'Whitehall amateurs cost lives'

Thursday, December 10, 2009

A senior British Army commander has said decisions by Whitehall 'amateurs' are causing the deaths of soldiers in Afghanistan.

Lieutenant General Frederick Viggers told the inquiry that the lessons of post-war Iraq had not been learned in time for Afghanistan, and that this has led to poor decision-making.

General Viggers, the senior British Army commander in Iraq following the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, said post-war operations in Iraq suffered from a "lack of a sense of direction from the outset".

"We have not really progressed at the strategic level. I am not talking about the soldiers and commanders and civilians - who did a great job. But it's the intellectual horsepower that drives these things [which] needs better co-ordination.

"We've got huge experience in this country - we're not using it and we're putting amateurs into really, really important positions and people are getting killed as a result of some of these decisions.

"It's a huge responsibility and I just don't sense we're living up to it."

General Viggers said British forces struggled to carry out reconstruction in Iraq because they were "taken by surprise" by the speed of the victory. British forces arrived in Baghdad after 16 days, considerably less than the 100-day estimate.

"That was a stunning military operation but in so doing it took everyone by surprise," he said. "We suffered from a lack of any real understanding of the state of that country post-invasion."

"It was rather like going to the theatre and seeing one sort of play and realising you were watching a tragedy as the curtains came back," he said.

General Viggers said the population were initially "hugely celebratory", but that they soon turned against the British and American forces.

"We were not laying on everything that we were expected to do. They are saying to us 'you people put a man on the moon and now you are telling us we can't have electricity'."