Still united against terror

The following is a guest post by Lieutenant General Nicholas Carter, who was given responsibility for leading the UK’s Army 2020 Team to design the future Army. From October 2012 he will be Deputy Commander HQ ISAF and the UK’s National Contingent Commander in Afghanistan. 

Lieutenant General Nicholas Carter was visiting Washington last week and in this guest post he talks about looking back and looking forward in both of his assignments in Army 2020 and in Afghanistan.

It’s great to be back in Washington. On this visit, I’m both looking back and looking forward. Partly, I’m here to talk about ‘Army 2020,’ a project I’ve been working on to reorganize and modernize the British Army in the light of straightened financial circumstances. But I’m also here to look forward to my next assignment: I will soon be taking over as Deputy Commander of ISAF, the NATO forces in Afghanistan.

Over a decade since the intervention, Britain still stands firm with our Afghan and NATO partners. With 9,500 troops, we remain the second largest contingent, committed to the principle we agreed at the Lisbon summit in 2010. But we must never forget why we are in Afghanistan in the first place. Certainly we have great sympathy for the plight of the Afghan people but, we are there for one clear reason: to ensure that Afghanistan can never again be the launch pad for international terrorism of the kind we witnessed eleven years ago this month.

That assurance can only come from a peaceful and stable Afghanistan. And in the long run that means strong Afghan security forces capable of defending their citizens and government and of denying terrorists the safe haven they once enjoyed. This is why we—Brits, Americans and the other allied nations that make up ISAF forces—have sought to work so closely with our Afghan counterparts at all levels of seniority.

Tragically, the trust we have built up through those close working relationships with our afghan partners is being under minded by a small number of Afghans who have sought to murder our soldiers. I shall use the experience I had as a Regional Commander in Kandahar to do what I can to resolve this.

But let’s also recognise the progress we have made. In just a few years, Afghanistan has gone from practically no security forces at all to a trained cadre of over 336,000 personnel—a force larger than the population of St Louis, Missouri. Every day, tens of thousands of these local troops go to work alongside their ISAF colleagues without incident. Soon, Afghan forces will have primary responsibility for security across an area of the country that contains over three quarters of the population. They are also now carrying out 85% of military training, which will help ensure the sustainability of local forces in the long run. And as Afghan forces become better at providing security, ISAF troops can be gradually withdrawn and more and more control can pass to the local authorities.

Is this process achieving what it set out to do? Is it making our citizens safer back home? Yes. Six years ago, over three quarters of terrorist threats against the UK emanated from the Afghanistan-Pakistan region. Today, the figure is less than half. We cannot expect to achieve lasting security without some risk, however. I am proud that the men and women of the UK Armed Forces, whose courage and dedication continues to amaze me after three decades in the service, have been able to shoulder some of that risk so that civilians in Britain, and indeed around the world, can live more securely.