by Tom Bower
Blair’s look of shock was also less than genuine. As he later told a special adviser in Downing Street, ‘There were lots of negotiations here. I couldn’t stand out on that issue.’ The bigger issues were not explained, but were assumed to be his bid for the European presidency.
‘We’re in a state of shock,’ said Rickett after confirming the likely bill. ‘That’s not the sort of behaviour you expect from a prime minister. He’s wasted eighteen months of work and it’s delayed anything happening on the ground while we go back to the drawing board.’ Nothing in the preceding months had forewarned Whitehall officials about Blair’s opportunism.
‘Blair’, explained Rickett, ‘has completely undermined the economics of nuclear power. The cost of a new nuclear power station has rocketed. Probably even higher than an onshore wind farm.’ The astronomical cost was the result of the compulsory guarantee of prices for the electricity supplied by the developer of any new station. This guarantee would require huge subsidies from consumers. ‘Overnight’, said Rickett, ‘our drafts of Britain’s new energy policy for the next White Paper have been wrecked. He’s undermined everything he wanted to achieve through the energy review.’
The following week, Blair arrived in the Commons to report on the summit. As he moved towards the Dispatch Box, the ministers on the front bench left the chamber. Only Tony McNulty, a junior minister, sat on the long green bench. ‘You’re not going to leave as well, are you?’ said Blair, evidently distraught.
As a last throw, the government published a draft ‘Climate Change’ bill aimed at achieving a mandatory 80 per cent cut in the UK’s carbon emissions by 2050 (compared to the 60 per cent already enacted). ‘The time for market innocence is over,’ said Malcolm Wicks in an unauthorised confession.
The 2007 White Paper ended the government’s neutrality on nuclear energy. The first new station was predicted to be in operation by 2018.
FORTY-SIX
An Unexpected War
* * *
In the spring of 2006, a round of military musical chairs caused havoc to the army’s adventures. General Rob Fry in Northwood was replaced by Vice Admiral Charles Style, and General Mike Walker gave way as chief of the defence staff to Air Chief Marshal Jock Stirrup. Neither Style, who struggled with details, nor Stirrup, a taciturn fighter pilot, had personal experience of land warfare. Then, in May 2006, Des Browne, a Treasury ally of Gordon Brown, became defence secretary. In the excitement of a particularly clumsy reshuffle, Blair never explained his expectations to Browne, an untested politician with no knowledge of defence and an outright opponent of Britain’s involvement in Afghanistan.
Helter-skelter, Blair had committed Britain’s underfunded army to two remote wars under the command of an air marshal, a vice admiral, a rookie minister, two brigadiers acting on their own initiative and Bill Jeffrey, the shy permanent secretary at the MoD who had no prior knowledge of his brief.
Browne’s introductory forty-eight hours were a baptism of fire. At his meeting with Stirrup on his first day, he was told that the army wanted to quit Iraq. ‘There’s nothing more they can do,’ said Stirrup, ‘and they are under constant threat of attack.’
Browne volunteered that Blair’s misunderstanding of the insurgency in Iraq had enmeshed the army in conflicting strategies. Stirrup agreed: ‘Blair never understood that the military could not change the political process.’
The day after Browne’s appointment, a British helicopter was shot down in Basra, killing five soldiers. Shocked by the deaths, Browne confessed he was unprepared for ‘the daunting experience of people dying. I was deeply affected.’ Thereafter, the stress of the daily routine and the incessant media attention was ‘enormous and gave me no space to stand back’.
His burden was about to intensify. At that moment, unknown to him or to Stirrup, Brigadier Ed Butler was proposing to abandon the plans for his engagement in Helmand. Butler’s orders, approved by Blair, had been explicit: as part of NATO, the British were to remain in Lashkar Gah, a safe town, and reinforce the peacekeeping effort in southern Helmand. Under their protection, the nation-building teams would attempt to civilise Afghanistan.
Five weeks after arriving, Butler was asked by Mohammad Daoud, the governor in Lashkar Gah, to send troops north up the valley towards Sangin, to protect Daoud’s family and loyal tribal chiefs. Butler flew by helicopter to reconnoitre the region. He was sympathetic to Daoud’s request and discussed the proposed change of plan with the newly appointed – male – British ambassador and the MI6 station chief in Kabul. In their reports to London, both men minimised the possibility of danger.
Butler returned to London at the end of May determined to set the record straight. In a room filled with over thirty people, including the chiefs and retired chiefs of staff, officials from the Foreign Office, MoD, MI6 and Margaret Aldred’s committee, he spelled out the dangers in Helmand and the inadequacy of the British military force for nation-building. At the end of his presentation, no one suggested any change of policy or even started a discussion. His audience departed with barely a word. If anyone bore responsibility for reconsidering the mission, it was Aldred’s committee, but Butler’s presentation led nowhere. Aldred asked him nothing.
Butler had not mentioned at the meeting his proposed move to Sangin. Acting without accurate intelligence on the irreconcilable rivalries among the local tribes or the Byzantine relationship between the tribes and the corrupt government in Kabul, he was empowered to take the decision himself. ‘I returned to Afghanistan’, he wrote with hindsight, ‘concerned that the senior leadership across government was still failing to grasp the enormity of the task ahead.’ At the time, Butler also did not understand the implications.
Some generals, including General David Richards, the opinionated NATO chief in Afghanistan, encouraged the move up the valley as a tactical manoeuvre that did not require political approval. Others, including General Peter Wall, the deputy chief at Northwood, were told during a visit to Helmand that Butler proposed to change his mission but believed that local brigadiers were being entrusted to take the initiative without seeking permission from Northwood. Stirrup recognised that the local complexities in Helmand placed the military in a no-win position and deferred to Butler, while Browne remained silent, even after a visit to Afghanistan. Accordingly, on his own authority, Butler acquiesced to Daoud’s request. The new adventure went ahead.
In June, small groups of British paratroopers landed in an unfamiliar environment. Their presence disturbed the American army’s financial ‘live and let live’ relationship with the local tribesmen and drug-traders, and also irritated an aggressive American commander who was committed to hunting down the Taliban and who opposed Britain’s nation-building plan. No official, general or politician in London thought of resolving the disagreement with the Americans. The expedition’s fate depended upon Butler.
Hours after their arrival, the paratroopers met with incoming fire and duly retaliated. During the firefight some died. The escalation was instantaneous. After the tribal elders’ exhortations to the paratroopers to leave had been ignored, the Taliban joined the battle and a ‘series of Alamos’ cropped up across the region. Groups of British soldiers, unable to communicate with the people they were protecting, were shooting at a mixture of drug barons and Taliban. To survive, the beleaguered platoons summoned air strikes. Inevitably, the pilots occasionally missed their targets and hit the homes of civilians. Villages and Sangin’s thriving bazaar became rubble. British anti-narcotic teams, in accordance with Blair’s instructions, began to burn the opium crop. ‘You’ve just taken the food out of my children’s mouths,’ a tribal elder told the troops. By July, peaceful nation-building had transformed into war.
‘Baffled’ about the deployment to Sangin, John Reid telephoned Browne for an explanation. ‘No one asked or told me,’ replied Browne. ‘I don’t know when the decision was taken.’ Later, he would tell an inquiry, ‘I was not part of the chain of command to Afghanistan. I was never strat
egically in charge. I was never clear about the chain. There wasn’t a proper structure to discuss the decision.’ Even Blair would say that he was not told by Stirrup about the change of plan. Sofa government, it was said as an excuse, had allowed decisions to be taken in the field that should have been referred to Blair and the Cabinet. In theory, Richard Mottram, the new security co-ordinator, should have supervised the deployment to Afghanistan but, like David Omand, his predecessor, he was excluded from Downing Street decision-making by Blair. The lessons of Iraq were ignored.
Air Marshal Stirrup was stranded. Daily, he received reports about patrols dispersing around Helmand, shoot-outs, British fatalities and disagreements among the NATO powers. Without experience of fighting counter-insurgency wars, he could not judge the army’s plight from London. Even after a tour of Helmand, he would explain that he never took personal responsibility for ground operations but, since Butler’s duty was to protect Helmand and since the governor, Mohammad Daoud, did survive, the mission was deemed by him to be a success. In common with the army’s chiefs, Stirrup could not identify who, other than Butler, had decided to change the mission and ‘stir the hornets’ nest’. At his request, Blair agreed to send an extra 900 combat soldiers – considerably fewer than the 10,000 troops Butler asked for. In the event, only a hundred were sent in June from Cyprus.
The scapegoating was aggravated by Mike Jackson. ‘Search me, guv,’ he would later say with surprise about the deployment. ‘I thought we were going to Kandahar.’ Northwood, Jackson would rightly add, was responsible for the army’s operations, not the chief of the army. The same confusion over authority had arisen in Iraq, but neither the chiefs nor the officials in Whitehall and Northwood had considered resolving the ambivalence.
In Northwood, Air Marshal Glenn Torpy had handed over command to General Nicholas Houghton, who at the outset denied knowing about Butler’s decision. He had not been alerted by Style to its implications, he said. His denial was challenged by the written records. An inquiry would conclude that Houghton ‘had no grip on Butler’, meaning that Butler should bear the blame for the change of policy. If Alice had observed Britain’s military in Wonderland, she would have heard a chief admit, ‘You’d have to be mad to dream me up.’
Des Browne received no special call from Blair to discuss the escalation. He read in a newspaper on 1 July a Downing Street spokesman’s comment that al-Qaeda was using Afghanistan as ‘a battleground. We have got to be victorious there.’ Browne did know that Jackson was demanding more planes, helicopters and troops to satisfy Blair’s judgement that the situation had become ‘very dangerous’. Mission creep had infected Blair’s interpretation of a monumental war within Islam, and between Islamic extremists and the West. Without proper discussion, Britain was slipping into a major conflict that would cost £38 billion, cause the deaths of 453 personnel and leave hundreds of servicemen suffering life-changing injuries.
On 12 July, Helmand became a sideshow, as Blair became preoccupied by developing hostilities between Israel and the Hezbollah army in Lebanon. He interpreted the initial destruction of buildings and civilian deaths along the Mediterranean as the continuation of the 9/11 attacks by militant Muslims, in this case supported by the Iranian government rather than Saudi zealots.
Israel’s retaliation for a minor incident after two weeks of fighting in Gaza was widely condemned as disproportionate. Blair rejected the criticism. Although Lebanon was blockaded and the Israeli military had destroyed strategic installations, he believed the country, as the victim of Islamic terror, was justified in launching reprisals. Despite that partisan position, he still trusted himself to broker between the two sides. During his discussions with President Bush, launching a Middle East peace plan had been a condition for Britain’s support of the Iraq invasion, and ever since he had taken an interest in the region.
On 14 July, he arrived in St Petersburg for a G8 summit, where he hoped to persuade Bush to endorse him as peacemaker. He first encountered the president in a common area. To his misfortune, a TV camera with live sound recorded Bush’s greeting: ‘Yo, Blair.’ To viewers across the world, the president was disparaging the ‘poodle’. Blair would reject that interpretation, insisting that the frivolous salute testified to their close relationship. But the damage was done, especially after Bush thanked Blair for a sweater.
‘It’s awfully thoughtful of you.’
‘It’s a pleasure,’ replied Blair.
‘I know you picked it out yourself.’
‘Oh, absolutely – in fact, I knitted it.’
Both laughed. They became serious, and then Bush flatly rejected Blair’s offer to act as Condoleezza Rice’s advance man in the Middle East.
Compounding the embarrassment, Blair’s renewed association with the president over another war outraged Labour supporters. The daily toll of deaths and destruction in Lebanon shocked Labour MPs, who expressed their disgust about Blair’s refusal to condemn Israel’s disproportionate attacks and his failure to call for a ceasefire. They were equally suspicious about his language. Unlike the diplomats, he spoke openly about ‘Islamic extremists’ and ‘Islamic terrorists’. Israel, he implied, was on the front line in a war to protect civilisation against reactionary Islam. As a supporter of Israel, he ignored his advisers and the criticism by Labour MPs of Israeli excesses, criticisms that would be echoed by a commission chaired by an Israeli judge appointed by the Israeli government. He was unashamedly partisan.
The result was a growing number of his party demanding that he set a date for his departure – to little effect. Ever since his leadership ‘coup’ in 1994, he had sidelined the party’s executives and public-sector trade union leaders. Twelve years later, he was not about to change the habits of his political career. He would go with dignity at a time of his own choosing. He seemed to have forgotten what he had said in a conversation in 1999 with the Lib Dem leader Paddy Ashdown: ‘Going is the most difficult thing to do in politics. Too many people stay for too long. I would rather stop when people said, “Why is he going?” rather than “Why isn’t he going?” Or worse, “When is he going?”’ Seven years later, that wisdom was forgotten.
On 31 July, as the carnage in Lebanon escalated, Blair flew to Washington to persuade Bush to launch a peace plan. In advance, he knew from David Manning, the ambassador, that his trip would be pointless, but there was another purpose for the journey.
From Washington, he continued on to Los Angeles to meet Arnold Schwarzenegger. The governor of California was campaigning for re-election, and John Browne, the chief executive of BP, had arranged a climate change conference for billionaires in a specially constructed compound in the port of Long Beach. Among those assembled were the chief executives of DuPont, Timberland, Goldman Sachs, Swiss Re and American Electric Power, along with Rupert Murdoch’s son James – whom he had met a week earlier at the annual News International gathering at Pebble Beach – and two hippy billionaires: Sergey Brin, the founder of Google, and Richard Branson. An organiser of the reception calculated that those gathered around the table managed companies earning half a trillion dollars a year and employing over 300,000 people.
Thanks to the American government’s subsidies, the production of renewable fuels had become a profitable business, one that was promoted by Bill and Hillary Clinton, with Schwarzenegger’s political support; even Branson had personally invested about $300 million in factories. In Blair’s opinion, all these billionaires were worth cultivating. ‘We’re going to a baseball match,’ Schwarzenegger told him at the end of the reception. To the guests who remained, Blair was America’s heroic ally deserving of indefinite support.
One week later, the Blairs flew to the West Indies for their summer holidays. The following day, Britain’s airports were reduced to chaos. Mass arrests had prevented a plot by Islamic terrorists to use liquid-based bombs to blow up seven planes flying to North America. Thousands of Britons suffered the ruins of their holidays while watching TV pictures of the Blairs in the Caribbean. On
ce again, critics drew a link between the terrorists and Britain’s invasion of Iraq. Resentment was inevitable. The misadventure in Afghanistan was not mentioned by the media or the government. As the first coffins were driven from an RAF base through the ranks of retired soldiers lining the high street in Wootton Bassett before the private funerals, the summer was the perfect opportunity for a rigorous reassessment of Britain’s commitment to the war.
Any one of five men – Blair, Des Browne, Jock Stirrup, Nicholas Houghton or Bill Jeffrey – was empowered to initiate the discussion. Orthodox and loyal, both Stirrup and Houghton lacked the experience. On his own account, Stirrup assumed that every plan collapsed on the first day. He could not have started a major review on his own; he would have needed support from Jeffrey. Previous permanent secretaries in the ministry, like Frank Cooper and Michael Quinlan, had possessed the intellectual power and bruising personality single-handedly to question Britain’s defence policies. Jeffrey’s invisibility broke the mould. ‘Bill opted out,’ observed one minister. ‘He stayed in his office and led the rest of the ministry’s officials to opt out of decisions. All they did was type up orders.’
‘Why are you not participating?’ Matt Cavanagh, a political adviser in Downing Street, asked a senior civil servant in the MoD.
‘From Blair downwards’, replied the official, ‘you’ve all poured shit on us, so why should we?’
Browne later admitted, ‘I managed circumstances instead of thinking. I was constantly reacting to an overwhelming daily routine. I had no reason to doubt Stirrup.’ On reflection, he identified his weakness: ‘I was getting no help from No. 10.’
Nigel Sheinwald, the ministry’s link to Downing Street, was regarded by his critics as inconsistent. To them, he blew hot and cold, and gave Whitehall no sense of direction. The responsibility for the policy vacuum led back to Blair, who could have challenged the military in the same manner as he questioned the ‘forces of conservatism’ across Whitehall. The idea never surfaced.
