Brigadier Ed Butler considered resigning over Helmand mission

Deborah Haynes, Defence Editor

The man sent to command the first British deployment in Helmand considered resigning even before he arrived.

Brigadier Ed Butler was frustrated by "crazily" inadequate planning and a command structure that would leave him unable to control his battle group.

"In October 2005, I was close to handing my chips in," the former SAS commander, who eventually left the Army two years ago, toldThe Times. "Some people said: 'Ed, don't be a dog in the manger about it.' I responded that I was giving a purely professional view that what you are doing here was crazy."

Asked why he did not resign, he said: "You feel your professional and pers-onal obligations. This is an extraordinarily bad set of cards we have dealt ourselves ... you just make the best of a bad job."

Brigadier Butler, who now heads a firm that advises investors about doing business in dangerous places, said he knew from the start that the mission had too few troops to achieve its stabilisation goals, and the Taleban threat had been underestimated. "I was very clear. With 3,000 troops, we were only just going to be able to live, breathe, sleep and eat. As soon as we get into a fight, we don't have the numbers, we don't have the helicopter hours, we don't have sufficient helicopters."

Another grievance was that - even though he was to be the first ground commander - he was not asked to take part in the preliminary planning. This was carried out by a team from the MoD's Permanent Joint Headquarters, along with four civilians, who drew up a complementary civilian plan.

Brigadier Butler considered this illogical and told his superiors. "The thinking in the campaign team, across Whitehall and PJHQ was that the three lines of operation - development, military and governance - would go at the same pace, they would roll out altogether.

"All the military was going to do was train the Afghan forces and provide local security. No account was taken of the enemy having a vote.

"What happened was that the military operations accelerated miles ahead, and hence all the complaints thrown at me about being too gung-ho and just wanting to get into a fight. I defended this by saying: 'You are not here, you don't understand. You are not the man in the ring.' There was a raging battle as soon as we arrived."

Brigadier Butler's battle group started to arrive in April, just as the poppy harvest was ending and the annual fighting season starting. Across the border in Pakistan, the Taleban had been regrouping and planning a response to the British advance.

Around the towns and villages of Helmand, a province dependent on the crop, Taleban sympathisers launched an effective public relations campaign, warning people that the British were back and planning to destroy their poppies. The British Army is well known in Helmand - the scene of the greatest Afghan victory against Britain in the 1880s.

The situation was not helped by a confused command structure, agreed by the MoD. This gave control of Nato forces in the south to a smaller Canad-ian battle group, led by a Canadian brigadier in Kandahar. This left Brigadier Butler, who was told to base himself in Kabul, out of the command chain.

Many blame Brigadier Butler for corrupting the mission by allowing his forces to push out into towns and villages to fight the Taleban in so-called platoon houses, rather than stay in the centre. He argues, however, that Mohammad Daoud, the then newlyappointed governor of Helmand, kept asking him to deploy outside the provincial capital of Lashkar Gah and the British base of Camp Bastion.

"We knew we were right on the edge, but my judgment was that the only way to keep an Afghan flag flying was by having platoon houses in the key centres of population," he said.

"By the time I left, it was only then reality was sinking in - we were up to our thighs and we didn't have a clear plan, sufficient resources or an exit strategy," he added.

"It is very easy to blame the politicians for getting us into Afghanistan, but I'd apportion some of the blame to some of the senior military for not actually saying to the Foreign Secretary, the Defence Secretary or the Chancellor: 'You have got to listen to this. We are heavily committed in Iraq anyway, we can't do two medium-scale campaigns'. "