UK Communication Strategies for Afghanistan, 2001–2014

Thomas W. Cawkwell

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317005643
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Technology & Engineering
• Subtopic: Military Science & Technology
• Index: Technology & Engineering

The war in Afghanistan came to an end in 2014 after nearly thirteen years of conflict. Throughout that period, British officials have described UK operations there in various conflicting and often contradictory ways; as a counter-terrorism mission, a stabilisation mission, and a counter-narcotics mission, respectively. This book investigates how the war was 'sold' to the British public and how Britain's 'transnational' foreign and defence policy impacted on the unfolding of UK strategy in Afghanistan and the way it was communicated. It argues that because the UK's foreign and defence policy is transnationally-oriented - meaning that it is foundationally aimed at maintaining alliance with the United States and the institutional coherence of NATO - UK strategy is contingent upon collective security and, crucially, is fundamentally concerned with the means of policy (maintaining alliances) over the ends (using alliances to effect change). Explaining the inalienability of collective security systems to national security is no easy task, however, and, when faced with the adversities of Afghanistan, the UK state has since 2008 instead opted to describe the significance of Afghanistan in narrow, nation-centric, counter-terrorist concerns in order to maintain public support for collective security operations there whilst, paradoxically, framing the conflict in a manner that avoids talking about the transnational structure and purpose of the mission. This kind of 'strategic' communication is increasingly becoming a focus of the UK state as it faces a transnational dilemma of maintaining its collective security bonds whilst facing a public increasingly sceptical of liberal interventionism.

Chapter 1
Strategy, Communication, and ‘Strategic Communication’

In the last weeks of 2014, Britain’s war in Afghanistan came to an end. Since the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, the world witnessed 13 years of intervention, making the conflict one of the longest in the modern histories of all of its participants. Alongside the United States and the United Kingdom, the conflict involved a coalition of 48 other states within and without the UN-mandated International Security Assistance Force (ISAF), which in turn ran alongside the US-led Operation Enduring Freedom (OEF) tasked with decimating or destroying international terrorist networks and stabilising the country. As the conflict wore on, strategies and operational approaches moved from narrow counter-terrorist missions to ‘population-centric’ counterinsurgency operations, and spread beyond the frontiers of Afghanistan into neighbouring Pakistan. The war proved costly for many of these contributors, with over 3,000 coalition deaths between them. For the UK, Afghanistan has resulted in 454 troop deaths and over 2,000 wounded in action and, according to one estimate by the Royal United Services Institute, came at a material cost of around £20 billion (Wright 2014, online). Statistics are scarce regarding the number of dead insurgents, but is thought to be in the tens of thousands (Dawi 2014, online). Similar figures must be considered likely in relation to Afghan and Pakistani civilians and security forces.

Given the magnitude of the intervention and the depth of British involvement, it is natural that questions about the efficacy of the mission became commonplace as the war concluded. What effect did intervention have, and to what extent was it successful? Of course, any answer to such questions must be prefaced by the simple fact that history is still being written on the fate of the country and its state, and whether the state will be able to maintain or expand its security writ over the country rests largely on its ability to consolidate its own authority and reach settlements with competing power bases in the country. Additionally, any answer regarding what was achieved in Afghanistan depends almost entirely upon how one understands the purpose of the mission and, from that, how one measures ‘success’. In the waning years of the conflict, political leaders of states involved in Afghanistan employed ‘narratives’ that claimed that the mission was successful, and did so by emphasising the baseline successes of preventing Afghan-centric international terrorism and the building up of the Afghan National Security Forces (ANSF) as a means of continuing such efforts in anticipation of ISAF’s departure at the end of 2014. Indeed, by this preferred metric, one may observe considerable achievements. At a minimal level, intervention in Afghanistan realised its immediate goals: first and foremost, al-Qaeda have been largely dismantled or at least pushed out of Afghanistan, and the ability of Islamist extremist groups to plan and/or carry out terrorist attacks from the country have been largely mitigated for the time being. Secondly, the Taliban were removed from power and, whatever the threat they pose to the current Afghan state, it is unlikely that they will ever recover (as currently constituted) the power they held over large parts of Afghanistan as they did prior to September 2001. This is so in no small part due to a third achievement of fostering the improvement of the capabilities of the ANSF, which ISAF trained and which took over responsibility for Afghan security in time for ISAF’s drawdown.

These accomplishments are somewhat muted, however, when one considers that the first two were achieved within months of the beginning of the intervention in October 2001. Indeed, the majority of the history of the international community’s involvement in the war in Afghanistan is a story of efforts not directly related to counter-terrorism. Rather, ISAF was primarily concerned with ‘stabilising’ the Afghan state and assisting it in securing and buttressing its authority over its territory. To present the ‘end-game’ of Afghanistan in purely security terms, as is now the wont of statesmen and women across the coalition, is to provide a highly revised and reductive account of the campaign but, crucially, also an instrumental one that to some extent justifies the costs of intervention. The problem with such narratives is that, in order to portray the Afghan mission as ultimately successful, they omit large parts of the history of the conflict. ISAF’s mission was far broader than the narrow national security retrospectives many officials now focus upon, so much so that the stabilisation mission in Afghanistan expanded over time to include commitments to practically every conceivable area of state jurisdiction, from the sustainability of its security forces to the development of a myriad of governance capabilities. Such efforts have, in effect, constituted ISAF’s strategy for Afghanistan, and on this basis there are significant grounds to question the claims of success made by Government officials.

Despite (or, as I will argue, reflective of) the revisionist narratives of today, delivering stabilising effects has been a fundamental strategic problem for the UK over the last decade, and is one that calls into question the viability of the operating model. Ultimately, Britain and ISAF’s strategies for Afghanistan were dependent on the ability of the Afghan state to resolve its own internal problems, leading to a general strategic dilemma regarding the suitability of stabilisation, specifically of relating the use of military force to achieve what was, in essence, a political objective. At the same time, there appear few options available to states in their efforts to prevent terrorist attacks other than stabilisation (Paris 2010: 340). However one assesses the merit of ISAF’s presence in Afghanistan, it should be clear that the strategic methodology by which it sought to facilitate the stabilisation of Afghanistan held significant flaws. For the UK in particular, experiences of Afghan stabilisation have precipitated a crisis of confidence in its ability to devise strategy to meet the demands of an increasingly unpredictable world. The difficulties Britain and its partners have faced in stabilising Afghanistan have manifested themselves in discursive terms – what state officials say – in a way that downplays much of the norm-based content of the stabilisation agenda. This work is about understanding this revisionism as a consequence of the difficulties of strategy in the contemporary era; specifically, how communication has been shaped by strategic dilemmas.

This introductory chapter provides context to this issue by inquiring how these problems of strategy came about. It argues that the root problem for the UK lies in the institutional and normative conditions in which stabilisation and state-building models have been inculcated; specifically, a divestment of strategy above the national level and a limiting of strategic possibilities to liberal normative options because of the way collective security mechanisms work. This has led to a conceptual blurring of ideas of interests and values and of ‘collective’ and ‘national’ which, I argue, has fundamentally affected British strategy in Afghanistan by confounding the terms of reference by which strategists do their work. A traditional, linear understanding of strategy begins at the identity and interests of an actor or set of actors and proceeds from this starting point to devise policies, from which strategies, operations and tactics are made. Under circumstances where the actors or interests are not easily divisible, strategy can become confused and unclear and, what is more, cannot be easily articulated. It is in this context that so-called ‘strategic communication’ (SC) institutional processes and practices have emerged as a discursive means of ‘plugging the gap’ in strategic thinking. It is this instrumental use of communications that makes it ostensibly strategic. In the chapters that follow, I will argue that SC can be understood as a response by the UK state to the problems of collective security strategy in Afghanistan typified by ‘transnational dilemmas’. I then apply this concept to the various policies pursued by the UK in Afghanistan.

The State of British Strategy

The UK has in recent years undergone a period of self-reflection and recrimination concerning its apparent lack of strategic capability. Criticism of Britain’s strategic acumen coincided with an expansion of UK activities in Afghanistan since 2006 and the emergence of subsequent operational shortcomings. Indeed, one may quite reasonably deduce that, given the centrality of Afghanistan to British defence interests over the last decade and a half, it is the war in Afghanistan that has served as the crucible for the British state’s realisation of its strategic limitations. This view is borne out by reference to chronological comparison of Britain’s struggles in Afghanistan with the prevalence of critical reports from within the UK’s political establishment regarding Government’s approach to the conflict, as well as with scholarly articles in recent years that have questioned the viability of the UK’s strategic posture (Strachan 2005, 2006, 2008). In February 2007, Field Marshal Sir Peter Inge voiced his concern that Britain had ‘lost the ability to think strategically’ (Betz and Cormack 2009: 320). This sentiment was echoed by then-Chief of the Defence Staff Jock Stirrup in December 2009, when he declared that Britain had ‘lost an institutionalised capacity for, and culture of, strategic thought’ and offered the advice that ‘[a]ll we do at the tactical and operational level needs to be rooted in good strategic soil, and therefore in our national interest’ (Stirrup 2009, online). In October 2010, the House of Commons Public Administration Select Committee released its review of Britain’s strategic capabilities, titled ‘Who Does UK Strategy?’, which opined that Britain has ‘simply fallen out of the habit’ of all things strategic (PASC 2010: 3). In that report, the Committee drew upon the testimony of Sir Robert Fry, who argued that Britain had

[fallen] out of the habit of Grand Strategy, and I think that is what happened to us in the second part of the 20th century. Also larger strategies that were extra-national—so NATO, the cold war – took over and really took the place of any Grand Strategy. (2010: 14)

Both Stirrup and Fry’s remarks contained within them an intimation that Britain’s difficulties with strategic thought were – at least in part – the result of the interests supporting them not being sufficiently ‘national’, seemingly as a consequence of a divestment of strategic responsibility from the national to the transnational level, and, in Fry’s case in particular, a concomitant hardwiring of collective security logic over and above any semblance of a distinctively ‘national’ strategy. Furthermore, for Fry the atrophying of British strategic autonomy is nothing new; rather, it has been a multi-generational process spanning at least the last half century and most of the history of NATO. This point raises an important question, however: if Britain has been operating under such logic for so long, why is it that this alleged divestment of strategic authority to the transnational level has only recently produced an awareness of a fundamental ‘loss of capacity’ for strategy? The institutional makeup of British defence policy is clearly important in deducing ‘who makes UK strategy’, but it does not provide one with an answer as to what animates the strategic process at the level of organising concepts.

Providing such an answer therefore requires an analysis of what is conceptually different about contemporary strategic circumstances in relation to those of the Cold War, which is of course the emphasis placed on combatting non-state terrorism as an international security issue of the highest order. Along these lines, the most enduring strategic dilemma for the UK in the twenty-first century has been determining the best response to international terrorism. For illustrative purposes, it is worth considering the UK’s responses to this question in terms of a rough binary between liberal and illiberal approaches. The first approach, in line with liberal peace theory, is to extrapolate that failed states breed terrorism, and that the problem of terrorism is foundationally the result of political and economic illiberalism (Doyle 1986; O’Neal et al. 1996). From this premise, it becomes incumbent to posit that the long-term solution to terrorism is political and economic reform (generally in the guise of liberalisation and democratisation), and therefore to develop policies and strategies that focus on underlying issues – that is, to treat terrorism as a symptom of a broader diagnosis of socio-economic illness stemming from weak governance and underdevelopment. The second approach to global security is combine comparatively straightforward counter-terrorist activity, typically consisting of air strikes and limited covert operations in conjunction with the development and maintenance of indigenous security apparatuses and forms of state governance (West 2011; Gentile 2011a, 2011b; King 2010a; McCrisken 2011). These positions typically give greater credence to the utility of military force than those of the stabilisation and human security schools. Articulations of this kind have grown in frequency amongst commentators and state officials in recent years, and similar sentiments can be observed in the revisionist explanations of politicians who increasingly framed the Afghan campaign in sparse counter-terrorist language. Indeed, this book will make the revised character of this approach quite clear, since the emergence of a more limited counter-terrorist retrospective for Afghanistan can be traced as taking place in conjunction with the gradual disappearance of liberal normative explanations.

Understanding these two perspectives in binary terms is useful because British strategy for Afghanistan (and the way in which strategy has been communicated) gradually but (so I will argue) decisively moved from the first approach to the second between 2001 and 2014. We may see this movement as an attempt by the British state to simultaneously extricate itself from less successful aspects of liberal state-building in Afghanistan and to maintain – and possibly strengthen – its domestic argument for staying in Afghanistan and, by consequence, staying true to its obligations to the collective security framework of NATO. The story of Afghanistan, simply put, is that British strategy – grounded as it is in collective security frameworks and bounded by liberal normative precepts – became confounded by the state’s attempts to meet the challenges of international terrorism by over-rationalisation of the means (stabilisation) by which to do so. This was so to the extent that the stabilisation of Afghanistan at points appeared to trump counter-terrorism aims, and did so because the collective security mechanism of NATO operates on the basis of a common denominator of liberal institutionalism. Stabilisation was, in this sense, strategically appealing to NATO members because it reflected their own assumptions about how their individual and collective power should be wielded. As both a leader and follower of institutional and normative principles, the UK has for much of the last two decades locked itself into a line of thinking that declares that the best way to respond to the security challenges states face in the contemporary era is through concerted action that places its faith in liberalisation and democratisation. More specifically, Britain relies on collective security actions coordinated around and constituted by liberal frameworks. What is significant about Britain’s defence posture is that it implies a divestment of autonomy to the transnational level and, therefore, a significant narrowing of strategic options that has extended only to those that accord with liberal principles.

Thus, the problematic of strategy expressed by Fry, Stirrup and others within the British establishment – that strategy must be grounded in national interests – is one made more complicated because British strategy appears to be driven by a mixture of collective security interests and liberal interventionist principles. The result is that terms like ‘national’ and ‘interests’ have lost much of their utility as foundational nomenclatural units of strategic theorising, as Britain’s adherence to strategic thinking within the purviews of collective mechanisms and liberal principles has progressively eroded ideas of the ‘national’ and ‘interest’ over the last two decades, to the point where they are understood by policymakers as indistinguishable from the collective security mechanisms and liberal principles through which British strategy is made. As such, a national interest is also a collective interest, and vice versa; what is a value is an interest, and vice versa; and so on. The terminology of strategy has lost its distinctiveness, and so thinking about strategy has become more challenging; and this has occurred because of the socialising aspects of collective security membership, which provides the UK with the means by which – and apparently only by which – its ‘national’ interests can be realised. Because British national interests – tied up as they are in the promotion of the rule of law and liberal norms – are difficult to separate from those of the international community, and because to set about separating those interests would be in many ways antithetical to Britain’s interests, they can be said to have become ‘transnationalised’ (Edmunds 2010). As such, it would appear that the options for reconstituting Britain’s interests as nationally-based are practically and conceptually limited. The blurring of values with interests and ‘national’ with ‘international’ indicates that Britain’s ‘interests are not defined well enough to impart a meaningful idea of strategy’ (Ritchie 2014: 88). This issue of definition is key: if one cannot easily define where ‘national’ interests end and ‘transnational’ interests begin, how can one hope to devise a distinctively ‘national’ strategy? If strategy exists beyond the level of the state, improving strategic capabilities at the level of the state will be a difficult task. Again, the issues informing British strategy are complex and multi-faceted. This work does not aim, nor is it designed, to provide an account for or a solution to all of these issues. Rather, it focuses on why strategy is so difficult (and difficult to articulate) for the UK and how strategy for Afghanistan, devised under conditions of collective security, has been communicated. More precisely, this work is interested in the historical development and performance of ‘strategic communication’ practices by the British state in relation to the war in Afghanistan and how these practices can be understood as consequences of the shaping effects of collective security on British defence policy.

Thesis and Structure

This work views the role of Afghan and ISAF/NATO politics as crucial in determining the British approach to explaining its strategy for the Afghan conflict. Britain’s difficulties in explaining its purpose in Afghanistan is intimately wound up in its role there within a collective security apparatus. As such, if communication about strategy is naturally dependent upon the substance of the strategy itself (its ‘explainability’), it is worth considering the difficulty in communicating the purpose of British involvement in Afghanistan as a consequence of a cognitive shift away from a traditional continuum of state activity of interests, policies, and strategies and toward a multi-national or inter-state continuum, wherein one may locate a significant divestment and blurring of ‘national interests’ to the transnational level. This in turn may be understood as being a result of an adherence to the internationalist assumptions implicit within the liberal norms that bind Western collective security mechanisms together. Anthony King has described this communicative difficulty in conceptual terms as a ‘transnational dilemma’ wherein mid-level states such as the United Kingdom have found it difficult to articulate to the British public the purpose of collective security missions like that in Afghanistan in collective security terms (2010b: 388). King encapsulates the dilemma thusly:

States are now increasingly interdependent and can increasingly defend themselves only by cooperating with other polities; individual security and defence is dependent upon the generation of collective security. Consequently, since the end of the Cold War, states have been driven to contribute to military expeditions which do not seem to be in the direct national interest but from which they cannot exempt themselves for fear of being excluded from access to critical shared security goods. (2010b: 388)

Directness of interest is pivotal in understanding the transnational dilemma. Collective security arrangements naturally militate against ‘direct’ effects, since interests and threats are (ideally) joint and several between all members. Indeed, this principle is enshrined in Article V of the NATO Charter, a point referenced by NATO in response to the 9/11 attacks. There is, therefore, an institutionally built-in predisposition within NATO to accepting the principle of indirectness; in a very real sense, it is its defining precept. Explaining collective security accurately requires some account of the inherent ‘indirectness’ of such frameworks, but to do so risks a level of abstraction perhaps unamenable to everyday political discourse. This is the quid pro quo of alliance membership described by King. The dilemma is a communicative one at root, and is one that confounds easy explanation. What Britain’s rhetorical response to the hardships of Afghanistan demonstrates is that the UK has largely sought to avoid this dilemma in both its liberal institutionalist (stabilisation-centric) and realist (counter-terrorist) articulations of its Afghan policy. In the first instance, it sought to claim that national interests were subsumed within and inseparable from collective interests. In the second instance, it argued that collective interests were subsumed within – but subordinate to – the national interest. Although, as we shall see, these two approaches are in many ways incompatible with one another, they do share a common feature of seeking to avoid at all cost the notion that collective and national interests can at times be quite separate. Even though a mutual and reciprocal acceptance of the principle of indirectness of interest is quite obviously a key element in the maintenance of any collective mechanism it is, in times of military hardship, paradoxically also a truth that apparently (for the UK, at least) must never be spoken, lest the tenuous nature of inter-state diplomacy be revealed and the strategic calculus of collective action (that is, the sharing of costs and benefits) therein exposed to question.

Avoidance of articulating the difference between two sets of interest – ‘national’ and ‘collective’ – should be understood more generally as an aversion on the part of Governments to revealing the relatively frail ties that bind states together within collective security mechanisms to the prevarications of public opinion. This is so particularly during periods where the activities pursued by such mechanisms do not appear to be providing sufficient collective goods to its constituent members, or where those goods appear to be outweighed or otherwise mitigated by the associated costs. Such aversion suggests that states are (a) aware of the importance of public opinion and the need to shield certain diplomatic arrangements from the dangers of debate in the public weal, and (b) that some diplomatic arrangements – particularly those that cut to the heart of supposed ‘national’ interests (in this case, the maintenance of collective security apparatuses) are possibly considered too important to be subjected to such debate. A view expressed in this ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preface
• 1 Strategy, Communication, and ‘Strategic Communication’
• 2 Transnationalisation, Transnational Dilemmas, and Strategic Communication
• 3 The Rise of the Stabilisation Narrative
• 4 The Fall of the Stabilisation Narrative
• 5 The Counter-narcotics Narrative
• 6 The Counter-terrorism Narrative
• 7 Conclusion: The State of British Strategy and the Utility of Strategic Communication
• Bibliography
• Index