Should the UK keep fighting in Afghanistan?

| 12-07-2009| Politics & Law

This is a thought on Afghanistan brought on this morning whilst reading a post written by Charonqc, a law professor in the UK, on his blog, following an especially bad week for the British in which eight soldiers were killed in just one day.

Should the UK keep fighting in Afghanistan?

This is a very serious business, too serious for the waffling platitudes currently being churned out by Brown et al. to be at all acceptable, although it seems there is precious little we can do about this government’s accountability.

In our age of 24-hour, real-time Twitter updates, – far removed from the hot, ditch-ridden, bearded world we see on YouTube and read about on websites when we click on the latest link – it seems intelligent thought and advice should get through to those at the top much more easily than it does. Perhaps it was always thus.

In that mountainous country more than 2.5 times the size of the UK, land-locked and with porous, unfriendly borders, no-one who matters seems to know why we’re there, what Ainsworth’s end-state really looks like or how long it will take.

On this fine Sunday morning – which all those brave souls (British and Afghan) who have died in Helmand will never see or care about again – we can click through to articles in the Guardian which have Brown agreeing to an extra 2,000 troops and articles in the Independent which have him cutting 1,500 from their current levels.

Helicopters are the answer, helicopters aren’t. More troops, fewer troops. Burn the poppies, legalise the poppies.

Confusion reigns within government and without.

If representative, soldiers’ letters published in the Guardian make it clear that they really don’t have much idea about what they’re doing there either;

An Independent article analyses no fewer than 10 different possible strategic aims that might encapsulate our reason for being in Afghanistan.

Everything would suggest we are very far from Brown and Miliband’s ‘clear strategy’.

And at 2009 casualty rates, how committed will politicians, the military and the British public really be?

With my limited maths skills, it seems we’re at a rate of about 2.57 killed, wounded or otherwise evacuated per day. With 172 days left in the year, that’s another 442 dead or wounded by New Year’s Day 2010, just shy of a whole battalion.

And if, as we are told, casualty figures are to get worse in the coming months, and the Taliban were to keep up this week’s atrocious example of 8 dead in 24-hours, that would be 1,376 dead by New Year’s Day. More than two battalions’ worth of dead, plus all the extra wounded.

The entire 8,000-strong task force would only last until New Year’s Day 2012 at that rate, the combat element of it much less.

And then what? Send the other 90,000? Bring back national service? Spend more money we don’t have fighting a war which has no clear strategy?

Endex. Everybody out.

There will be time and proper reason again for our soldiers to be brave and courageous in the not-too-distant future.

For them to continue to be so in the Sangin valley should bring shame upon our politicians and, if what Mike says about them representing us is true, perhaps upon us too for not demanding their proper diligence with our soldiers’ lives.