ABSTRACT
When British troops entered Afghanistan in November 2001, in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks in New York in September of the same year, in the United Kingdom (UK) there was widespread public support for the military operation. Opinion polls carried out a few months into the campaign showed that the majority of Britons supported the deployment of UK troops as part of an international coalition led by American forces. When British troops entered Helmand province in 2006, five years into the military campaign – and five years after the initial polls were taken – the level of support for military intervention in Afghanistan had dropped significantly. However, although the initial level of public backing for sending UK troops to Afghanistan had deteriorated by this time, the years after 2006 still showed a small rise in British public support for the campaign and the UK’s involvement in it. This was despite the fact that casualties on all sides continued to rise, and notwithstanding the reality that the UK’s decision to move into Helmand meant that the country had suffered a heavy death toll. The question thus remains: how did the political leadership in Britain manage to stabilize public backing for military intervention despite the large number of British casualties? The discussion that follows searches for an answer to this question. It does so by examining the UK’s strategic culture, its political decision-making processes for the deployment of military force, and the strength of the strategic narrative employed by the political leadership to justify the campaign in the eyes of the home public. These underlying factors all shape political and public attitudes toward security policy and military intervention. Against this question, the chapter aims to understand if and how the strategic narrative was used to mobilize
public support for the deployment of UK troops to Afghanistan. To this end, it examines the extent to which the British political culture created a particular environment that helped muster public support for the campaign. The chapter thus recognizes that the reason for the stable level of public support post 2006, and the political commitment to the Afghan mission, should not be found in the government’s strategic narrative alone. As we will see, other conditions linked to British strategic culture were equally important. Through an examination of government documents, parliamentary papers and reports, top level messages, as well as committee debates, the discussion that follows is set within a qualitative analytical framework that builds on the emerging literature on strategic narratives and the political system in the UK. It identifies these domestic features of the UK strategic culture as central to the political and public attitude toward the Afghan mission. The answers to the questions raised in this chapter should therefore be found in the UK’s ambition and willingness to use military force, its interventionist approach, as much as in its strategic narrative. The chapter is divided into three overall sections, with further subsections. The first section offers an overview of UK strategic culture as well as the system of using military force in a British context. This section also includes a brief review of the emerging body of scholarly work on strategic narratives, with references to the theoretical chapters in this volume. The second section focuses on the tenets of the strategic narrative. It thus charts the political messaging and the strategic narrative as well as the development in public opinion during the initial phase of the conflict in 2001, the deployment of troops to Helmand in 2006, and the drawdown phase post 2010. These particular periods in UK involvement in Afghanistan become significant in the strategic narrative, as they represent new directions in the campaign narrative. They represent key points for the political messaging. And they represent key points in the development of UK public opinion on the Afghan war. These different aspects of the UK case are then summed up in the final section of the chapter, which comprises a brief conclusion.
