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UK army 'misleadingly optimistic' over Afghan war, says former envoy

IRNA - Islamic Republic News Agency

London, Jan 14, IRNA -- Britain's former special envoy to Afghanistan has criticised the UK’s military leaders of being ‘misleadingly optimistic’ about Afghanistan in a renewed scathing attack on the conduct of the war.

Sir Sherard Cowper-Coles, who left the Foreign Office last October after being replaced in Kabul, said the war gave the army “a raison d'être it had lacked for years and resources on an unprecedented scale'.

“I am not blaming the military for being optimistic, or for constantly lobbying for more resources for Helmand,” Cowper-Coles said.

“But I do think some of the advice they put to ministers was misleadingly optimistic, and that ministers’ professional advisers, both military and civilian, sometimes did not spell out for ministers the costs and risks of engagement in Helmand,” he said.

The former envoy was suddenly suspended from his post of shadowing his late American counterpart, Richard Holbrooke, in June after clashing with senior Nato and US officials over his insistence that the military-driven counter-insurgency effort was headed for failure.

In his written testimony, he suggested that the deployment in Helmand in 2006 was seen by British military leaders as an opportunity to make up for the failure in Iraq.

“In the eyes of the Army, Afghanistan has also given our forces the chance to redeem themselves, in the eyes of the Americans, in the wake of negative perceptions, whether or not they were justified, of the British Army’s performance in Basra,” Cowper-Coles said.

He revealed that he was told by the then Chief of the General Staff, Sir Richard Dannatt, in the summer of 2007 that, if he didn’t use in Afghanistan the battle groups then starting to come free from Iraq, he would lose them in a future defence review.

“In my view, the Army’s ‘strategy’ in Helmand was driven at least as much by the level of resources available to the British Army as by an objective assessment of the needs of a proper counter-insurgency campaign in the province,” he told the all-party committee of MPs.