The Daily Mail, 16 May 2000
Send in the dogs of war
By Frederick Forsyth
Britain, and indeed all the West, finds itself on the horns of a dilemma when it comes to wars in foreign places of which we know little.
The first problem is that, thanks to the very communications technology that we developed and now control, we are all able to slump in our armchairs and tune into a nightly horror story.
This is not courtesy of Hollywood; this is raw, red reality. We can see the massacres, the mutilations, the torched villages, the wailing babies, the shot and shell wounds. We can see the blood, hear the screams.
A hundred years ago our grandfathers would never have known of the genocides of Rwanda and Burundi, the pogroms of Kosovo and Chechnya, the ethnic cleansing of Bosnia and East Timor. Today, we see it all. And we react with horror, clamouring: Something must be done.ı
So our second problem is our conscience. We feel we cannot watch such miseries and do nothing.
If the disaster is natural ? the famines of Ethiopia and South Sudan, the floods of Mozambique, the earthquakes of Turkey ? we delve deep, we write cheques, we donate.
We see the Hercules transports lifting off from RAF Lyneham, crammed with food, medicines, blankets, tents which we have bought. We see the aid agencies bringing succour and relief. We feel better: we did something, we contributed.
But when the warlords are at work in the hellholes of the world beyond our palisades, when the psychopaths, sadists and tyrants are at their business, we know our blankets and morphine jabs will never get there.
Slaughter
We know something ought to be done to end the barbarism, but we also know it is going to take brute force to stop the slaughter.
That is when we run into problem three. We have in New Labour a Government that refuses to recruit, train, equip and maintain nearly enough front-line troops to carry out the missions decreed by its seemingly endless posturing.
I yield to none in my admiration for our infantry, cavalry, paras, marines, aircrew and special forces.
But they are vastly overstretched, scattered too far and wide, occasionally fitted out with second-rate equipment, starved of funds, numbers and a clear mandate.
Between assignments they spend too little time at R and R, let alone with their families. And there is another aspect to this problem. The West, with America far in the lead, has become so squeamish about the very idea of taking a casualty that the commitment of many Western armies to a combat situation has become politically impossible.
President Clinton made clear at the outset of the Kosovo involvement that ground forces were out of the question in case an American was killed. Britain and France have so far not followed suit, but most of Western Europe has.
The sight of a bodybag containing the corpse of one of your own soldiers is truly hideous. But one would be a fool to pretend that you can contemplate a full-scale combat situation with a guarantee that there will be no casualties except among the enemy.
Which brings us to Sierra Leone. This once-prosperous and peaceful country has for years been torn apart by civil war. There is no doubt whatsoever about the perpetrator: a homicidal psychopath called Foday Sankoh, whose RUF force, often composed of swarms of drugged teenagers, has lain waste the land, killed, skinned alive and mutilated thousands in his lust for power. A few months ago, defeated and captured, he was in jail under sentence of death.
Now he is free again, the countryıs diamond fields under his control, to continue the war and his endless butchery.
And who precisely was responsible for his liberation and incorporation into the Sierra Leone government?
Hapless
Step forward our apology for a Foreign Secretary, Robin Cook, whose ethicalı stupidity has now led to even more hapless peasants dragging their amputated stumps into the capital seeking help.
And why was Mr Cook so eager to achieve the restoration of Foday Sankoh? Because he did not like the way Sankoh had been defeated and captured.
And how was that? Why, by a small group of professional mercenaries who had been covertly assisted by our local High Commissioner and the Foreign Office on a nudge-nudge-wink-wink basis. This revelation upset the Islington luvvies.
Yet here is our quandary: if we are not prepared to watch mass butchery and do nothing, and we are not prepared to commit our armed forces, not just to evacuate our British nationals, but with a clear mandate to defeat the thugs, destroy them, capture the psycho who leads them and hand him over to the elected government, why not use mercenaries?
That is, of course, the emotive word. The men themselves prefer contract soldiersı. But it is all relative.
Hundreds of British officers and men are presently on secondmentı to friendly governments. Even more ex-soldiers are working as contract consultantsı. Britain sanctions them all. The French do the same, apart from harbouring their own Foreign Legion.
So what exactly is the difference? We are not talking about freelance psychos going off alone to Bosnia to indulge their deranged sadism, but a structured, officered combat force drawn from trained soldiers of many nations who are prepared to fight under contract.
Unseemly
There is nothing new in this. Soldiers for hire have been an integral (and honourable) ingredient to the history of combat, from Sparta and Athens, through ancient Rome to the Middle Ages, to the condottiere of Renaissance Italy, the European wars after that and up to the 19th century.
Only with the advent of true nationalism and patriotism about 200 years ago was it deemed unseemly to pay non-nationals to fight.
There were two such non-national combat units in Sierra Leone two years ago. Like them or not, they did the job. They defeated Sankohıs lethal rabble and captured the maniac leader.
One has gone into abeyance; the other, the British-run mercenary firm Sandline International, commanded by former Scots Guard Lt Colonel Tim Spicer, is still available.
If we wish, really wish, to end the torture of Sierra Leone, we should face reality. UN forces are mandated only to sit inside their own compounds waiting to be captured, as more than 500 recently were, giving up their modern weapons without a shot fired.
We should either do the job ourselves or engage to do it those who are prepared to do it for a price.
What we should not do any longer is what Robin Cook does: strike poses, preach about ethics and watch while the hapless farmers of Sierra Leone are dragged to the tree stump to have their hands hacked off.