Why the war in Afghanistan is justified.
Afghanistan: what Labour must do
Two more British soldiers were killed in Afghanistan today. Since Friday, 16 British soldiers have died in Afghanistan.
At a stroke, the number of British casualties since the beginning of the Helmand offensive has been doubled. Fourteen more lives have been lost and, with them, a sophisticated and expensive aircraft. The vulnerability of our position in Afghanistan, which depends on an air-bridge to Karachi, has been exposed. There are, inevitably, renewed calls for the withdrawal of our Servicemen from the theatre.
Such calls are influenced by the debate over Iraq. Many of those who favour the evacuation of British troops from Basra tend, almost unthinkingly, to extend their argument to Afghanistan. But the two cases are very different. We now know that Saddam did not pose a direct military threat to our interests. The Taliban regime, on the other hand, was training and exporting militiamen to fight the West. Occupying Afghanistan has allowed us to dismantle the training camps and to reduce substantially the operational capacity of the jihadists. While there will be endless arguments over whether Iraq is better off now than it was under the Ba'athists, there can be no such arguments about Afghanistan, which has benefited from foreign investment, female emancipation, new schools and hospitals and agrarian improvement.
"Ah, but you can't hold Afghanistan by force," say some half-clever people. "We tried that before." Even as history, this is bunkum. Britain won both Afghan wars. The massacre of the garrison in 1842, which became an icon of Imperial defeat, came about because Ghilzai tribesmen violated a safe-conduct agreement and ambushed a departing column. It was swiftly and brutally avenged. British policy in the 19th century was, in effect, to find a well-disposed local chieftain and offer him support so that he could dominate any rivals – which is roughly what we are doing today, with the difference that we now lend our support to the faction elected by the Afghans themselves. By and large, the policy is working: we have replaced an inimical regime with a friendly one and, although parts of the country remain lawless, we are at least taking on the terrorists in the Hindu Kush rather than in British cities.
All military campaigns involve danger, and ministers are culpable for not having made this clearer. However, the loss of the Nimrod, tragic as it is, does not alter the argument for continuing the fight. What it does is bloodily to underline the need to equip our troops properly. This newspaper has argued repeatedly, most recently last week, that our Armed Forces are let down by poor procurement decisions and an inadequate budget. Instead of trotting out clichés about our magnificent soldiers, ministers should give them the matériel they need.
telegraph.co.uk
