Real scandal is not hacking but Helmand

Five-year British military campaign in southern Afghanistan has been woefully under-resourced and hampered by inadequate equipment, according to a damning report by MPs.

The Commons defence select committee, which has been analysing UK operations in Helmand province since 2006, says that it was "unacceptable" British forces were handicapped by insufficient numbers, poor equipment and low-quality intelligence when the deployment began.

For the first three years of the operation – during which 132 British personnel died and more than 2,000 were hospitalised in Helmand – victory was more or less unattainable given the levels of manpower, military vehicles available and knowledge of the enemy.

The initial deployment of 3,500 solders into Helmand, of whom around 1,000 were infantry, was "not fully thought through", the report says.

James Arbuthnot, a former Conservative defence minister and chairman of the committee, said: "The force levels deployed throughout 2006, 2007 and 2008 were never going to achieve what was being demanded."

The report questions how the Ministry of Defence failed to anticipate that the presence of foreign troops in Helmand "might stir up a hornets' nest". The then defence secretary, John Reid, was famously reported as saying that he would have been happy if British forces had left Helmand "without a shot being fired". By the end of 2008, however, British forces were expending almost four million bullets a year against an increasingly strident insurgency.

Our own columnist, Christopher Booker, protested in 2006 at the outrage of British troops in Southern Iraq being sent to meet their deaths in lightly-armoured Snatch Land Rovers, in conditions which also applied in Afghanistan.

In 2008, the Tory MP Patrick Mercer – after the death of four British soldiers from a roadside bomb in Afghanistan – described Snatch vehicles as “death traps” that are “packaging our troops as compact targets.”

It is sometimes said that everyone has 20/20 vision in hindsight, but in this case ministers often appear to have formulated Afghanistan policy while wearing both blindfolds and earplugs.

There is a danger that, when the public is drip-fed details of a scandal over many years – as opposed to a hectic set of revelations over weeks – it slowly loses its appetite for holding those responsible to account. We begin simply to accept too readily that poor decisions were taken by those in charge, and lives were thereby lost.

If a touch-paper is needed to reinvigorate public outrage, let it start with this report. Who failed to inform John Reid that British troops were being deployed in Sangin and elsewhere? When did he find out?

Why were men such as Brigadier Ed Butler, the commander of the first Task Force to enter Helmand, ignored when in 2005 – a year before the start of the mission – he told senior commanders that his force was short of resources?

It is said that those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it. We are not out of Afghanistan yet, but it cannot be too soon to learn the lessons of how our troops came to be treated with such indifference and contempt.