Here’s your starter for ten as we continue our Saturday slot posing a view for debate:
Lib Dem MEP Chris Davies has recently written to Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg renewing his call for British troops to be withdrawn from Afghanistan:
It is very difficult to justify our continued engagement when the reasons for it so often appear contradictory and open to challenge. I suspect one reason why 77% of people in this country tell pollsters that they want our troops out of Afghanistan is because they either do not know what are the objectives for their presence or do not believe that these can be achieved. I share these doubts.
The American-led assault against the Taliban government was launched in the wake of the 2001 aircraft hijackings and attack upon the World Trade Centre. It had United Nations support because the Taliban provided shelter for the al-Qa’ida leaders who planned that outrage. But the al-Qa’ida presence has long since been removed, at least so far as this will ever be possible in such a land, and the Americans have the technology and weaponry to prevent it regrouping in an organised fashion
It has been claimed that our presence in Afghanistan is intended to keep safe the streets of Britain. I do not believe this case can be sustained. Our soldiers are easily portrayed as foreign invaders who should be resisted by Afghan patriots, and our presence in the country may not only contribute to instability there but increase the risk of maverick attacks on people here.
Nearly a decade on the American-led forces are still very far from establishing an Afghan national army or police force that can claim to be representative of all people in the country. It is widely recognised, not least by President Karzai, that an accommodation must be found with the Taliban. Our money, or ‘soft diplomacy’, may help facilitate this, and an alternative political strategy should be developed with this in mind. In the meantime British soldiers continue to be killed by people who will one day be part of the Afghan government.
Undoubtedly the withdrawal of our troops would present risks. It could allow the Taliban to increase their influence and to take control of a greater part of the country. It might also allow the Taliban to strengthen their presence in Pakistan. But then again it might not, or not to any significant degree.
The majority of Taliban fighters are said to be local farmers who have no great national ambitions. I am not sure that our allies, the former warlords who are now politicians and regional governors, have any greater moral right to govern parts of the country than the Taliban but they have their own private militias and will not easily surrender territory.
I have heard it argued that the principal reason that British troops remain in Afghanistan is because we do not want to weaken our relationship with the Americans by following the example of other European states and announcing a date for withdrawal. I do not regard such a reason as sufficient justification for the death of our soldiers.
There will be no happy ending to our involvement in Afghanistan. At some point we will start to withdraw our forces, and in years to come we shall question why we did not take this step this at an earlier date. Let it commence now, before still more lives have been lost for no good purpose.
Agree? Disagree? Over to you and the comments thread …
Follow @LibDemVoice on Twitter
Like us on Facebook
Subscribe to our feed
Sign-up for our daily email digest
"Malcolm Saville made me an archaeologist"
One million viewings but here comes the competition!
Waiting for the bus
Fraser's weekly ward surgeries tonight! #dundeewestend
'Big demands on our services... less and less money' Watford Mayor Peter Taylor defends local government on GB News
James Fowler
Peter Martin
Peter Hirst
Joe Bourke
23 Comments
A little context, I have friends out there, have a very good knowledge of what goes on and what’s being achieved. It’s also likely that I’ll be out there at some point in the next few months. One friend went out a few weeks ago, another landed in Kabul on Friday after five days in transit, another flies in the next week as an EOD operator.
It’s worth bearing in mind that Afghanistan is roughly three sub-states, with different situations in each. In the media we generally only hear about what goes on in the South West of the country as that’s where our main ground effort is. It’s the area that abuts the Durand Line, the border between India and Afghanistan agreed under the government in Delhi in 1893. As with so many imperial borders it doesn’t take into account the actual laydown of tribal loyalties so the border cuts right through the Pashtun areas with the Federally Administered Tribal Areas in Pakistan. The North and East of Afghanistan are reasonably stable, there are still issues but far fewer, and reasonable progress is being made.
Military activity takes place to support work going on to develop civil society, to provide security for reconstruction and governance activities to take place.
There are a number of things going on, but for me there are two that are extremely significant, Rule of Law and education. British activities are involved in both of those with access to education for all, a key building block for any other reform. We do see in the media our involvement in policing reform, and that is a high risk element of the package, What we don’t see reported is the supporting judicial system and penal system that any RoL effort demands, it is going on and it’s making improvements. In particular the relationship between the state judicial system and the non-state system, and identifying where there should be governance applied in the non-state.
Talk of ”victory” is misleading, in stabilisation and structural reform there is no such thing, there is merely the opportunity to wind down and hand over. We’re not a desperately good role model, our own policing, judicial and penal system leaves a lot to be desired, our own parliament is an embarrassment, however our security sector governance is good, our ”non-state access to justice” is pretty good, our education model and health model are both far superior to others.
From a fairly cold military perspective, yes we are losing people, but service with the Army, Navy and Air Force is something where that is a risk. All three are represented in Afghanistan, and all three are out on the ground with both the policing and security patrols and with the military stabilisation and reconstruction group.
The other aspect for me is that we got into this mess, and we have an obligation to make the best of getting out. Operations in Afghanistan in 2001/ 2002 were entirely justifiable. We were forced to take our eye off the ball for Tony & Georges big adventure in the sandpit and in doing so failed to adhere to the first principle of war. If we’d focused on Afghanistan we wouldn’t be where we are now, it’s likely that a lot more progress would have been made. We have an obligation to stick it out.
I watched an in-depth TV news item on the Taliban yesterday. The opening shots were of a single tribally dressed Afghan fighter, carrying his weapon, outlined on the crest of a mountain. Then I looked more closely and just below him on the hillside were at least ten other tribesmen similarly dressed and all with weapons. They had just disappeared into the scenery with the most perfect camouflage. Thousands of square miles of impossible terrain and a people that are totally at home in their surroundings. How would it be possible to defeat them?
Yesterday the Taliban could afford to send FIVE suicide bombers on one mission. That is hardly the mark of an enemy that is struggling to find either men or motivation.
In 1842 the British lost a whole army of 16,000 men. One of the few times in recorded history that a total army has been massacred. Only one man was left to tell the tale. The Soviets failed in the 1980s at an estimated cost of a million men in combatants and civilians.
Time to pull out now I think.
I don’t know if there is anyone who remembers Des Wilson. Des was one of the greatest campaigners this country has ever had and for a number of years we were lucky to have him as a party member and activist.
He always emphasised that the most important thing in running a campaign is to work out your achievable objectives. What are they in Afghanistan?
Can we stop the Taliban taking over in the south and east of the country? We have been in Afghanistan for over 8 years and we are still fighting them. We want the Afghan army to take over, but 8 years on and they do not seem to be ready yet. Indeed, how can we be sure that when we leave they they don’t simply join forces with the Taliban? Last year Channel 4 News showed video evidence of the Afghan army handing over weapons to the Taliban. How much of that is going on?
What about the North and the West? The Taliban have infiltrated large parts of the country here as well, but it is likely the the Shia Muslims will resist the Sunni Taliban in Herat, and the Tajiks are likely to do so in the north as they have done before. Kabul could go either way. Withdraw from these regions then our allies could suffer a terrible fate.
There are concerns that Mohammed Kaizai is corrupt. How do we put an end to this? At the moment he seems impregnable. Yet he must know the the history of Afghan presidents is that it is very likely he will experience a terrible death at the hands of his opponents. So lets withdraw from the south and west, we cannot win there. Give them regional autonomy. Lets tell Kaizai that we will withdraw further unless he stops being corrupt. Then for the first time we have leverage over how he behaves.
There are no perfect solutions. We always get reports of progress being made, but this is wearing thin after 8 years. Whatever progress is being made is not enough because our troops are still there and there is a lot of violence taking place. We can’t afford to stay any longer. The idea that the west knows how to run countries like Afghanistan has been shown to be false. Where a country is culturally radically different to our own, we cannot run it any better than the locals, even the despotic ones. Our model of liberal democracy and free markets is not a one size fits all model that you can apply to every country.
Unlike our immoral, and probably illegal, invasion of Iraq we could justify the invasion of Afghanistan as our ally, the United States, had been attacked from that country.
Having invaded Afghanistan we failed to fufil our responsibilities to install sound governance. The military resources which could have been used to do provide security for this were instead being used to attack Iraqis.
After missing that opportunity we have just been reacting to events. NATO lacks the will to provide sufficient armed forces to hold sufficient ground for long enough to force a negotiated solution.
Our armed forces are being killed, the people of Afghanistan are being killed as a result of the moral and strategic failings of the last Labour government.
Continuing to fight (but not to secure good governance) in Afghanistan is not in our strategic interest and serves no moral purpose.
I think this sort of view is shared by a great many people in Britain. One of the tragedies about the 2010 general election (for all those who think general elections are about giving “the people” a choice) is that not one of the three main parties provided an opportunity for people who feel as I do to express that choice through the democratic process.
I should modify my last remark slightly. In my new constituency there was one candidate who was opposed to our continuing to fight in Afghanistan but he was a BNP candidate. It is a very poor state of affairs where the only way to express opposition to this war is to vote for the BNP.
Or so the Americans would have us believe, but they’ve admitted they can’t prove anything really (bin Laden has both claimed and denied responsibility, so there’s no particular reason to believe anything he says) and the Taliban provided no more shelter than any other sovereign nation would. They offered to put all those people on trial, and the US responded by bombing them. It’s not very convincing.
I think it’s fairly clear to everybody at this point that the al-Qaeda stuff was just conveniently timed political posturing, and the US had been intending to invade for months – they just wanted to get rid of the Taliban because they don’t like Islamic extremist governments. I suppose one could argue that’s a legitimate position.
No international ambitions, for sure. Very few Afghanis have ever been mixed up in something like that – mostly they’ve just been fighting other Afghanis. That’s kinda the problem; it’s not much of a nation. They’ve been in a more or less constant state of civil war since the fall of the Soviet Union, and it’s hard to care about the rest of the world when that happens.
The invasion and occupation haven’t changed any of that much. It’s hard to see how further occupation is going to help. They need civilian support to build a viable government and a lasting peace, not military domination. The only way military force is going to get them to stop fighting is when everybody is dead.
Like it or not we have made commitments to our NATO allies, in particular the U.S.A., and to the Afghan government and people, we should live up to those obligations.
The population centric counterinsurgency strategy, to which ISAF is now committed, affords us the best opportunity to leave Afghanistan in the best possible state whilst pulling out now would pretty much guarantee a return to the disastrous situation of the 1990’s. It is wrong to say that we are losing, we have moved from mere occupation and are properly focussed on Afghanistan and have adopted an appropriate strategy. There is an increased focus on avoiding civilian casualties and an emphasis on living amongst the population.
Where the coalition forces have and are still failing is in providing good governance, there is an assumption that government at all levels can be imposed from above and as Liberal Democrats we know this does not work, this can be seen clearly in the recent operation in Marja where the attempt to provide a ‘government in a box’ has had to be rethought. More than any other party, Liberal Democrats understand what ‘all politics is local’ really means; that good local government is built on local organising and campaigning, that no one can just move into an are and govern for people no matter how well intentioned they may be, we understand what it is like to rebuild a moribund local party organisation from scratch. This is where I believe we can make a distinctive and significant contribution, we must insist that proper support is put in place to enable Afghans to develop their own political organisations and structures based around local needs. Particular ideologies, philosophies and even political systems should not be our concern, those should be for Afghans to decide; our concern to enable, to facilitate to support and to get out when we are not wanted or needed.
@Mathew
We have been following those commitments for the best part of a decade . If we followed that logic of making commitments the Americains would still be in Vietnam.
Did we not also make commitments to people in this country . many of which it is becoming clear we ae not going to fullfill. ?
@Matthew, what would you do if local people support candidates who are sympathetic to the Taliban, or are susceptible to being corrupted by them?
The reason our troops are in Afghanistan is because we cannot control the country in terms of stopping the Taliban.
Local government will also mean a loss of control.
Personally I think this is what should be allowed to happen, but I am not sure you have factored this into your calculations.
@Geoffrey
Our armed forces are operating in Afghanistan to support the efforts of the Stabilisation Unit, FCO, Ministry of Justice and DFID to develop just that governance structure. What Mathew is not aware of is that much of the governance is aimed at the local, rather than the national level. There is also effort ongoing at the central government level in Kabul, but far more effort is regional and local.
Hence this rhetoric we’ve had recently about ”talking with the Taliban” is mildly specious, it already happens at the local level. There is a clear risk that the Taliban can provide a more attractive proposition, so some of the effort is education, and putting in place the governance around trade.
I should probably add that those of us who do specialise in these areas are very aware of the interplay between general security, policing, trade, education and infrastructure.
There is one way that would solve the whole problem but is an unlikely scenario as the weapons companies, oil companies and the militarists that like to rule us would lose so much.
The tribal chiefs are allowed to take back their traditional lands. The poppy harvest continues but we buy the raw opium at a higher price than the Taliban would be prepared to pay. We would need secure market places but there would be no need for the general population to keep running to the Taliban for funds. The poppy harvest could either be turned into medical opiates, which the west consumes in huge quantities and the surplus would be destroyed. This would also take control of much of the world’s illegal drug trade. So simple I wonder why no-one has thought of it before?
This would be a win win all round – except of course for the arms manufacturers, whose main aim is to keep all these wars smouldering away. George Orwell was correct. We are not allowed peace because as soon as we make peace with one enemy then a new one is created. Funny isn’t it.
Quiz question to finish – who is the largest individual customer for oil in the world?
Answer – US Armed Forces.
No more need be said.
@Keith
A few observations, although you may wish to discount them as I’ve already identified upthread that I am rather experienced in matters military.
I’m sure it’ll come as no surprise that state intervention in the market has a disruptive effect, indeed your suggestion is that ”the state”, presumably under Kabul rather than London or Washington, would become the monopoly supplier of poppy to the wider medical market. The idea of ”buying up all the poppy” was tried, I think in 2005, perhaps unsurprisingly the cost rocketed, it incentivised an increase in poppy cultivation that had the result of flooding the market with processed heroin about 12 months later. A result was that the street price of heroin dropped significantly, although there was evidence of stockpiling at various points in the supply chain.
In Afghanistan I’m afraid that the result of your suggestion would be to entrench the requirement for western forces to be in country for the foreseeable future. It would have little effect on the supply of processed heroin, although there would be about three years worth of significant price fluctuation.
A further effect would be a need to import basic foodstuffs to a far greater extent than now, cultivation of foodcrops would be reduced as the poppy cultivation increased again.
One observation that I would make, and it’s in common with several contributors to this thread, is that there is little distinction between ”Taliban” and ”Tribal hierarchy” in many areas.
It’s really easy to grow poppies. Afghanistan is not a historical site of the drug trade – in fact, when the Taliban had control of the country, they were ruthless in stamping out production sites, so it had very little. The recent surge in opium production is precisely because some idiots bombed all the real crops, so the Afghanis needed to grow something that was easy, fast, and robust and could be sold for enough money to buy the food, supplies, and weapons they needed.
The international drug trade can carry on just fine without Afghanistan. It’s only there because the Afghanis are desperate to sell.
Points taken.
I was thinking we could revive the East India Company which was the financial muscle of the British Empire and made most of its wealth from the opium trade…………. or perhaps not !!!
Trade has to be the answer to any conflict and that has always been the case throughout history.
My other point is that military solutions are rarely the best solution and usually the worst but they are sold to us as being one of the few options open to governments.
Not dissimilar to using rockets to explore space.
Many other ways of leaving our planet have been suggested by eminent scientists and such visionaries as Arthur C Clarke. Richard Branson’s latest project is one of them. However you dont kill many people or deliver too many bombs on Moscow or Beijing with vehicles moving at a slow but steady acceleration.
ALL the Government money (East and West) for 60 years has gone into explosive Rocketry to explore space but that is really only a secondary use of the engineering capability.
We are all in the hands of the warmongers and perhaps it will always be that way.
@Keith
The point I’ve made a couple of times is that military effort isn’t happening in isolation, it’s there to support the governance and stabilisation effort. That effort doesn’t make it into the media very often.
What we see from many of the embeds is that they want to go out to the places where there is a lot of hostile activity going on, so what we see in the papers and on TV is a disproportionate presentation of that side of things. They’re not often keen on trogging round with infrastructure reconstruction, sitting in Shura with the governance advisers, sitting in discussions around judicial process and the balance between state and non-state justice,
A ”military activity” is only there to allow the others access, letting them do their job. What the general public don’t see is what’s happening once things are stable enough that there isn’t a significant need for kinetic activity to assure it.
What truly excellent comments from Alistair.
Harry Paget Flashman?
Like 1842, the Soviet invasion (which was supported by many of the entryists who subverted and turned the likes of the StWC [1] into a more-than-objectively pro-fascist organization) wasn’t particularly concerned with noble pursuits such as relief work. Both were strictly terroritorial and expansionist, and ignored/mistreated civilians accordingly.
This knee-jerk reference to supposed American duplicity and mendacity is becoming really boring; and as aspects of civil society Afghanistan improve, increasingly perverse. A lot of people who’re not American believe that as well… America ‘stole’ your country’s Empire 60 years ago, Andrew. Get over it.
The invasion of Afghanistan occurred after the mass-murder of thousands of American citizens, and for me the ultimate symbol of boorish ‘anti-Americanism’ will always be the sight of the American Ambassador to the UK (a New Yorker) being reduced to tears by inhumane street-thugs on Any Questions right after the fact.
Links please.
This isn’t a debate in Unk-Unk. OBL and/or al Qaeda have been linked to previous attacks, such as the mass-murder of hundreds of Kenyan workers and another attack on the WTC. If you have reason to believe that 11/9 was by someone else, provide an argument.
Almost 200 sovereign nations didn’t. Plus, ownership of a country does not go to whichever gangmasters are in charge. Lastly, the Taleban wasn’t even the recognized sovereign power in Afghanistan.
Yes there should be. Lots. No! Don’t give us a BBC News link from 1997 about some oil exec meeting in Texas!
Saddam had form in launching wars of aggression (real WoA, not the twaddle about the 2003 invasion being more supposedly aggressive than others). Thousands of Afghan civilians have been killed by Western-forces in similar circumstances to thousands more in Iraq… are their deaths excusable ‘cos there was a legal document somewhere?
Immoral? You said it!
Saddam also had form in terrorizing and annihilating Iraqis: despite all that’s happened over the past seven years, the survivors think his deposition was for the best
Were there less means of recourse against this ‘cos it was an internal matter, and avenging American deaths is more pressing?
Immoral? You said it!
[1] The Stop the War – no! Not that one! – Coalition was not formed in the run up to March 2003, which would have made sense. It was formed less than a fortnight after the mass-murder of 3,000 civilians in America.
Of course I meant Question Time.
William Brydon was believed to be the only survivor.
Why does it have to be by anybody? I know the Americans have trouble believing that something so spectacular could be anything less than the act of a huge conspiracy, but there’s no particular reason to believe it extended beyond the people who were involved, and the US has only linked it to others by forced confessions via torture, which we all know aren’t reliable.
We don’t need an “alternative conspiracy theory”. The burden of proof is clearly on those who wish to show that the al-Qaeda conspiracy existed – something which they haven’t been able to do in the past nine years. I’ve never found conspiracy theories without proof to be very convincing.
Because they weren’t in the other nations. Let’s be clear about what the US demanded here: the illegal extraordinary rendition of Afghani citizens into US military custody without even extradition, let alone trial, and with no prospect of them ever receiving a fair trial once in US hands. Any nation would have refused that demand, and countered with an offer of trial (or extradition if a suitable treaty existed). That is not “sheltering”, it’s straightforward respect for the rule of law. It’s the same appalling thing we’ve been trying to get the UK to stop participating in.
Drat it, lost the source I was thinking of. US admissions aside, the important point is that they haven’t proved anything – we’ve had nothing but government claims, as if they’d never lied about such things.
It is quite remarkable how few people have actually been tried for actions relating to the WTC attacks.
See what Mr. Suffield’s gone and done, boys and girls? He continues to infer irrationality and vengefulness on ‘Americans’… I mean, all that happened was seeing thousands of their friends and family dying live on television.
What’s most shocking, I found, is the disconnect… it wasn’t aeroplane-loads of humans flown into skyscrapers, or thousands crushed under collapsing buildings. It was only Americans.
But it wasn’t. Almost four hundred non-Americans died on 11/9, and their friends and families tend to blame actors in Afghanistan.
Rubbish. Absolute rubbish. The “huge conspiracy” would be the American state conspiring the fly robot controlled aeroplanes (or plywood built around missiles; because those claiming their families were onboard those aeroplanes are only Americans and probably mistaken) after the WTC was seeded with explosives, and the USAAF was brought in to fire missiles at the Pentagon.
The simple scenario is that a rag-tag of 19+1 North Africans and Arabs, with minimal funding and training in flying aeroplanes (but not landing), blew the heart out of a major Western city. And *that* is what some have difficulty believing… so either they construct endlessly elaborate scenarios which rely on the whole state pulling the wool over the public’s eyes (but they’re more intelligent and have sussed them out), or they come out with guff boarding on sophistry.
Of course the actual hijackers died on 11/9. They still required direction: they did not arise, de novo, from the sand. And that was what actors in Afghanistan were accused of.
This is not a discussion about the use of torture. In my experience, throwing in new information is a sign of deceit in order to win the discussion through deceit: just like Arnold Judas Rimmer tried to win at draughts with the skutters.
Who’s talking about a monolithic organization called al-Qaeda which meets every Friday around a table? I’m not. Some of us don’t need the security blanket of tangible organizations, built around Western standards with command and control structures, to believe in a threat.
Why don’t you tell the families of the victims of A-Q in Algeria, or those hundreds of Kenyans incinerated by OBL’s lot that those events were post modern constructions in some Western commentators’ minds? I have an Algerian friend who came from a village where a teenage girl was shot dead for not wearing a scarf, and a Kenyan friend felt the bomb-blast at the US Embassy from a few streets away. They’d love to hear from you.
That’s not what you said. You stated clearly that they received no more accommodation than they would have elsewhere. Except they didn’t. Because no-one (except maybe North Korea) would have had them.
And you persist in describing the Taleban as a legitimate Government. It wasn’t. So stop it.
No, let’s not be “clear”. As I said above, this is not a discussion about torture/rendition. You have myriad other threads to discuss that. Stick to the discussion here.
You had only one link in the whole of the Internet? Can’t have been very reliable, then.
Links, please.
That’s because most of the known names are dead! And most of the other suspects were being protected by an unrecognized ‘government’. What would you have suggested, invasion?
How many have been tried for the Omagh bombing? That happened.
Apart from the Gang of Four, it is quite remarkable how few people have been tried for the Cultural Revolution in China. Even fewer have been tried for Stalin’s Great Terror.
But no-one – at least no-one with a glimmer of humanity – claims they didn’t take place.
The comparison with the loss of a column is a useful one, notwithstanding any quibbling around survivors. There were a small handful, but only one actually completed the trek, arriving in Jalalabad, without having to be recovered. The circumstances have some useful parallels. The behaviour of the British in Kabul had led to losing the confidence of the Emir, who evicted the force. The column was assured of free passage yet was attacked in the Khord pass, it wasn’t configured as a defensive column, but was essentially a rout and had a very high proportion of non-combatants. The key points are that we operate under the government in Kabul, however authoritative it may be, and that the control of Kabul, particularly in the Pashtun areas, is restricted.
Stepping back a little to the legitimacy of the initial invasion, I do think it’s a pretty extreme stretch to suggest that the 9/11 attacks were a minor operation. Getting those numbers of operators into the US, trained and in place for multiple a/c hijackings is not an insignificant operation. There is evidence, published by the US review of the issues that support the view that it was planned and funded by the AQ leadership in Afghanistan and the FATA.
If I may observe, both of you are conflating Taliban and Al-Queda, they’re not the same thing. AQ itself is predominantly a guiding philosophy adopted by a wide range of terrorist groups globally. The common theme is a very literal and old fashioned approach to Islam, that ignores much of the learning and progress in Persia. The schools that support it were developed as a reaction to the Indian Mutiny of 1857. Taliban is contained within Afghanistan and the FATA, and is a bit of a motley collection. Some who are labelled are merely defending their lands, others are more idealogical.
I would observe that the number of prosecutions being low is a mildly specious argument. Those who actualy flew the planes are no longer available, others probably haven’t been captured. There is an issue, and I’m very glad that as a party we challenge the US on their handling of prisoners. Until such time as the US regime are prepaed to put those they hold into a court of law it’s unlikely to happen. I don’t see their current approach as being particularly indicative of a lack of substance in the assertions that AQ were key funders and planners of 9/11.
It’s certainly not my intention… I see them both as separate entities, assuming they can be considered coherent groups with Western-style command-and-control structures. OBL was accommodated by that the gangmasters in control of Afghanistan, and I’ll continue stating that.
Ahmed Rashid’s book from 2000, Taleban is essential reading on the subject.
As for that title question, I hold with the non-commital statement of “as long as it takes”. Obviously, if the Afghan Government (whomever that may be) called for troops to leave, there wouldn’t be much choice. Also specious is any argument that the mission has gone on for longer than the Second World War… well, yes, but there is such a thing as scale.
The few thousand ISAF, NATO, British and American troops who’ve died since 2001 would represent a good day at certain points in said war.
For simplicity’s sake, let’s reduce potential positions on withdrawal to one of three options:
i. British troops have no business being in foreign countries;
ii. British troops have outlived their usefulness and should be withdrawn;
iii. Humanitarian aid is great until one has to get off the fence and commit because harsh language doesn’t always work.
The first option has the benefit of honesty. The second option often is based on the immediacy of reportage from such conflicts, often the most lurid intended to leave an impression of reporter own preconceptions: sod a week being a long time in politics; that was pre mass media, and the time-scale has been greatly compressed.
The third option merits only scorn.
I am aware of where our effort is going, what I question is the method of achieving the aim of good local government. What is required is local solutions to local problems, we simply can no longer turn up and say we know what’s best for you.
It is often quoted that the Taleban government attempted to eradicate Opium production however this was only true for the final year of their control (a 91% reduction), previously they had succeeded in doubling production and it was not until their July 2000 decision to outlaw it that such measures were taken, since the 2001 invasion opium production has roughly mirrored the area under Taleban control and it is only in the last two or three years since the change of strategy that production has once again started to fall, see this most recent report of the UNODC for details.