Afghan Papers
The armed forces of the United Kingdom have now, at the time of writing, been involved in Afghanistan for exactly a decade. By the time the forces draw down from combat roles in 2015, they will have been engaged for almost a decade and a half. Nor will this be the end of the commitment. Some UK forces will remain in a mentoring and support role for the Afghan National Security Forces for some years thereafter. The political commitment to create a sustainable Afghan state and deny international terrorists any ungoverned space in the country remains open-ended. The intention of this volume is not to arrive at a definitive judgement on the strategic coherence or the value to the national interest of the UK's campaign in Afghanistan. More evidence covering the whole campaign, and a sense of the outcomes after 2015, will be necessary before that can be attempted. But, in a period of great uncertainty for the UK's defence and security institutions, it is important that the complex reality of policymaking is not caricatured in a series of easy political sound bites, and volumes such as this are intended to throw their weight against casual judgements. The complex reality of the decisions dealt with here does not necessarily favour either the supporters or the opponents of the Afghan campaign. They demonstrate with equal conviction that strategy has to be fashioned from a constant flow of known and unknown events covering issues from different theatres all happening simultaneously; but also that without clear-headed, and timely, intervention in that flow, coherent strategy is unlikely to emerge. The reality of security policy presents a challenge that is at once daunting, but unavoidable.
