uk strategy in afghanistan, 2001-2014

350 Pages·2015·1.99 MB·English

UK STRATEGY IN AFGHANISTAN, 2001-2014:
NARRATIVES, TRANSNATIONAL DILEMMAS, AND
‘STRATEGIC COMMUNICATION’

Submitted by Thomas William Cawkwell to the University of
Exeter for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Sociology,
November 2014

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Abstract

The difficulties faced by the United Kingdom in realising its stabilisation objectives in the War in
Afghanistan (2001-2014) have precipitated a change in rhetorical approach by successive British
Governments, from one based on liberal normative principles to one that emphasises traditional,
rationalist precepts of ‘national security interests’. This transformation of ‘narrative’ is identified in
this work as chronologically analogous with the institutionalisation of ‘strategic communication’
practices and doctrine emanating from the defence establishment of the British state. In this work, I
argue that changes in narrative approach and the emergence of strategic communication can be
understood as a consequence of an overburdened British state attempting to free itself from a
‘transnational dilemma’ (King 2010): that is, to find a means of appealing coherently and succinctly
to the benefits of participation in collective security whilst avoiding threatening the viability of
collective security membership by acknowledging its costs. This transnational dilemma has been
exacerbated by intra-state competition over the material and ideational aspects of British strategy in
Helmand, and is traceable by close empirical analysis of three competing ‘policy narratives’ for
Afghanistan: stabilisation, counter-narcotics, and counter-terrorism, respectively. Intra-state
competition can, in turn, be conceptualised as the result of embedded inter-state relationships of
political obligation and military cooperation referred to by Edmunds (2010) as the
‘transnationalisation’ of defence policy. UK policy in Afghanistan has been guided by transnational
issues, specifically the maintenance of NATO as a collective security apparatus and of the ‘special
relationship’ with the United States, through which Britain secures and projects its national interest.
I argue that the UK’s grand strategic commitment to transnationalisation underscores an
‘unstatable’ ultimate policy of meeting the expectations of the United States and NATO, and that the
development of various policies and narratives for Afghanistan can be understood primarily in such
terms. In Afghanistan, transnationalisation and the concordant pursuit of satisfying American and
NATO expectations has come at the cost of a significant divestment of strategic autonomy, which
has uprooted traditional, nationally-based concepts of strategy and policy to the transnational level
and resulted in a strategic vacuum wherein intra-state competition has flourished. This, I argue, has
compromised the ability for Britain to link policy to operations (to ‘do’ strategy)d in Afghanistan, a
point which can be empirically measured by reference to the discordant and contradictory aspects of
aforementioned policy narratives, which have been rooted in the institutional interests of various
elements of the state. Strategic communication has arisen out of this situation as a means for the
state to overcome the transnational dilemma by promoting a unified ‘strategic narrative’ for
Afghanistan that has reconfigured the narrative for the conflict to one that emphasises the conflict
not in terms of collective security but in ‘national’ terms. This work concludes by arguing that, in
sidestepping rather than confronting the core dilemmas of British strategy, the emergence of
strategic communication can be seen as posing as many problems as solutions for the UK state.

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Contents

CHAPTER 1: STRATEGY, COMMUNICATION, AND
‘STRATEGIC COMMUNICATION’ 5

CHAPTER 2: TRANSNATIONALISATION, TRANSNATIONAL
DILEMMAS, AND STRATEGIC COMMUNICATION 37

CHAPTER 3: METHODS: DISCOURSE, CONTESTATION AND
PERFORMANCE 80

CHAPTER 4: THE RISE OF THE STABILISATION NARRATIVE 109

CHAPTER 5: THE FALL OF THE STABILISATION NARRATIVE 144

CHAPTER 6: THE COUNTER-NARCOTICS NARRATIVE 188

CHAPTER 7: THE COUNTER-TERRORISM NARRATIVE 232

CHAPTER 8: CONCLUSION – THE STATE OF BRITISH
STRATEGY AND THE UTILITY OF STRATEGIC COMMUNICATION 286

BIBLIOGRAPHY 322

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CHAPTER 1: STRATEGY, COMMUNICATION, AND
‘STRATEGIC COMMUNICATION’
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At the time of completion of writing (April 2015), Britain’s war in Afghanistan has
come to an end. Since the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, the world has witnessed
thirteen years of intervention, making the conflict one of the longest in the modern histories
of all of its participants. Alongside the United States and the United Kingdom, the conflict
has involved a coalition of forty-eight other states within and without the UN-mandated
International Security Assistance Force (ISAF), which in turn ran alongside the US-led
Operation Enduring Freedom (OEF) tasked with decimating or destroying international
terrorist networks and stabilising the country. As the conflict wore on, strategies and
operational approaches have moved from narrow counter-terrorist missions to ‘population-
centric’ counterinsurgency operations, and have spread beyond the frontiers of Afghanistan
into neighbouring Pakistan. The war has proven costly for many of these contributors, with
over 3,000 coalition deaths between them. For the UK, Afghanistan has resulted in 453
troop deaths and over 2,000 wounded in action and, according to one estimate by the Royal
United Services Institute, has come at a material cost of around £20 billion (Wright 2014:
online). Statistics are scarce regarding the number of dead insurgents, but is thought to be
in the tens of thousands (Dawi 2014: online). Similar figures must be considered likely in
relation to Afghan and Pakistani civilians and security forces.
Given the magnitude of the intervention and the depth of British involvement, it is
natural that questions about the efficacy of the mission have become commonplace as the
war draws to a conclusion. What effect has intervention had, and to what extent has it been
successful? Of course, any answer to such questions must be prefaced by the simple fact
that history is still being written on the fate of the country and its state, and whether the
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state will be able to maintain or expand its security writ over the country rests largely on its
ability to consolidate its own authority and reach settlements with competing power bases
in the country. Additionally, any answer regarding what has been achieved in Afghanistan
depends almost entirely upon how one understands the purpose of the mission and, from
that, how one measures ‘success’. Increasingly, political leaders of states involved in
Afghanistan have employed ‘narratives’ that have claimed that the mission has been
successful, and have done so by emphasising the baseline successes of preventing Afghan-
centric international terrorism and the building up of the Afghan National Security Forces
(ANSF) as a means of continuing such efforts in anticipation of ISAF’s departure at the end of
2014. Indeed, by this preferred metric, one may observe considerable achievements. At a
minimal level, intervention in Afghanistan has realised its immediate goals: first and
foremost, al Qaeda have been largely dismantled or at least pushed out of Afghanistan, and
the ability of Islamist extremist groups to plan and/or carry out terrorist attacks from the
country have been largely mitigated for the time being. Secondly, the Taliban have been
removed from power and, whatever the threat they pose to the current Afghan state now
and after 2014, it is unlikely that they will ever recover (as currently constituted) the power
they held over large parts of Afghanistan as they did prior to September 2001. This is so in
no small part due to a third achievement of fostering the improvement of the capabilities of
the ANSF, which ISAF has trained and which has taken over responsibility for Afghan security
in time for ISAF’s drawdown.
These accomplishments are somewhat muted, however, when one considers that the
first two were achieved within months of the beginning of the intervention in October 2001.
Indeed, the majority of the history of the international community’s involvement in the war
in Afghanistan is a story of efforts not directly related to counter-terrorism. Rather, ISAF has
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been primarily concerned with ‘stabilising’ the Afghan state and assisting it in securing and
buttressing its authority over its territory. To present the ‘end-game’ of Afghanistan in
purely security terms, as is now the wont of statesmen and women across the coalition, is to
provide a highly revised and reductive account of the campaign but, crucially, also an
instrumental one that to some extent justifies the costs of intervention. The problem with
such narratives is that, in order to portray the Afghan mission as ultimately successful, they
omit large parts of the history of the conflict. ISAF’s mission was far broader than the
narrow national security retrospectives many officials now focus upon, so much so that the
stabilisation mission in Afghanistan expanded over time to include commitments to
practically every conceivable area of state jurisdiction, from the sustainability of its security
forces to the development of a myriad of governance capabilities. Such efforts have, in
effect, constituted ISAF’s strategy for Afghanistan, and on this basis there are significant
grounds to question the claims of success made by Government officials.
Despite (or, as I will argue, reflective of) the revisionist narratives of today, delivering
stabilising effects has been a fundamental strategic problem for the UK over the last decade,
and is one that calls into question the viability of the operating model. Ultimately, Britain
and ISAF’s strategies for Afghanistan have always been dependent on the ability of the
Afghan state to resolve its own internal problems, leading to a general strategic dilemma
regarding the suitability of stabilisation, specifically of relating the use of military force to
achieve what was, in essence, a political objective. At the same time, there appear few
options available to states in their efforts to prevent terrorist attacks other than stabilisation
(Paris 2010:340). However one assesses the merit of ISAF’s presence in Afghanistan, it
should be clear that the strategic methodology by which it sought to facilitate the
stabilisation of Afghanistan holds significant flaws. For the UK in particular, experiences of
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Afghan stabilisation have precipitated a crisis of confidence in its ability to devise strategy to
meet the demands of an increasingly unpredictable world. The difficulties Britain and its
partners have faced in stabilising Afghanistan have manifested themselves in discursive
terms – what state officials say – in a way that downplays much of the norm-based content
of the stabilisation agenda. This work is about understanding this revisionism as a
consequence of the difficulties of strategy in the contemporary era; specifically, how
communication has been shaped by strategic dilemmas.
This introductory chapter provides context to this issue by inquiring how these
problems of strategy came about. It argues that the root problem for the UK lies in the
institutional and normative conditions in which stabilisation and state-building models have
been inculcated; specifically, a divestment of strategy above the national level and a limiting
of strategic possibilities to liberal normative options because of the way collective security
mechanisms work. This has led to a conceptual blurring of ideas of interests and values and
of ‘collective’ and ‘national’ which, I argue, has fundamentally affected British strategy in
Afghanistan by confounding the terms of reference by which strategists do their work. A
traditional, linear understanding of strategy begins at the identity and interests of an actor
or set of actors and proceeds from this starting point to devise policies, from which
strategies, operations and tactics are made. Under circumstances where the actors or
interests are not easily divisible, strategy can become confused and unclear and, what is
more, cannot be easily articulated. It is in this context that so-called ‘strategic
communication’ (SC) institutional processes and practices have emerged as a discursive
means of ‘plugging the gap’ in strategic thinking. It is this instrumental use of
communications that makes it ostensibly strategic. In the chapters that follow, I will argue
that SC can be understood as a response by the UK state to the problems of collective
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security strategy in Afghanistan typified by ‘transnational dilemmas’. I then apply this
concept to the various policies pursued by the UK in Afghanistan.

The State of British Strategy
The UK has in recent years undergone a period of self-reflection and recrimination
concerning its apparent lack of strategic capability. Criticism of Britain’s strategic acumen
has coincided with an expansion of UK activities in Afghanistan since 2006 and the
emergence of subsequent operational shortcomings. Indeed, one may quite reasonably
deduce that, given the centrality of Afghanistan to British defence interests over the last
decade and a half, it is the war in Afghanistan that has served as the crucible for the British
state’s realisation of its strategic limitations. This view is borne out by reference to
chronological comparison of Britain’s struggles in Afghanistan with the prevalence of critical
reports from within the UK’s political establishment regarding Government’s approach to
the conflict, as well as with scholarly articles in recent years that have questioned the
viability of the UK’s strategic posture (Strachan 2005, 2006, 2008). In February 2007, Field
Marshal Sir Peter Inge voiced his concern that Britain had ‘lost the ability to think
strategically’ (Betz & Cormack 2009:320). This sentiment was echoed by then-Chief of the
Defence Staff Jock Stirrup in December 2009, when he declared that Britain had ‘lost an
institutionalised capacity for, and culture of, strategic thought’ and offered the advice that
‘[a]ll we do at the tactical and operational level needs to be rooted in good strategic soil,
and therefore in our national interest’ (Stirrup 2009: online). In October 2010, the House of
Commons Public Administration Select Committee released its review of Britain’s strategic
capabilities, titled ‘Who Does UK Strategy?’, which opined that Britain has ‘simply fallen out
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of the habit’ of all things strategic (PASC 2010:3). In that report, the Committee drew upon
the testimony of Sir Robert Fry, who argued that Britain had
‘[fallen] out of the habit of Grand Strategy, and I think that is what happened
to us in the second part of the 20th century. Also larger strategies that were
extra-national—so NATO, the cold war—took over and really took the place of
any Grand Strategy’ (2010:14).
Both Stirrup and Fry’s remarks contained within them an intimation that Britain’s
difficulties with strategic thought were – at least in part – the result of the interests
supporting them not being sufficiently ‘national’, seemingly as a consequence of a
divestment of strategic responsibility from the national to the transnational level, and, in
Fry’s case in particular, a concomitant hardwiring of collective security logic over and above
any semblance of a distinctively ‘national’ strategy. Furthermore, for Fry the atrophying of
British strategic autonomy is nothing new; rather, it has been a multi-generational process
spanning at least the last half century and most of the history of NATO. This point raises an
important question, however: if Britain has been operating under such logic for so long, why
is it that this alleged divestment of strategic authority to the transnational level has only
recently produced an awareness of a fundamental ‘loss of capacity’ for strategy? Why now?
The institutional makeup of British defence policy is clearly important in deducing ‘who
makes UK strategy’, but it does not provide one with an answer as to what animates the
strategic process at the level of organising concepts.
Providing such an answer therefore requires an analysis of what is conceptually
different about contemporary strategic circumstances in relation to those of the Cold War,
which is of course the emphasis placed on combatting non-state terrorism as an
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