Introduction by Professor Hew Strachan

Summary

In Missionaries, Phil Klay's 2020 novel about war (among other things), one of his protagonists, Lisette, an American journalist, talks to a friend and former soldier, Diego, about the conflict in Afghanistan. ‘Go through the mission set of every unit operating in Afghanistan right now’, Diego challenges her; ‘tell me a single one that doesn't make sense.’ Lisette concedes the point. Individual missions did make sense. ‘It was the war as a whole that was insane, a rational insanity that dissected the problem in a thousand different ways, attacked it logically with a thousand different mission sets, a million white papers, a billion “lessons learned” reports, and nothing ever approaching a coherent strategy.’

Lisette's views presumably reflect those of their author: Klay served with the United States Marine Corps during the ‘surge’ in Iraq. The war in Afghanistan may have been different in many respects but, even if its veterans disagree over specifics, they will recognise the force of Lisette's point. British and Dutch units in southern Afghanistan did their best to bring stability and security to Helmand and Uruzgan. At the end of each tour, their commanders could and did reflect with pride on what they had achieved – what Lisette calls ‘a thousand tight logical circles’ as each task was executed ‘with machinelike precision, eyes on the mission amid the accumulating human waste’. Nonetheless, by the end of 2014, when NATO ceased active offensive operations, nobody could be quite sure what lasting results had been achieved. That uncertainty has only increased with the passage of time.

The British and Dutch armed forces were good at addressing what Mirjam Grandia in this important book calls the ‘how’ of the war in Afghanistan but neither government proved able to provide a consistent and coherent answer to the question ‘why’. Throughout the Cold War, for both countries the ‘why’ of military effectiveness had been simple: the defence of western Europe from Soviet aggression, most probably along the inner German border. It was the ‘how’ that generated the big questions: whether NATO had sufficient conventional military strength to mount a successful defence without an early recourse to nuclear weapons, whether Dutch conscripts of the 1960s or ‘70s would be ready to fight, and whether either army was intellectually equipped for war at the operational level.