Goodbye Afghanistan: where next for British troops?
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Version 0 of 1. This week, at the end of the biggest airlift mounted by the RAF since the Berlin Airlift in 1947-48, the final plane took off from Camp Bastion, the largest operational base built by British forces since the second world war. Seventeen waves of two C130 Hercules transport aircraft and two Chinook helicopters took the last British armed forces from what was at one time home of up to 40,000 troops. It was a one-way trip. British combat troops will not be deployed in Afghanistan again "under any circumstances", insisted the British defence secretary, Michael Fallon. "We are not going to send combat troops back into Afghanistan. We've made that very, very clear. Under any circumstances, combat troops will not be going in there." The question now is what is going to happen to those soldiers. With promises, by all parties, to increase spending on the NHS, and pay and manpower taking a large part of the defence budget, and with two large aircraft carriers, and, later, a new fleet of Trident nuclear missile submarines, biting a large chunk out of the budget, the army is in the firing line. Faced with growing doubts, the government told the Commons defence committee this week it was "committed to spending 2% of GDP on defence". 2% is the Nato target - it would be extremely embarrassing for the British government to fall behind this figure given its rebukes to other European Nato countries which have persistently failed to meet it. Britain would continue to meet the 2% target, the MoD told the Commons committee, "until the end of the spending review period" - that is, April 2016. The question is whether the next goverment will have the nerve to adjust UK military spending and policy to meet new threats rather than simply cling to what Jonathan Shaw, retired general and former director of Britain's special forces, calls the "traditional and inherited UK posture" - that is, a "full spectrum capability which means having a little of everything in the military toolbox; full geographical scope, ie we can deploy and operate globally..." Shaw, rightly, points to Britain's wider security goals, including "counter terrorism, cyber security, disaster relief, and environmental catastrophe". The potential beckons for a wide-ranging debate on Britain's future defence needs - even though "defence" is far down the list of issues concerning the British people, according to opinion polls. |