What Harry’s Taliban boast conceals
The Duke of Sussex has been roundly condemned for his claim to have killed 25 Taliban while serving in Afghanistan. That the claim is crass and tasteless requires no further elaboration and it has drawn global opprobrium, from both military and civilian commentators. The response from soldiers has been spontaneous and adamant — though not always entirely choate — and centres on the crossing of a military ethical line that is unwritten but universally understood: you simply never boast about the taking of human life. Yet few observers have looked beyond a sense of instinctive outrage and tried to pick out what the Duke’s comments tell us about the West’s campaign in Afghanistan, and, above all, about Harry’s comprehension of what he was there to do.
First, a little context. Operating as an infantry soldier in Helmand during the fighting season was a hot, arduous and insanitary experience that was both physically and emotionally exhausting, punctuated by occasional episodes of lethal violence that had alternating elements of elation and terror. No matter the valour of individual aircrew, that was not the war that Harry knew.
The Apache attack helicopter in which he was a front seat passenger not only bristled with firepower but was designed to survive on a hostile battlefield. The crew compartment and rotor blades were capable of surviving hits from 23mm weapons when the Taliban typically deployed with small arms and machine guns that varied between 7.62mm and 12.7mm; the self-sealing fuel system ensured that even major ballistic damage could be survived and the aircraft continue to operate.
The Apache’s inventory of sensors, guns and missiles meant that the Taliban could be located, identified and engaged well beyond the range of their own weapons, while an air conditioning system not only maximised the efficiency of the crew but perhaps compounded the sense of distance from the uncomfortable, dangerous and proximate business of closing with the enemy on the ground.
There is therefore some defence available for Harry’s studied detachment, though less for his ghost writer’s use of language. J R Moehringer may be a Pulitzer laureate but allusions to “chess pieces taken off the board” sound like a pretentious attempt to emulate Clausewitz at his most magisterial; it is certainly not the language habitual to junior officers in action. More than anything else, it is difficult not to see the avid computer gamer Duke in his own mind as being involved in an antiseptic facsimile of combat without ever properly comprehending its visceral reality.
The West conducted a counter insurgency campaign in Afghanistan. The defining characteristic of counter insurgency is that the vital ground is The People and their culture. Habits and conventions must be understood if their tolerance – at best consent – is to be earned. This is a painstaking and protracted business in which the kinetic engagement of the enemy is a sub-clause rather than the main effort; indeed, the military element of state power should be no more than co-equal with the civil elements that will bring the rule of law, economic prosperity and representative governance. Above all else, it is a profoundly human enterprise where the most effective weapons are cultural awareness, empathy and the ability to blend all the instruments of international power to deliver demonstrable benefit to The People.
Taken against this background, how does Harry’s contention that “you can’t kill people if you see them as people” sit? The answer can only be as diametrically opposed to every principle of counter insurgency. Unless you see the civilian population – including those elements that might be armed against you – as human beings capable of sentient choice, then you have no chance of engaging them on any level other than the enemy, which is the guarantee of automatic failure in any war amongst the people.
Harry goes on to observe that the British army “trained me to other them and they trained me well”. Unfortunately, not that well. It’s curious that the army with the longest sustained experience of counter insurgency in the world was unable to impart the most basic principles of campaign design to one of its more eminent novitiates. Indeed, my experience and that of any recently serving soldier is that the British army is meticulous in its pre-deployment training, and, if the fault does not lie with the collective training machine, perhaps it lies with the individual. Successful counter insurgency requires a sophistication way beyond the unidimensional application of military violence. Maybe Harry simply lacked the intellectual curiosity to grasp that.
The great conflicts of the 20th century saw examples of implacable enmity between combatants involved in wars of national survival. Fighting between Germans and Russians on the Eastern Front, between Americans and Japanese in the Pacific Islands and between British and Germans after July 1916 had an intense, existential quality for both the individual and the nation. But in even the bitterest phases of these wars, it was possible to recognise a humanity in the enemy and to concede his military competence, as illustrated by Churchill’s tribute to Rommel in Parliament in 1941, US Marine Corps war diary accounts of the Pacific Campaign or even Wilfred Owen’s poem Strange Meeting.
From the Falklands War onwards, the British army has found it harder to hate its enemies. Shivering Argentinians or abject Iraqis were hardly to be compared with the German field army at the height of its powers. In Afghanistan, the Taliban posed a different challenge, as it was difficult not share a generational admiration for the fighting qualities of the Pashtun warrior that had begun in 1838, in the First Afghan War. But taken over the span of more than a century, the overwhelming evidence is that soldiers have never entirely dehumanised their enemies and that returns us to the military ethical line with which this article began.
For so long as an enemy is recognisably human, taking life has an inalienable moral significance. It may be entirely legitimate within the principles of Just War theory and it need not burden the conscience of the victor, but it is an unusual soldier that is able to kill without an element of reflection and it is that shared – but rarely stated – understanding that constitutes the unwritten rule: you never boast about your body count.
So where does that leave Harry? Charitably, we might say that perhaps his ghost writer had too much latitude, too little editorial control and no military counsel. Less charitably, we might conclude that Harry means what has been attributed to him, and, despite the play he makes on his military career, that he has never really understood what it is to be a soldier.
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