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Nick Fishwick
Former Senior Member of the British Foreign Office
Nick Fishwick CMG retired after nearly thirty years in the British Foreign Service. His postings included Lagos, Istanbul and Kabul. His responsibilities in London included director of security and, after returning from Afghanistan in 2007, he served as director for counter-terrorism. His final role was as director general for international operations.
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Cipher Brief Expert Nick Fishwick CMG retired in 2012 after nearly thirty years in the British Foreign Service. He did postings in Lagos, Istanbul and Kabul. His responsibilities in London included director of security and, after returning from Afghanistan in 2007, director for counterterrorism. His final role was as director general for international operations.
OPINION — How are the allies reacting to the latest disasters in Afghanistan? I can only speak for Britain. We have a long history of sporadic and largely unsuccessful involvement in the country, going back at least to the early 19th century. We have lost over 450 military lives in Afghanistan since 2001 plus a number of civilians. Thousands of British people, myself included, served in Afghanistan in one role or another so, it may be worth looking at how this is playing over here.
Perhaps this background should make it less of a surprise that the British media and political classes having largely ignored Afghanistan at least since we ceased combat operations many years ago, are now obsessed with the place. Media coverage of the collapse of Afghanistan has been intense. Prime Minister Boris Johnson, enjoying a holiday somewhere or other, was forced to recall the British parliament from its summer recess and we have just witnessed a lively Parliamentary debate that gives insights into how people feel about the collapse of the Afghan state.
I would say this is crystallising into five sometimes overlapping schools of thought. First, those who say that the Afghan venture was never going to work. A second school says that our hands were tied by President Trump’s deal with the Taliban and President Biden’s decision to proceed with the withdrawal. We did the best we could. Thirdly, those who say on the contrary, that we failed to prepare properly for the withdrawal. Fourth, the argument that not all was going wrong in Afghanistan, and we should never have gone along with the withdrawal. Finally, some are starting to think through the broader implications for national security, for how this shambles will affect our country and the world we live in.
The British government has discreetly distanced itself from the US decision to withdraw. It is telling us that the US decided to fix a troop withdrawal date and stick to that date, come what may. Britain wanted a withdrawal based on conditions, not some arbitrary date. Still, the Americans decided and there was not much we could do about it. We are where we are and looking ahead, we have to do what we can to make sure the gains of the past twenty years are not lost. Taliban have been on a charm offensive, but they will be judged by their actions and not their words. What exactly the UK will do if these actions prove as terrible as we all expect, has not as yet, been explained.
The debate in Britain is heavily influenced by Afghan veterans. There was a brilliant, moving speech in the Parliamentary debate by Tom Tugendhat, the Conservative chair of the Foreign Affairs Committee, who served long and courageous spells in Afghanistan. There were further telling interventions by Johnny Mercer (Conservative) and Dan Jarvis (Labour), who also served in Afghanistan. Britons generally give a respectful hearing to ex-military people: they put their bodies on the line. And unlike most politicians they are straight-talkers.
Much of the debate here has been about the treatment of Afghans trying to get out of their country. There is a recognition that the UK has obligations especially to people who in some way or another helped us in Afghanistan. The debate is about how widely that recognition is applied. It has caught the imagination of the British public because of the shocking media coverage of recent events at Kabul airport, of people stuck in Afghanistan fearing for their lives. The iconic image is not of people getting into a helicopter on the top of the US Embassy but of bodies falling from US military planes.
From this, has followed the opposition Labour Party’s main line of attack: the government’s failure to prepare for the Taliban takeover. So, was the government not receiving reliable intelligence – or was it ignoring it? It had been clear since the Trump deal with the Taliban that the US was going to withdraw, so we had plenty of time to plan and prepare. How can anyone witnessing the scenes at Kabul airport possibly imagine that this is the result of careful preparation?
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Nick Fishwick,Former Senior Member, British Foreign Office
Nick FishwickCMG retired in 2012 after nearly thirty years in the British Foreign Service which included postings in Lagos, Istanbul and Kabul. He served in London as director of security and, after returning from Afghanistan in 2007, as director for counterterrorism. His last role in government was as director general for international operations.
Conrad Prince, Former Deputy Director, GCHQ
Former Director General for Operations and Deputy Director of GCHQ
Conrad Princeserved as the Director General for Operations and Deputy Director of GCHQ from 2008 – 2015. He led GCHQ’s intelligence operations and was responsible for the development of the UK’s national offensive cyber capability. From 2015 – 2018 he was the UK’s first Cyber Security Ambassador, leading cyber capacity building work with a number of key UK allies.
EXPERT PERSPECTIVE — If the British public have read their government’s integrated defence review, introduced by Prime Minister Boris Johnson in Parliament last Tuesday, they will have realised that there is a whole lot more to defending the country these days than just having good armed forces.
The review is very wide-ranging. There is a lot about cyber; space; the global struggle to uphold liberal values; international governance and human rights; the importance of climate change (our “number one international priority”) to global security; health; international alliances; international rivalries; the importance of investing in scientific R and D and new technologies like quantum; terrorism; organised crime; and the nuclear deterrent. And lots more. And this has to be right. Everyone will be clear about the ever-growing diversification of potentially existential threats. We realised twenty years ago, that we could not just contain terrorism by leaving it to the police and security agencies, however good they were: we needed an effort across government, and we needed the active consent of society. The integrated review is informed by this and requires a cross-government and cross-society approach to the threats and challenges facing us. It recognises that in many crucial sectors, what matters will be what universities and the private sector do, rather than what government does.
Much attention has been paid to the fact that the number of nuclear warheads has been raised from “up to” 180 to “up to” 260. Depending on what “up to” means, this is a big proportionate increase though it would still leave the UK’s arsenal smaller than France’s, let alone the big beasts China, Russia and the US. The review itself was noticeably reticent on the reasons for this increase, simply saying that minimal deterrence through 180 warheads was no longer “possible”. So the reasoning is sensitive; national security professionals will know why, and they will have been helped by ministerial comments that the growing threat of Russian nuclear capability is at least part of the reason. Still, not everyone is happy with this. Does it show that we have given up on multilateral nuclear disarmament? Is it another excuse to reduce our army, now due to be cut to a size that could comfortably be contained in a football stadium – something former US defence secretary/CIA chief Leon Panetta has expressed concern about?
The review is not designed to provide the “how”, and that will be the big challenge for Britain over the next ten years. The nuclear niggle aside, most people will support the need to modernise our military, the central importance of responding adequately to the climate crisis, the imperative to get more competitive in the S and T realm, defend and promote our values, counter aggression in traditional and non-traditional spaces, and so on. An army that would take two football stadia to contain would still not guarantee that. But the “how” will be the question to watch. British politicians have been scathing about the ability of our defence ministry to implement big programmes without waste or delay. Governments themselves have to stay focused: the review has encouraging language about its faith in our values, but some fear that authoritarian regimes have been better at implementation and long-term planning than divided, distractable western democracies. It is of the utmost importance to push back on that narrative.
One of the more striking aspects of the review is the emphasis on significantly boosting the UK’s position on science and technology, so that by 2030 it has become a ‘science and tech superpower’. In a narrow military sense this is part of the aspiration to shift from a traditional set of armed forces with legacy conventional capability to one more rooted in data, AI, cyber, space technology and all the rest. But it is a much broader agenda than that. The doubling down on tech represents the UK’s response to the challenges of the globalisation of technology, and a pivot east in tach innovation, with a particular China dimension. The review presents a new ‘own-collaborate-access’ model for vital new tech where the UK will either lead the development itself, collaborate with other friendly states, or acquire the tech, in a risk managed, way from elsewhere. And there is a big emphasis on increasing investment in UK R&D, improving pull through and commercialisation of research, and developing a long-term approach to growth in critical areas like quantum and bio-tech. Overall, this reflects the UK increasingly looking to build its future global power and influence on science, innovation, technology, and R&D.
Cyber is a key part of this and the review gives some hints as to the focus of the UK’s new cyber strategy, due later this year. Along with the cyber dimension to the tech agenda, there is a much-needed focus on further boosting resilience on the critical national infrastructure. There’s a strong international dimension too, looking to do more to promote the Western vision of a free, open and secure internet in the face of competing models from Russia and China. On offensive cyber, it is striking that the UK emphasises the use of all levers – including political, economic, legal and strategic communications – alongside offensive cyber as a means of responding to hostile attacks. This reflects a more nuanced approach beneath the recent hyping of the National Cyber Force, the UK’s new offensive cyber organisation.
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