Originally Posted by rafloo
Having recently recovered from a period of schooling at Shrivenham... I can now tell you that the Armed Forces no longer have a "Lessons Learnt" process after Operations or Exercises. We now have a "Lessons identified" The change came about a couple of years ago as it seemed that we never "Learnt" from lessons anyway so why bother with the process.
However, It is right and correct that we are in Afghanistan trying to help bring law and order to that country. The work that the British Armed Forces are doing is looked upon and admired by many countries. The work that has been completed by 216 Signals has been paramount to achieving succes for the ANA. Remember that the UK is commited to helping Afghanistan secure democracy. If the Armed Forces are not going to help them then who should we send....The Fire Service maybe?
How about we just leave them to it? After all its THEIR country, not ours, with very few British interests over there. So why shold we risk spilling British blood for a complete S**thole? I tell you why we are likely to fail in Afghanistan.
1) We are a warfighting force, not a low intensity conflict world police force. That is the fault of the SDR, and although we would like to think that the SDR was a golden bullet to solving all the worlds woes, it AINT. The last time we had a world police force, we had an empire.that is the whole idea behind NEC and scaling back our forces. NEC gives us absolutely NO advantage over this assymetric threat, just look what has happened to the yanks. We are affectively fighting a war of attrition. Look at how the yanks consider sucess. Body count. Didnt they teach you at Shriv about how considering body count as a measure of sucess? whell te last time they tried it was Vietnam. We have no easily identifiable centre of gravity to fight against to bring this one to a swift conclusion, what are we going after? The drugs? Tribal leaders? Who knows. I dont think anyone does. I think we have been foolishly placed in the desert by a political leadership that has us by the knackers who completely misunderstands the way we work.
2) The Kabul region may of been one thing. However, we all know Khandahar and the other southern regions are a different kettle of fish. They are highly tribal, something that is ingrained in them since the beginning of time, so how exactly are we going to get them to tag along to our neo western style democracy, teach them to be "nice taliban" pay your VAT on your heroin trade? Lunacy. We should just leave them to it.