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UK NATIONAL STRATEGY AND HELMAND

The UK policy response to the 9/11 attacks was immediate and categorical: the ungoverned space of Afghanistan must be denied to Al-Qa’ida as a haven and prospective base for mounting future operations. This position gained formal and general expression with the publication in 2002 of the New Chapter addendum to the Strategic Defence Review of 1998. The New Chapter made clear that, in the British view, terrorism at home had to be addressed by forward defence in Central Asia or wherever the contingent threat emanated from. This view can be, and was latterly, criticised as supine conformity to US policy and an approach informed by the vacuous idea of a global war on terrorism: a war against a condition and therefore, by definition, unwinnable and with few pointers to the appropriate application of the instruments of national power. Nonetheless, the policy requirement at the outset was clear and the challenge then became to create a strategy to deliver it; or, alternatively stated, how to reconcile political ends with military (and other) means. The UK’s coincidence of strategic purpose with the US stemmed from a deep-rooted sense of security being indivisible in the face of a potent transnational threat. There was also recognition that Afghanistan had been left to stew in its own juice after the Soviet withdrawal indeed, positively neglected and the result had been civil war, Taliban government and Al-Qa’ida basing. NATO’s invocation of Article V of its founding treaty