Afghanistan: War without End?

This programme contains some strong language and scenes which some viewers may find upsetting.

Some time after sunset, a group of men gathered together in Kandahar

to savour the moment they made history.

Televisions had been banned in Afghanistan,

but these men were honoured guests.

Osama Bin Laden and his al-Qaeda faithful were there to watch

the horror of 9/11 unfold.

What al-Qaeda call "The Manhattan Raid".

So the West invaded Afghanistan.

There was a belief it could be done quickly, with a very light footprint,

we could be in and we could be out again,

and we ended up doing neither one thing nor the other.

Instead 47 nations - America and Britain especially -

have been sucked ever deeper into a quagmire.

I used to ask myself every time I went to Afghanistan,

"What are we doing here?"

In the first of three programmes

marking ten years of war in Afghanistan, I've been examining

some of the key decisions that have shaped the conflict.

A conflict that's cost many thousands of lives,

including more than 370 British servicemen and women.

With the right attention, the right strategy and the right resources,

the war would be over and most of our boys would be home,

but we didn't do it.

It's important to give people a clear idea

that there is an end to this.

So will the death of Osama Bin Laden, who started the Afghan war,

bring us any closer to an end?

Two years before 9/11, Afghanistan's UN envoy arrived in New York.

There he handed in his resignation.

I went to the Security Council and said,

"Look, I have done everything I know

"and it has got us nowhere.

"I haven't got anywhere, because you are not supporting me,

"you are not interested in Afghanistan.

"But you are wrong."

Afghanistan had become a pariah state.

The Taliban government had allowed al-Qaeda

to establish its base there.

From where Osama bin Laden declared a holy war on Jews and Christians.

The Taliban shared with al-Qaeda its medieval version of Islam.

The United Nations had been trying to persuade the Taliban

to kick out al-Qaeda.

Their envoy had a rare meeting with the Taliban leader, Mullah Omar,

a veteran of the war against the Russian invaders of the 1980s.

Very shy man, you know he had lost an eye and he was,

he was very much aware of that.

So he kept, you know, always playing with his hand like this.

Very, very soft spoken.

I told him, look, this group have an agenda that has nothing to do

with Afghanistan, and that will create a lot of problems for you.

He said, "Osama bin Laden, he's our guest."

In Afghanistan, Bin Laden was more than a guest.

As a wealthy Saudi, he helped bankroll the Taliban regime.

Mullah Omar refused to disown his friend and benefactor.

Lakhdar Brahimi's mission had failed.

He warned the Security Council that by ignoring Afghanistan,

they were storing up trouble.

You are wrong to think that, you know, this is a small country,

far away country, that what happens there is irrelevant.

It will blow in our faces.

Holy shit!

The impact of 9/11 cannot be understated.

It was the deadliest attack

against America in its history.

With nearly 3,000 dead,

it was inevitable that America would strike back.

The people who knocked these buildings down

will hear all of us soon.

Prompting America to invade Afghanistan

was exactly what Osama bin Laden was hoping for on September 11th.

His son has told us,

in retrospect, my father's dream

was to get America to invade Afghanistan.

To me, it's just common sense,

obviously you just got to go get the guy.

America gave the Taliban every chance to avoid war.

All they had to do was hand over Bin Laden.

If Bin Laden's the guy we want,

send the assassination team out and get him.

There was a serious effort to persuade the Taliban

you do not want to go down with al-Qaeda.

If you'll hand these guys over,

our war isn't with you.

The Taliban response was that their ancient hospitality code

trumped all other considerations.

It was a no, that we're not going to separate ourselves

from traditional hospitality, welcoming of guests.

It's hard for us to understand that when you're dealing

with a man like Osama Bin Laden.

It happens, it happens like that.

Yes. The life of the guest is protected by the lives of the hosts.

Nearly four weeks after 9/11 America's patience ran out.

The President told his generals to unleash "Holy Hell".

On my orders, the United States military has begun strikes against

al-Qaeda terrorist training camps

and military installations of the Taliban regime in Afghanistan.

America was determined not to get bogged down in Afghanistan.

So there was no large ground invasion, no heavy armour.

Instead, America relied on CIA operatives, precision, speed,

just 1,800 troops, and buying up Afghan militias.

Its plan was "war-lite".

We sent in 20 or 30 CIA officers with several million dollars

in walking-around money

and bought the Northern Alliance over to our side.

The Northern Alliance was a coalition of warlords

which had once ruled much of Afghanistan.

They were a rag tag militia

now aligned to the world's most sophisticated fighting force.

In the 1990s, the Northern Alliance had lost to the Taliban

in a civil war costing tens of thousands of lives.

The tables were now turning.

On 13th November 2001, just five weeks after the invasion,

the Northern Alliance captured the capital Kabul.

It looked like the war was over.

That's not what Osama bin Laden thought was going to happen,

he thought it would be a long, protracted, guerrilla struggle.

He was surprised.

The celebrations in Kabul

concealed a mass of underlying tribal and sectarian tensions.

The Northern Alliance represented ethnic groups in the North.

The Taliban were drawn from the majority Pashtun of the South.

To avoid another inter-ethnic civil war, Afghanistan

needed a leader acceptable to both.

That leader was a Pashtun who teamed up with US Special Forces

at a secret air base near the Pakistan border.

His name was Hamid Karzai.

In 2001 my mission was to link up with Hamid Karzai.

I liked him immediately.

I can't say I've worked with many Afghan warlords before,

so maybe they're all equally personable.

But Karzai was a very modest man. Very polite.

Captain Amerine's mission was to help Karzai

raise an army against the Taliban.

The Taliban had retreated south

and were regrouping for a last stand in their spiritual home in Kandahar.

During a chaotic day of fighting, Karzai and Amerine learnt

that hundreds of Taliban fighters were closing in on them.

Basically as all hell was breaking loose and we were waiting

for the Taliban to overrun our location and kill everybody,

Karzai was standing out there in the street calmly directing people

and trying to gather up guerrillas to fight with us.

He was definitely cool under pressure.

We received a phone call late at night.

Everybody was asleep except me and Karzai.

After he hung up, it was like, you know, "Who was that?"

And he says to me, "Oh, that was an intermediary for Mullah Omar."

And I kind of did a double take.

I'm like, "What did Mullah Omar want?"

The Taliban leader wanted to explore the terms of a surrender.

Provided the Taliban returned peacefully to their homes,

the war would be over.

At least, that's what the Taliban say Hamid Karzai promised Mullah Omar.

He promised to him that this is your country, to live in

your country peacefully with all your natural rights and the human rights.

But they were not allowed to live peacefully in this country.

Washington rejected a deal with the Taliban.

Their Afghan mission was "Kill or Capture"

and they made no distinction between the Taliban and al-Qaeda.

Get your BLEEPing head down.

-Do you think that was a mistake?

-I do.

Certainly below the level of Mullah Omar,

to have considered a political approach

which would have offered the Taliban

possibilities for them to participate in the political process,

provided that they would cut their ties with international terrorism.

I think history will judge that as a missed opportunity.

Because Washington wanted to get in and out of Afghanistan swiftly,

there were few US troops to chase the fleeing al-Qaeda and Taliban leaders.

The hunt for Osama bin Laden took special forces

to a network of caves close to the Pakistan border.

This top hill.

Very top up there. That's supposedly where Bin Laden's hanging out.

The Americans had deployed less than 100 troops

with which to seal all routes out of these vast mountains.

Bin Laden slipped away, as did the Taliban leaders.

We took our eye off the ball

and gave Osama bin Laden, Mullah Omar a remarkable second chance.

And in one of the most brilliant military comebacks of modern times,

the Taliban went from the ashes of defeat

to being on the outskirts of Kabul in a matter of less than a decade.

Any hope that the Afghan war would be brief

vanished when Bin Laden and Mullah Omar slipped across the border

into Pakistan's Pashtun tribal lands.

Greeting the fugitives were not only friends and family,

but also elements of Pakistan's military intelligence

sympathetic to al-Qaeda and who'd also helped the Taliban

win the Afghan civil war in the 1990s.

They wanted a government in Kabul

that was under their influence and control.

And which was not under the influence of India.

They'd given them their first batch of serious weaponry,

ammunition, money.

There were Pakistani military officers

who were working and serving with the Taliban.

After 9/11, Pakistan's President, Pervez Musharraf,

bowed to American pressure

and promised to cut his government's ties to the Taliban.

The Bush administration was ecstatic

when Musharraf agreed to switch sides, after September 11th.

President Bush is a man who believes very strongly

in personal relationships

and he believed that he and General Musharraf

had developed a strong bond between them.

Many al-Qaeda members were arrested.

Not so the Taliban high command.

Mullah Omar and his fellow fugitive leaders

were reported to be living openly in the border city of Quetta.

Right on the outskirts of Quetta

there is the biggest refugee camp, about 100,000 people.

Now, this is the centre of everything

-and control...

-The centre of the Taliban?

-Yes, centre of any terrorist coming and going.

-Any jihadi group?

Yeah, anyone could come there and go.

Can you differentiate between a Taliban or a refugee?

No, sir, you cannot.

They have the same beards, carrying weapons, so it's the same people.

In Kabul, the Afghan Intelligence Service did not accept

there was an innocent explanation to Mullah Omar's presence.

From the outset, there was deep distrust of Pakistan's motives.

The Taliban leadership were hibernating in Pakistan.

They were not defeated or killed.

The Americans received verbal assurances from President Musharraf

that Pakistan will cooperate.

But they kept the Taliban intact. I mean the leadership of the Taliban.

I learnt over time in dealing with President Musharraf

that he would literally tell me truth.

I had an occasion where I asked him to dismantle a certain terrorist camp

that was directed towards Kashmir.

And after we wrangled a bit about it, he agreed.

And he did? He dismantled it?

He did dismantle it.

However, he "re-mantled" it a couple of kilometres away.

Now, when I went back to him,

I said "Now, this time, I need you to dismantle this terrorist camp.

"So let's say you have 12 in total, tomorrow there'll be 11 and every day after this there'll be 11."

"OK, I agree". And he did it.

Terrorists who once occupied Afghanistan

now occupy cells in Guantanamo Bay.

Four months after 9/11, there was a feeling in Washington

of mission accomplished.

Liberated from the austerity of the Taliban regime,

Afghans celebrated the birth of new freedoms.

A free press, a role for women

and eventually the first democratically elected head of state.

But the Americans made it clear from the start

that they weren't there to rebuild Afghanistan.

That was a job for Hamid Karzai's new government.

The US insisted that public safety

in Afghanistan should be a responsibility for the Afghans,

despite the fact

that at this point the country had no army and no police force.

The US Defence Secretary, Donald Rumsfeld,

said it would be a fool's errand

to get more involved in a tribal society as complex as Afghanistan.

Rumsfeld said US forces would use their influence to prevent outright fighting,

but that nobody would do peacekeeping or public security outside of Kabul.

Wouldn't get that in Colchester, would you?

Britain led the first group

of international forces to assist with the security of Kabul.

That left 80% of the country - more than twice the size of the UK - unsecured.

Who did Secretary Rumsfeld think then was going to keep

law and order if it wasn't going to be a stabilisation force?

-My view is, he did not care.

-How did he imagine

that stability was going to arise out of a....

I don't think, I don't think he cared about stability. He was intent, give him his credit,

on dismantling and destroying Al-Qaeda.

I don't think he was intent at all on what the Afghan of the future,

the Afghanistan of the future would look like.

It was right not to put ourselves in the business of trying to govern

a foreign country for which we had neither the cultural

nor the linguistic capacity to do it

and which would have dragged us into Afghan quarrels,

and pretty soon we would be the problem, not as an occupying power, but it's beyond our competence.

On the other hand, I think we should have done more to build up

-the Afghan capability to provide for their own security.

-Security forces.

If there's one thing I would wish we had done, it was to use the time when things were relatively quiet.

Karzai had no militia of his own.

His interim government brokered by the UN included warlords -

the same people whose violence and corruption

had given rise to the Taliban.

While they occupied cabinet seats in Kabul,

their militias filled the power vacuum outside.

People forget that he didn't create this administration, we did. The international community,

including the United Nations,

including myself, we formed this government.

We told him "please come to Kabul and lead this group".

We allied ourselves with former warlords.

Our objective was to destroy Al-Qaeda.

And we very much then created and empowered

a group of political actors not accountable and also people who,

as they grew in power, actually caused more instability.

In all this, the Taliban, who just months earlier had been

the government of Afghanistan, seemed to have just vanished.

I was one of the people who was saying "look, where are the Taliban?

"They're, you know, these people controlled 90% of the country a few weeks ago."

-And what was the response?

-The response was

"they've been defeated, it's gone, finished, they'll never come back."

Within six months of the invasion, Britain and America began to avert

their gaze from Afghanistan, pre-occupied by another matter.

Preparations for the war in Iraq.

The biggest single mistake? Just one?

Probably Iraq.

We didn't know then, you know, the most important player in Afghanistan,

the Americans, was absent-minded from day one,

was looking somewhere else.

The world was now focused almost exclusively on Iraq, while Taliban

gunmen started to cross the porous border into southern Afghanistan.

It was March 2003, just 18 months after the invasion.

The Taliban were back.

The Taliban went into Kandahar

and they were looking for targets and there were very few targets,

there were just Afghans living there, there were no foreign troops.

There were a few Afghan government representatives who really weren't

worth killing as far as the Taliban were concerned in those early days.

So the Taliban just went further and further

into Afghanistan, looking for targets.

'The UN in Afghanistan has ordered staff not to travel by road

'in the area where an international Red Cross worker was murdered last Thursday.'

'He was ordered out of his car by a group of armed men and then shot.'

You had American generals sending off cables, saying,

you know, "something is happening", and sending cables even to Rumsfeld.

And I think Rumsfeld ignored them.

The White House ignored them.

We clearly have moved from major combat activity to a period

of stability and stabilisation and reconstruction and...activities.

It was the forgotten war of 2002 to 2005.

The Taliban were reorganising. They were licking their wounds

and figuring out what to do next.

There wasn't a heavy British or coalition loss, and the country seemed to be relatively stable.

It wasn't a war on the front pages.

Yet the Afghan war was far from over.

In fact, it was about to reignite.

By 2005, NATO was in control and did what Washington had so opposed at the start.

They increased troop numbers and inched towards nation-building.

NATO wanted to extend the authority of the Afghan President, Hamid Karzai, beyond Kabul.

Britain took on Helmand province.

It was suggested that I go down to this place called Lashkar Gah.

And everybody said, "it's not entirely safe, but you'll be OK."

Boarding an old Russian helicopter, Britain's Foreign Office minister

decided to take a look for himself at Lashkar Gah, capital of Helmand province.

And as we came into Lashkar Gah,

I saw down below me this Beau Geste fort.

The commander was a guy called Colonel Hogberg.

I said, "what's it like here?"

And he said, "well, sir, it ain't the end of the earth, but you can see it from here!"

He said you could be wandering into a fight between two tribes

or sub-tribes or villages over water rights.

You could run into a drugs convoy.

And he pointed out to me that some of these drugs columns

actually had anti-aircraft missiles on them.

You could be running into Taliban,

or just a village that didn't like strangers.

He said "we don't hang around, because you never know who's shooting at you."

And this really struck me at the time

as being an observation that we ought to take a bit of notice of.

Helmand had little infrastructure,

few public services, no functioning security, economy or justice system.

The Blair government's vision for Helmand, however, did not lack for ambition.

The original vision was that Karzai would be able to create

a growing and sustainable peace,

and this would create a space in which governance would spread.

And some people likened this to creating Belgium in a couple of years.

A team of experts was dispatched to Helmand by Whitehall in late 2005.

Their task was to plan the delivery of this vision,

with troops providing protection and expected home in just three years.

It was a task of biblical proportions.

It was a medieval province,

vast open spaces. There was no infrastructure.

I remember flying across the province's only road.

Corruption ran from top to bottom.

So when one looked at all of this,

one saw a rudderless expanse of not much,

where the principal economy was drugs.

Some estimates said that 80%

of the population were illiterate, and that extended

to many key functions in government, including the Director of Education,

who could not read or write.

We didn't know how many police stations there were. The chief of police wasn't sure either.

There were sporadic outbursts of violence

because of the drug trafficking.

And when I asked the American officer

what background research I should do to understand Helmand better,

he said I should watch The Sopranos.

On their return home for Christmas, the planners met up with their Whitehall masters.

The planners told them their vision for Helmand was unrealistic.

The overwhelming impression I had of that afternoon was of the clock ticking.

The conclusion that this was not achievable in three years

was not an acceptable conclusion.

There was an unforgiving timeline,

and there was no time for discussion.

The planners were told to get on with it.

But they weren't the only ones asking awkward questions.

The Foreign Office minister wrote to the Ministry of Defence.

We're planning to go down there with 3,300 troops.

We had 30,000 in Northern Ireland.

Are we sure that we're going to be able to do something about this?

And have we got enough helicopters, have we got enough water, can we, you know, can we do all of this?

The generals said yes, yes, and yes.

The military momentum was unstoppable.

Britain was going to Helmand, come what may.

16 Air Assault was the brigade chosen to provide protection for the reconstruction mission.

They did anticipate some fighting.

There was an awful lot of grenade launcher

practice going on down the road.

And there wasn't much of a queue for the development brief.

There were a lot of stripped down vehicles going past.

This was, I think, every soldier's dream, Afghanistan.

Hugely historically resonant, extraordinary country, classic soldiering.

Perhaps, as a former soldier myself, I understand that.

My sense was that they had come with a larger place in the plan

for malleting the Taliban.

No, I dispute that. I mean, I'd been in the military for two dozen years.

I'd been on a lot of operations.

I knew the consequences of the wrong use of force.

I'd been in Afghanistan twice before.

The force deployed gave a maximum of only 800 fighting soldiers.

So the reconstruction mission was limited

to the central area of Helmand around the capital, Lashkar Gah.

'Out on patrol in Helmand, the British troops have arrived

'and are introducing themselves to their neighbours.'

I'm good, fine. How are you?

Does he understand why the British soldiers are in Lashkar Gah?

TRANSLATOR: No, sir. He said no.

From the moment troops arrived, Helmand's Afghan governor warned that his authority was being

undermined by lawless gunmen in the north.

He urged the army to deal with them.

His argument was very much saying,

"I need you to make sure that the flag of Afghanistan flies

"over all of the district centres".

Did you resist that to begin with or not?

We did, we made it very clear that we were going to be extremely limited

in our capability to do other operations.

The generals in London judged that deploying north was unsustainable.

But the Helmand Governor persevered and was supported

by the British embassy in Kabul and the Secret Intelligence Service.

By late May, the generals relented.

The order was given to defend positions up to 70 miles from the reconstruction area.

By late June, the army was thinly spread across three new flashpoints

and about to stretch to yet a fourth - the town of Sangin.

There were no angels in Sangin.

There were two warring drug cartels, effectively, in Sangin.

And here we were, about to deploy British troops

in between those two drugs cartels.

I did everything I possibly could to engage anyone who had decision-making authority to say "this is madness.

-"This cannot be happening."

-But it was.

The arrival of the troops stirred up a hornets' nest.

I was furious watching that type of decision-making

that ended up...uprooting the entire plan that we'd devised.

The summer of 2006 saw the British army

engaged in some of its fiercest fighting in half a century.

-How does this compare to Iraq?

-Oh, it's a lot worse. That was a lot better.

We didn't see any action in Iraq.

Out here, every day you can guarantee small arms fire incoming.

Pinned down in a series of Alamos across the north of Helmand,

British soldiers became magnets for attacks from the Taliban,

drug gangs and locals just angry at the presence of foreigners.

A lot of the people we were killing were effectively farmers who'd had

-AK-47s put in their hands by the Taliban leadership.

-Part-time Talibs.

Part-time Talibs, part-time Talibs and not very well trained ones.

We killed huge numbers of them.

I don't think that was to our liking at all. We were conscious

that with everyone we killed, we were probably actually fuelling the insurgency.

The general responsible for overseeing day to day operations

in Helmand was Sir Peter Wall, now head of the British Army.

The mission changed dramatically.

-No, I don't think the mission did change.

-Really?

-No.

Change in what way?

Do you mean the aim changed or the mode of delivery changed?

Well, the original mission was a sort of

"hearts and minds, help bring governance" mission

for this limited area in the centre of Helmand.

And within a matter of weeks, 16 Air Assault were fighting for their lives in a series of Alamos

and no governance, none at all taking place.

Had we not gone north, what would have happened, in your estimation?

That's not for me to say.

-You were in charge of operational decision.

-Yeah.

So what's your estimation?

Afghan governance in Helmand would have collapsed.

You'd have seen the Taliban breaking out, and you'd have had your Alamos in different parts of Helmand.

Fuck me!

Where have you seen the Taliban? Where?

The original mission was to win hearts and minds.

You would accept, I guess, that if only because we needed to protect our soldiers,

that quite a lot of Afghan hearts were lost in the process?

Undoubtedly. Yeah, undoubtedly. I accept that.

This guy is ID-ing these here and saying they're Taliban.

Two men?

Taliban, yeah?

How much of your original plan did you manage to implement?

Not really very much!

After the first 18 months of hard fighting,

understanding the challenges the Taliban posed,

our expectations changed from Belgium in two years

to Bangladesh in 30.

The scale of the challenges really became apparent.

Jesus! Stay still.

Stay fucking still.

Jack, we've got to get him out now!

In the first five years of the Afghan conflict, two British soldiers had been killed in action.

In 2006 alone, that rose to 39.

A slow drumbeat of death began to roll.

Ministers said the sacrifice was about keeping the streets of Britain

safe by denying Al-Qaeda a safe haven in Afghanistan.

Yet a mission that had been intended to help stabilise Afghanistan

seemed to have made it less stable.

'There's no doubt that the Taliban are growing in confidence and they're focusing their attention on Kabul.'

'Another bomb blast on the streets of Kabul.

'This is becoming increasingly familiar.'

By the start of 2007, violence had spread across much of the country,

with a sevenfold increase in suicide bombings.

Many were being planned and executed from Pakistan.

The then US commander was General Karl Eikenberry.

He had regular meetings with the Afghan President, Hamid Karzai.

'Many of my conversations with him were conversations'

of maybe 60 minutes and 58 minutes would be spent on Pakistan.

And my view was, initially,

'he seems to be obsessing on this subject, but I have to tell you,'

as I look back on it, he was correct, it was a very serious problem.

I think around that time Pakistan came to the conclusion

maybe the coalition was going to be short of breath.

I believe very strongly that if the coalition

was not going to prevail in Afghanistan then Pakistan

wanted to make sure that they had some seat at the table.

A seat for Pakistan by using the Taliban

to gain influence inside Afghanistan.

The CIA concluded that America's closest ally in the region could no longer be trusted.

Pakistan's intelligence service, the ISI, was playing a double game.

Do you want to know where the headquarters of the Afghan Taliban is?

Find the headquarters of the ISI, they are in the same building.

We've even had reports of Pakistani officers

being killed inside Afghanistan,

fighting with the Afghan Taliban as expert advisors to them.

The Afghans also insist that Pakistan intelligence was protecting the Taliban leader, Mullah Omar.

-They know where he is?

-Of course.

He is in their safe house.

Did they ever tell you where he was when you were...?

I told them where he was and they got panicked.

Not once, not twice - time and again.

Why did you not hand over Mullah Omar to the Americans?

He never came to Pakistan.

-He did!

-That is the normal belief.

He came to Pakistan at the end of 2002.

No, I don't think so, ever.

You don't think he is even there today?

No, I don't think. He'll be mad if he's in Pakistan.

-Where do you think he is?

-He'll be in his own area.

-In Afghanistan?

-Yes.

You think Mullah Omar is in Afghanistan?

-Yes, indeed.

-You must be the only person who does?

Well, I'm the only person? No.

The people who don't believe that are probably West and United States.

I don't think anyone else believes that he is in Pakistan.

By the end of 2008, many of the Bush administration's major goals

for Afghanistan were in reverse.

The 'Lite' military footprint was heavier.

53,000 NATO troops - mostly American - and rising.

Washington, once determined to avoid nation-building,

was now spending many billions.

And Pakistan, once their friend, was betraying them.

America was getting sucked in deeper and deeper and there seemed no way out.

CROWD CHEERS

-Thank you.

-All eyes turned to a new president for fresh thinking.

Thank you so much, everybody, thank you very much.

Thank you, everybody.

We meet at one of those defining moments,

a moment when our nation is at war.

'We left him a very poor hand of cards,'

with very few choices. When Mr Obama came aboard,

he was immediately faced with, "Be careful, don't lose Afghanistan."

The President asked me to fly with him to California in early March 2009.

And after reading my report, we spent the better part of a couple of hours going through it.

President Obama had asked Bruce Riedel

to write a no-holds-barred report on the Afghan crisis,

and Riedel did not pull his punches.

Defeat is what we were staring in the eye two years ago, catastrophic defeat in Afghanistan.

With the Taliban taking over the southern half of the country

and maybe being able to march on Kabul at some point in the future

and the NATO Alliance fragmenting and falling apart.

The President ordered his staff to go back to basics.

What exactly were America's goals,

and how best to achieve them?

A gruelling policy review ensued.

It would take eight long months.

In settings somewhat humbler than Air Force One,

an equally bleak picture had been briefed to the British Prime Minister.

I was on my way home for the weekend and I'd got to Cardiff station

and just got on the train that goes up the valley, and it was packed out.

Suddenly the Prime Minister was on the phone, and you can't not take a call from the Prime Minister!

Gordon Brown wanted Kim Howells' assessment of the Afghan government led by Hamid Karzai.

Seven years earlier Karzai had been seen as Afghanistan's saviour.

I told him that we would find it increasingly difficult

trying to argue the case for continued death

and the maiming of our young people in Afghanistan

when they were fighting to prop up a regime that was basically...

up to its eyeballs in corruption.

These mansions had sprung up in a part of Kabul

exclusively reserved for Afghanistan's military and political elite.

Ordinary Afghans could only wonder how such luxuries

could be afforded on a government wage.

In early 2009, one of the US senators overseeing

America's multi-billion-dollar investment in Afghanistan

confronted Karzai in the Presidential Palace.

The corruption in the country is rampant,

very frustrating to go there year in and year out and say

"When is somebody going to jail in Afghanistan for ripping off the Afghan people?

"When is somebody connected to the highest narcotics dealer ever going to go to jail in this country?"

-You said this to President Karzai?

-Absolutely, just like I'm saying it.

-At the dinner table?

-Yes.

"How much longer are the Afghan people going to have to wait

"and the world going to have to wait till you see things change here?"

This is Afghan MP, Dr Basher Dost,

famous for giving most of his salary to the poor.

In 2004, he resigned as Karzai's planning minister

in protest at the epic scale of corruption.

Karzai offered to let Bashar Dost head a new anti-corruption commission.

He agreed, but only if he could investigate Karzai's cabinet.

What was his response?

So you left the government?

In August 2009, Karzai stood for re-election.

-NEWSREADER:

-Voting is underway in Afghanistan's presidential election.

Corruption, fraud, apathy and the threat of attacks from the Taliban...

Allegations of vote rigging and fraud have been ringing across the cities, valleys and plains of Afghanistan.

The presidential election was wreathed in corruption.

Ballot boxes were stuffed with false papers.

The campaigns of both frontrunners were implicated.

Karzai won a second term in office,

but for the West it meant five more years with a partner who'd become a liability

and whose state of mind was also ringing alarm bells.

'President Karzai said to me several times'

that he suspected the British Army was involved in

the drugs trade in Helmand, otherwise we could have ended it.

He was sure that if we really wanted to, we could defeat the Taliban in Helmand

and we were choosing to keep the fighting going in order to give us an excuse to be there.

I mean, there is an extraordinary paranoia.

Afghanistan was beginning to look like just another tin-pot dictatorship.

In America, on 1st December 2009, the President announced the results of his long-awaited Afghan review.

I want to speak to you tonight about our effort in Afghanistan

and the strategy my administration will pursue to bring this war to a successful conclusion.

After years of drift,

America SEEMED to set its compass.

It was getting out of Afghanistan.

But not before having one last crack at the Taliban.

If I did not think that the security of the United States

and the safety of the American people were at stake in Afghanistan,

I would gladly order every single one of our troops home tomorrow.

To reverse the Taliban's momentum,

the generals told the President there'd need to be a military surge.

The President sent another 30,000 troops to war.

This has taken the total number of troops in Afghanistan to 142,000.

What you do today, you will have to live with that shit for the next 10, 20, 30-plus years.

This president decided that once in, he was in all the way

and that he needed to give our commanders in Afghanistan

the troops they felt necessary in order to turn the situation around.

For the first time

we had, if you like, the end state quantified in military terms.

Up until then we had just been increasing bit by bit

with never any clue of when enough was going to be enough.

The Americans decided that to secure Helmand, 30,000 troops were needed.

The most Britain could supply was 10,000.

If the Americans hadn't gone into Helmand,

there would have been a strategic defeat for the British Army.

Well, there would have been an inability to get our strategic objectives secured,

because the force levels required were beyond us.

That's not a strategic defeat for the British Army.

It's a strategic defeat for NATO,

but the British Army would have done its job magnificently.

The purpose of the surge is to clear ground held by the Taliban.

Smoking!

GUN FIRE

Yeah, bitch!

Oh, yeah, baby!

I fucking love you. Do it right.

-Check?

-MEN SHOUT IN RESPONSE

The Americans want to hand over the whole of Afghanistan to Afghan security forces by 2015.

When the surge was announced, the British Foreign Secretary

and his special envoy thought this was wildly ambitious.

We asked a very senior Afghan minister

how long the Afghan authorities would stay in Helmand after we left.

And the Foreign Secretary, David Miliband, was expecting an answer -

three years, six years, you know, however long it took.

And the answer from this minister - very close to President Karzai, knows Helmand very well -

his answer with a broad grin was, "24 hours, Foreign Secretary, 24 hours."

The Americans say that since then,

there's been much progress from a 12 billion-a-year training programme.

Yet they are building an Afghan army and police force whose cost neither they nor the Afghans can sustain.

And corruption and drug-taking are still endemic, even while on guard duty.

Ultimately, as long as the Afghan government lacks legitimacy with the overwhelming majority,

its security forces may not be able to hold the Taliban at bay.

At the end of the day if you follow a counter insurgency strategy,

you must be true to its precepts.

And one of the principal precepts is, in a counter insurgency,

you're only as good as the government you represent and serve.

In this case it's the government of Afghanistan.

That is why the Americans say that US troops will only be withdrawn from combat by 2015

if the Afghans are capable by then of taking over.

Not so the British.

In May last year, Britain got a new leader.

Like the President, the Prime Minister says he too will withdraw combat forces by 2015.

I believe the country needs to know there is an end point to all of this.

From 2015, there will not be troops in anything like the numbers there are now

and crucially they will not be in a combat role.

Unlike the American President, however, the Prime Minister intends to withdraw from combat by 2015

whether or not Afghan forces can prevent al-Qaeda returning to Afghanistan

even though that's always been the justification for our soldiers dying there.

If the assessment at the end of 2014 is that

Afghanistan hasn't been hardened against the return of al-Qaeda,

might that deadline have to slip?

No, the deadline is a deadline and it won't slip.

We have paid a very, very large price in terms of the number of young men

and indeed some young women that we've lost in Afghanistan,

now over 360 people.

And I think if you're going to maintain public support and backing for what we're doing,

it's important to give people a clear idea that there is an end to this.

There are lots of domestic political reasons

why the Prime Minister has selected that option

and we've committed ourselves as the British Army to deliver against that timeline.

And whether or not it turns out to be an absolute timeline

or more conditions-based approach nearer the time, we shall find out.

So it's not an absolute commitment then

that we will get out of combat operations, irrespective of the conditions on the ground?

-It's certainly the intention.

-The intention, yeah, but things could change?

Well, things could always change.

I mean, things change weekly in politics and in strategic issues.

For some time, Britain's special representative to Afghanistan had been arguing

that the only way out was to start talking to the Taliban.

Last summer Sherard Cowper-Coles attended a summit of Afghan experts at Chequers hosted by David Cameron.

Stabilising Afghanistan isn't a question of pumping in more and more troops,

or training up a vast national army to garrison the country.

It's creating, arriving at a political settlement

and then using military force to underpin that settlement, but not to deliver it.

The simple conclusion that we came to is that

most insurgencies down history and around the world have ended in two ways -

one, with some military success, but secondly, with some political process and solution as well.

The new Prime Minister decided that it was time

to take political risks - to start talking to the Taliban.

Last February, Washington agreed - something they'd previously opposed.

The Americans say a Taliban team, including an aide to the leader Mullah Omar,

are now engaged in exploratory talks.

Eliminate any collateral damage.

Fire. Shoot again.

One more.

One, two, three, four, five, six, seven guys. Two guys running up the wadi.

But whilst American officials are talking to the Taliban,

American special forces are also seeking out and killing many individual Taliban commanders.

In a typical 90-day period special mission units

kill or capture some 360 targeted insurgent leaders.

The Americans say that only this relentless lethal pressure

will persuade the Taliban to negotiate seriously.

The Taliban say the only outcome will be yet more attacks directed at coalition forces.

On a moonless night last month, American special forces set course for Pakistan.

Their target - Osama Bin Laden, the man the Taliban leadership still revere

as the leader of the Islamic jihad against the infidel invaders.

GUNSHOTS

On nights like this one, we can say to those families who have lost loved ones to al-Qaeda's terror,

justice has been done...

-CROWD CHEERS

-USA! USA!

I couldn't be more proud.

It's been a long ten years.

The Americans may have removed Bin Laden from the scene, but what of his original objectives?

The objective of September 11th

was to goad the United States into invading Afghanistan.

Then they could destroy an American army in Afghanistan,

shatter our will at home

and lead the United States and our allies to get out of the Islamic world.

Bin Laden did provoke the longest war in America's history,

and the financial cost has become unsustainable, never mind the human toll.

You are going to say that we killed your women and your children

and that is not true.

So what about the coalition's war objectives?

They say they've dismantled al-Qaeda's base in Afghanistan,

but it's been re-mantled across the border in Pakistan.

We have not succeeded yet in

partnering the state of Afghanistan

to ensure that al-Qaeda cannot return here.

Ten years ago, we thought we could get in and out quickly.

Today, we're still struggling to build an Afghan government

that can stand on its own two feet...

GUNSHOTS AND EXPLOSIONS

..and now we're losing patience.

I think no-one really understood,

perhaps still no-one really does understand

the scale of the challenge we've taken on in Afghanistan.

We would never, in the 19th century, have created a colony,

run it for five or ten years, and then said, "It's over to you now."

But that's really what our so-called strategy in Afghanistan is.

If it's going to take 30 years to stabilise Afghanistan,

let the Afghans go through those 30 years of stabilisation,

because we will never do it.

We have not 30 years, but just three years to get it finally right.

The armies of the international coalition are all heading for the exits.

Next week Mark Urban tells the inside story

of the bloody five-year battle for Helmand with unique access

to the generals and frontline troops who have had to fight it.

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd

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