Relegated from the Great Game

It is a precarious business this making predictions, but it is part and parcel of the op ed/blogging world.
I had recently written about the defeat and retreat of the British from Basra in Iraq.
I noted that the victors usually write history.
However in this case most if the victors are illiterate.
So the losers-backed up by the BBC- get to explain away their second prise into a magnificent victory of a job well done.
What I had not expected was for the operation in Afghanistan to be marked down for closure so swiftly.
Michael Smith of the Sunday Times broke the story that the treasury had vetoed the British Army’s request for 2,000 extra troops.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/article6211080.ece
The plan now is for the British to hand over combat operations in Helmand province to the USA. The British will reduce their presence to three battalions. Two for training and one as an emergency reserve for the Afghan army.
This is-effectively-the same story as Basra.

I had predicted-erroneously-that the UK would be in combat operations in their bit of Afghanistan fro the decades it will take to deafeat that insurgency.

Now-thanks to Michael Smith’s scoop-we know that the British are preparing to leave the field of battle.
The three battalions will be held up as evidence of a significant and continuing British deployment in Helmand at present.
The UK current has 8, 300 the new plan will see that reduced to around 2,000.
No one is seriously suggesting that the security situation in Helmand is improving.
Quite simply the British government has decided to pull out of Afghanistan as much as it can possibly do so at the moment.
Some time in 2010 or 2011 the training job will be deemed to be done and those spiffing chaps in the Afghan national army will not require the emergency reserve battalion.
This will, of course, all be tosh.
Britain’s power play in this part of the world-where the British army fought never ending battles with the Pasthun tribesmen and blocked the march south of the Czar’s forces to give the Russians the warm water port they craved was styled “the great game”.
Only great powers could play the Great Game.
What is clear now is that Britain, post Blair, can no longer afford to take part in this game.
The retreat from empire had been long.
No amount of victory parades through British towns will disguise the reality of British defeat and British inability to pay the price in such foreign operations.
Since the formation of the British state the army has played pivotal role in shaping the society.
The British Army also was a dominant feature in Irish life in the 19th and early 20th centuries.

As I write this another British soldier has died from an IED blast in Helmand province.
He was a member of what remains of the Black watch.
The Black Watch is Britain’s last truly tribal regiment.
In previous generations the battalions of “Pontius Pilate’s bodyguard” raised from around Perth were as clannish as the Pasthun.
The British Army is heading-under new defence cuts-to have a regular strength of under 100,000.
At this stage the British army starts to lose critical mass.
The garrison in Basra airfield towards the end wasn’t large enough to defend itself, but it didn’t need to.
Firstly, they had cut a deal with the Shia militias to leave them in peace in Basra airbase while the Mehdi army boys got on with the serious job of beheading women for wearing short skirts.
Then the US Marines and the Iraqi Army came down from Baghdad and re-took the city while the British hunkered down in the airbase.
As the British army starts to look only fit for home defence most of the UK’s defence budget over the next twenty years will go on two aircraft carriers and the replacement for trident.
The aircraft carriers will have no planes or escort ships and the successor to Trident wont
Have any targets to fire at.

None of this makes any sense-which is probably the most disconcerting aspect of this entire sad story.

The British army’s next war-which may last as long as the Northern war-will be the Yorkshirestan insurgency
I keep coming back to American philosopher Will Durrant’s observation that:

“Before great civilisations are destroyed from without they first destroy themselves from within.”
The current treatment of Gurkha veterans smacks of political elite that has lost its moral compass.

I was born two years after Suez the final wake up call that the UK was now part of a wider American imperium.
A mere fifty years later and the reality of Britain’s atrophied armed forces cannot be hidden by the acquisition of two aircrafts carriers (aircraft not included) or a ballistic missile system which is effectively controlled by the Americans.
Pakistan has an independent nuclear deterrent Britain does not.
Britain now struggles to permanently deploy a force of 10,000.
At the end of the Great War Britain fielded an army of seven million men.
These are uncomfortable realities for people reared to have a warm fuzzy feeling about the certainty of British military power.
The days of Westminster being able to  independently deliver major violence on the battlefield are gone.
That is a brutal truth and no amount of new labour spin or marching around Ibrox by the Royal Marines will conceal the fact that Britain is no longer a player in the top league.
Now that is a prediction I am confident to make.