This doesn’t sound right.
From the very start, commanders on the ground were concerned about the timing of the operation. Late August marks the culmination of Afghanistan’s fighting season, a period when the maximum number of insurgents are guaranteed to be in Helmand province. Moreover, the British 16 Air Assault Brigade was in the final few weeks of its tour, a time when troops are traditionally preparing to rotate out of the country and see their replacement units safely installed, rather than embarking on new, complicated, risk-laden operations.
Speaking to The Times in Kabul in July, officials involved in planning the operation said that British commanders preferred instead to wait until next spring’s poppy harvest, a guaranteed point of low ebb in the Taleban’s activities, to launch the convoy.
In spite of these misgivings, Nato came under pressure from Washington to secure visible progress in the Kajaki hydroelectric project to safeguard future funding lines before the US presidential elections
Really? The Brits rotate out their units during the heaviest part of the fighting season? The U.S. pushed a risky operation on the Brits to influence the election? I care less about the censorship angle (it is appropriate to delay coverage of an event to prevent leaking critical information from getting soldiers killed), but if it turns out that the Bush administration really did pressure the British to install the new generator at Kajaki for the elections here, that’s pretty appalling.
This post was written by...
Joshua Foust – author of 1801 posts on Registan.net.
Joshua Foust is a Fellow at the American Security Project and the author of Afghanistan Journal: Selections from Registan.net. His research focuses primarily on Central and South Asia. Joshua is a correspondent for The Atlantic and a columnist for PBS Need to Know. Joshua appears regularly on the BBC World News, Aljazeera, and international public radio. Joshua is also a regular contributor to Foreign Policy’s AfPak Channel, and his writing has appeared in the New York Times, Reuters, and the Christian Science Monitor. Follow him on twitter: @joshuafoust
For information on reproducing this article, see our Terms of Use
{ 2 comments }
It is also mentioned the Taliban tax the power output anyway…
It’s worth checking out an echange in the guardian (UK) on the same subject. An editorial (‘Power Projection’) published on September 4 described the operation as ‘a glorious but dangerous folly’, noting the poor timing for the same reasons as you above and also the pressure from Washington.
Commendably, the graun has allowed the defense secretary Des Browne to put the government’s case (‘Development work in Afghanistan cannot wait for complete security’). Browne writes:
‘We cannot afford to wait for complete security to be established before development begins. The need to combine the two is one of the challenges of Afghanistan, which both we and NGOs are grappling with to support the Afghan government.’
And:
‘Finally, you are too cynical about American motives. USAid is currently pouring hundreds of millions of pounds of aid into southern Afghanistan each year, on a wide range of projects including not just the Kajaki dam but also, for example, the agricultural park in Lashkar Gah, which could help restart Afghanistan’s agricultural export industry. Helping this desperately poor country recover from decades of war and conflict will demand a great deal of money and effort from the whole international community, and the generosity of the American people, Congress and government should not be so lightly dismissed.’
There are all sorts of important questions raised by this operation – not least the fundamental one of: is it worth it? – but if we are going to be cynical about the motives then it must be remembered that the government of Gordon Brown is currently in a state of siege (economic slowdown, thrashed at recent by-elections, party infighting, leadership challenges etc etc) and just as much in need of good news as the GOP. If there is a political angle, then London is probably as much to blame as Washington