When the End of War Is the Beginning of War

International New York Times | 20 March 2014

LONDON — When history’s great contests wind down, they leave questions that wars cannot answer and conflicts sometimes create.

That seems as true in the myriad centennial commemorations of the start of World War I this year as in the recollection this week of President Vladimir V. Putin, who invoked Russia’s indignities at the end of the Cold War to justify the annexation of Crimea.

It was a familiar reflex. As European history showed after the Treaty of Versailles in 1919, terms of peace that offer no dignity to the defeated sow the seeds of future conflict. In this century — witness the revived bloodletting in Iraq — wars that end on ill-defined terms merely store up the tinder of future conflagration.

So what is to be made of Britain’s drawdown in lockstep with the United States’ from a war in Afghanistan whose aims have shifted inconclusively as lives have been lost?

On Sunday, Britain’s Ministry of Defense announced that British troops in Afghanistan — America’s main allies in the NATO-led coalition — had pulled back to a single major base, Camp Bastion in restive Helmand Province, and one outpost.

At the height of their combat deployment, the British troops numbered close to 10,000, deployed at 137 bases. Now the tally is fewer than 5,000 soldiers who plan to complete their withdrawal by the end of 2014. Those are the easy statistics. The hard one is this: 448 British soldiers have perished in a war that has not answered Britons’ questions about why they had to die.

Ostensibly, after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, when Osama bin Laden enjoyed sanctuary in the Taliban-ruled Afghanistan, the years of combat were supposed to deny a haven to Qaeda terrorists hatching plots against the West. But the fighting did not pre-empt the resurgence of the Taliban or spare British citizens the violence of terrorism linked to Pakistan on their own soil.

In less than 13 years, militants have relocated across the globe from North Africa to Somalia to Yemen. Now it is the war in Syria that has replaced far-flung training camps in Afghanistan or Pakistan as the newest academy of jihad.

When British and American combat troops leave Afghanistan, the overwhelming question is whether the post-invasion template has already been devised in Iraq, where unreconciled sectarian passions have erupted in the vacuum of Western withdrawal, and where the behavior of British troops has come under harsh criticism.

Writ small, another footnote in the annals of Britain’s usually ill-fated campaigns in Afghanistan from the 19th century onward has been unfolding this week in the attempts of a retired officer to promote a memoir of his time there, raising the question of how much the war effort was built on deceit and dissimulation about the adequacy of soldiers’ equipment.

Maj. Richard Streatfeild, 41, was a commander in the hotly contested Sangin region in 2009 and 2010 who became what newspapers called a “poster boy” for the British Army through his blogs about the valor and sacrifice of soldiers on one of the BBC’s most prestigious radio news programs.

In those broadcasts, known as The Sangin Diaries, he acknowledged this week, he played down concerns about poor equipment and training, a lack of radios and a shortage of armored vehicles to protect soldiers from hostile fire and explosives in what he called “the most dangerous place in the world.” 

The truth, it is often said, is war’s first casualty.

Major Streatfeild said his priority was operational security and the safety of his unit. But five soldiers under his command died anyhow. 

One of them, Michael Pritchard, 22, was killed when a British sniper mistook him for an insurgent. Major Streatfeild said a broken radio prevented officers from telling the sniper to hold his fire.

But “the obvious thing that always stood out,” said Helen Perry, the fallen soldier’s mother, “was this should never have happened.”