the results of Operation Panther’s Claw was to enable an extra eighty thousand Afghans in Helmand to vote against a campaign of violence and intimidation

Just thought I’d mention. It’s not as if the Evening Standard hasn’t changed from being a negative, mendacious rag of inferior quality.

xD.

PS you’re right, reading the ES is bad for my blood pressure.

Were the problems with the Iraq war just the basis on which we went to war, or inappropriate equipment necessitating lots of UORs ?

Do we just want to know that the whole enterprise was a bad idea, or do we want to see where and why things were done badly or well?

The loudest opposition to the nature of the inquiry has largely come from the grouping around the Stop the War Coalition (a trading name of the Socialist Workers’ Party ¹ ). It is worth remembering that this grouping was not only opposed to the war ² , not only opposed to the Labour government, but opposed to the entire system of government and nature of the state. That suggests that they would be opposed to the inquiry on some basis no matter what as, in their view, the government is necessarily corrupt and serving of capitalist interests.

The more reasoned problems come under three heads; timing, secrecy and outputs.

Timing

The ‘why now’ question is easily answered; British troops there have largely withdrawn. Conducting an honest inquiry would have been impossible if witnesses thought they were kicking the stool from underneath troops in the field.

The ‘how long’ question can only be answered in reference to other inquiries.

The Fingerprint Inquiry; announced 14 March 2008. Yet to report.
The Fraser Inquiry into the Holyrood building; announced July 8th 2003. Report published 15 September 2004.
The Hutton Inquiry into the death of Dr David Kelly; opened 1 August 2003. Report published 28 January 2004
The Cullen Inquiry into the Dunblane massacre; announced 21 March 1996. Report published 30 September 1996
The Laming Inquiry into the death of Victoria Climbié; announced 20 April 2001. Report published 28 January 2003.
The Cullen Inquiry into the Ladbroke Grove rail disaster; announced 8 October 1999. Report published 17 April 2001
The Davies Inquiry into the Aberfan disaster; announced 26 October 1966. Report published 3 August 1967
The Saville Inquiry into Bloody Sunday; announced 29 January 1998. Yet to report.
The Butler Review into WMD in Iraq; announced 3 February 2004. Report published 14 July 2004.
The Redfern Report into the Alder Hey organs scandal; announced 3 December 1999. Report published 7 November 2000
The Scott Report into the Matrix Churchill affair; announced November 1992. Published 27 April 2004.

This will of necessity be a painstaking process. Setting an artificial limit of twelve months will not help anyone. I would reply to anyone who says it is being put back till after the election for political reasons that desiring it to report early, half-cock, so that it can be used to hit the Labour party is also a political reason.

Secrecy

Much of the criticism has been on the issue of secrecy.

For one thing, I understand and agree with the logic of certain things being secret. Beyond the obvious issues of national security, I would make two points.

Firstly, we did not cover ourselves in glory. I’m guessing that there are plenty of people who will want to tell their part of the story but will not, for various reasons, want to do it in public. Their own conduct or that of ‘brother officers’ might have been wanting, or they might be concerned about leaving interpreters and other locally employed civilians in the lurch again.

Equally, an honest investigation will have to take information from people who we cannot compel to appear – from the USA, for instance – and who are unlikely to appear if they feel they would compromise confidences. Similarly, would (say) a representative of the Kurdistan Regional Government be likely to appear to discuss oil if their words were ferried direct to Washington and Baghdad?

Outputs

The inquiry has many issues to consider. Off the top of my head, they could include the lead up to the war, WMD, intelligence qua intelligence, use of intelligence, lack of embassy, use of intelligence from allies, the march on Baghdad, de-baathification, troop numbers, mission objectives in Basra, relations with civilians, the Awakening, civil-military co-operation, troop equipment and so on and so forth.

Quite beyond the simple questions of ‘were there WMD’ and ‘was the dodgy dossier sexed up’, there are questions about everything that happened in Iraq. There is a general understanding that we didn’t cover ourselves with glory, but after any operation of the size of Iraq, there is a need for a ‘lessons learned’ exercise. There are going to be two outputs, one public, one secret. As with the Dunblane inquiry, parts of the secret version may be declassified before the time limit to aid that process.

The ouput is not ‘Tony Blair was wrong’ but a whole range of comments, recommendations and criticisms. Those looking for an answer along the lines of ‘Tony Blair was wrong’ are missing the point and, ultimately, will make it harder for us to see where we went wrong, what lessons we can learn and how that affects and constrains future military conduct.

Ultimately, going to war in Iraq was a political decision. While an inquiry may do much, it cannot decide whether a policy was right or wrong. That is reserved for the electorate.

For the record, I opposed the Iraq war.

xD.

This post also appeared at Common Endeavour and in a shortened version at Liberal Conspiracy.

1 – they’re not socialists, they’re not workers and they don’t know how to party
2 – even though it had no problems with declaring “we are all Hezbollah now”

Setting up the Afghan government was never going to be enough, either. The international community needs to rally round and provide development support to build the institutions that will allow Afghanistan to run itself. A successful part of that has been the establishment of the Afghan National Army, which (I believe) now takes part in more than two-thirds of missions conducted under the ISAF or OEF banners. More work does need to be done, for instance, on the Afghan National Police. It is worth mentioning OMLTs (Operational Mentor Liaison Teams, or Omelettes), which remain attached to an Afghan unit after it has been set up and trained to provide ongoing training and advice.

NATO went into Afghanistan under an Article V¹ commitment to prevent further attacks, on the US in particular, launched from Afghan territory by al Qaeda with the complicity of the then-government. The conflict was and is increasingly characterised by asymmetry; while there have been some ‘pitched battles’, insurgents are increasingly avoiding such conflicts. Instead, they are going after development work precisely because it is that work which wins hearts and minds and helps to develop the structures that Afghanistan needs. A good instance is the delivery of a hydroelectric power turbine to produce electricity for on the order of two million people. It took five thousand troops to safeguard its passage precisely because the Taleban were so determined to stop it arriving.

While the higher echelons of the Taleban are under pressure, local groups are able to maintain opposition. This is largely because they use aggressive means with no regard at all towards loss of life, Afghan or otherwise. It is worth remembering, though, that a couple of years ago the Taleban were talking in terms of defeating the Afghan government in some parts of the country. They have failed. While the situation is not necessarily what I’d describe as ‘good’, the Taleban are being defeated as a coherent force.

As I said at the beginning, there was never going to be a military victory in Afghanistan. What military force can do is allow and support the autonomous developments needed for Afghanistan to run itself and thus prevent further attacks like 9-11.

xD.

1 – Article V of the North Atlantic Treaty, aka the Washington Treaty, runs:

The Parties agree that an armed attack against one or more of them in Europe or North America shall be considered an attack against them all and consequently they agree that, if such an armed attack occurs, each of them, in exercise of the right of individual or collective self-defence recognised by Article 51 of the Charter of the United Nations, will assist the Party or Parties so attacked by taking forthwith, individually and in concert with the other Parties, such action as it deems necessary, including the use of armed force, to restore and maintain the security of the North Atlantic area.

Any such armed attack and all measures taken as a result thereof shall immediately be reported to the Security Council. Such measures shall be terminated when the Security Council has taken the measures necessary to restore and maintain international peace and security.

Full text of the treaty at Wikisource.

PS – I draw your attention to the disclaimer at the bottom of this page.

The hotel in question, the Metro, apparently has had problems with rowdy soldiers in the past. My instinct is to say that where there are problems, the police should be called and, if necessary, taken up with the commanding officers of the people in question. Turning someone away because of an association with other people who happen to have the same job as them is unreasonably discriminatory. In this particular case, however, Cpl Stringer was on his own, not in uniform and, I surmise from the story, was clearly not going to cause any problems. Indeed, had he not used his Army ID to check in, the person at the desk would have had not idea that he was in the armed forces.

It might appear that this was a poor decision by a clerk who didn’t understand the reasoning behind the, frankly daft, rule introduced by the hotel; nevertheless, the existence of the rule itself is superfluous and its implementation arbitrary and unfair.

I’ve set up a petition on the Number Ten website; I will put the link here as soon as it’s ready.

xD.