David Pratt: We must learn the lessons of the past in Iraq and Afghanistan

Right now I’m in Iraq just as the latest military offensive to push fighters from the Islamic State (IS) group out from another of their strongholds in the town of Tal Afar west of Mosul gets under way.

Just around the time that US Secretary of Defence James Mattis, was arriving here in Iraq a few days ago, US President and Commander in Chief, Donald Trump, was on television vowing to win the war in Afghanistan by committing more US troops there. That announcement doubtless means I’ll be returning there too in the near future.

It wasn’t that long ago that Mr Trump was bemoaning Nato and pledging to get America out of foreign wars and adventures. But in what has now become a characteristic volte-face approach to foreign policy, this week he called on Nato allies such as Britain to increase troop numbers in Afghanistan.

If there’s a sense of deja vu about all of this, then that’s because we have actually been here before, and not without considerable cost in terms of the lives of both British service personnel and Afghans.

So far, UK Defence Secretary Sir Michael Fallon has stopped short of vowing to increase the number of British troops in Afghanistan, but again, we’ve been here before and heard similar reassurances. The simple inescapable fact is that in recent years, where US military adventures have gone, the UK has blithely followed.

Like some recurring nightmare in which Iraq and Afghanistan are the setting, the same ill-considered policies, military strategies and even characters, seem to inhabit the narrative of engagement that the US and UK have had with both these long-suffering and volatile lands.

Just a few hours’ drive from where I sit writing this, lies the Iraqi town of Tal Afar. It’s there over the last few days that the Iraqi Army, with the help of US Special Forces, and air strikes have moved to oust IS fighters from a place the jihadists have held for almost three years. But it was way back towards the end of 2005 when I first visited this rather nondescript town close to the Syrian border.

Back then, just like today, Tal Afar was a toxic mix of Islamist extremism, insurgency terrorist infiltration and inter-ethnic tension.

While embedded with US forces all those years ago, I recall interviewing a certain US Army colonel who was to lead something of a landmark counterinsurgency operation in Tal Afar. He was a charismatic soldier, quite different to many US officers I’d met before. Articulate, considered in approach and possessing a PhD in American History, his name was HR McMaster.

If that name sounds familiar, then perhaps it’s because today, having been promoted to Lieutenant General, H.R McMaster is US National Security Adviser in the Trump administration. It’s been reported that President Trump’s decision this week to “stay the course” in Afghanistan was in part a result of Lt Gen McMaster using a 1972 photo of Afghan women in miniskirts to show the President that the country had once adopted Western values and to persuade him to escalate the war.

For a whole raft of reasons I have no reason to doubt the veracity of this account, not least Lt Gen McMaster’s unorthodox approach that made him such an effective counterinsurgency tactician, and Mr Trump’s fickleness and stupidity.

That Lt Gen McMaster was viewed by some within the Trump administration as being soft on Islamist extremism and terrorism only adds to the emerging picture of an American leadership that has completely lost any cohesion and sense of direction in terms of foreign policy strategy. Indeed it’s said that the departure of Mr Trump’s right-hand man, White House chief strategist Steve Bannon, was in part a result of him not seeing eye-to-eye with Lt Gen McMaster. Since Mr Bannon’s leaving, that view has been compounded by him quickly rounding on the National Security Adviser with a Breitbart article headlined: “HR McMaster Endorsed Book That Advocates Quran-Kissing Apology Ceremonies”.

In short, it claimed that Lt Gen McMaster supported a call for military personnel serving in the Middle East to avoid desecrating the Quran to improve relations with local Muslim communities, thus making them less likely to support radicalism.

That in itself is not a bad move and typical of the canny tactician Lt Gen McMaster is. Nevertheless, it would appear he still seems hell-bent on embroiling the US even further in Afghanistan if, as reports suggest, Mr Trump has heeded his advice.

The point I’m making is that not only is it now clearly evident that the Trump administration is totally at sea when it comes to foreign policy, but also has no sure and steady hands on the political tiller.

Decades on after embarking on military campaigns to rid Iraq and Afghanistan of Islamist extremism and jihadism and supposedly do a bit of nation-building along the way, the US remains bogged down in both countries with no end to either conflict in sight.

As the Iraqi Army gears up its offensive to push IS out of Tal Afar, as it did in Mosul recently, the signs are that IS is rethinking its tactics. Since my arrival in Iraq increasingly I’ve heard mention of it moving towards guerrilla-style tactics as it loses territory. It is even said to have set up an organisation for their recruits’ post-IS existence named Fajrulazeem, which will work as sleeper cells.

“They have changed the way they operate: kill, inflict harm, and disappear,” was how one Kurdish security official summed it up. Meanwhile in Afghanistan it has been much the same story. Just as the jihadists tactics shift so the West’s response remains predictability the same. More troops, more Special Forces, more boots on the ground. It’s obvious now that a politically rudderless US is once more getting sucked into the mire of both conflicts. Here’s hoping Britain this time shows more sense and doesn’t again play the role of obedient political puppy that gets its paws burned.