In January, Afghanistan’s former NATO commander General James L. Jones warned that the country risks becoming a “failed state” – the diplomatic euphemism for a country that descends into murderous chaos.
If that happened, he said, the gains that have been achieved in the six years of international action in Afghanistan which followed the 9/11 attacks on the United States, could be wiped out and NATO’s very future as a credible military alliance would be called into question.
Other warnings have been coming thick and fast in recent weeks.
The Afghanistan Study Group for example, co-chaired by Jones along with representatives of other countries, has talked about “too few military forces and insufficient economic aid.”
Foreign Secretary David Miliband and his U.S. counterpart Condoleezza Rice underlined the point when they visited Kandahar in the dangerous south of the country and called on other NATO countries to shoulder more of the combat burden of fighting the Taliban.
“This is not a peacekeeping fight,” Rice noted in London this week.
Those countries with significant troop numbers in the south are Britain, Canada, Australia and the Netherlands. Germany, Italy and France are in less hazardous areas. The United States’ 15,000 troops are mainly in the east.
The issue is bound to be at the forefront of discussion at the next NATO summit in Bucharest in April but the chances of getting major reinforcements into the South do not look good at the moment.
Do you think Britain should follow Canada’s example and threaten to withdraw its troops unless others pull their weight? Or would that merely give the Taliban free rein to re-establish their hardline presence and increase the threat of terrorist attacks in Western capitals?
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3 comments so far
The British troops still aren’t being supplied with the kit they need, i read today that they’re short of machine guns of all things, and the units that the troops come from is immense because Regiments are struggling to find recruits.
The government can give £50bn at the drop of a hat to a failing bank, but won’t supply our men and women with what they need. Totally unacceptable.
- Posted by JoeyFor whom we are fighting and for what?
- Posted by AjitThe NATO countries are half-hearted invaders who will eventually bring their soldiers home as a matter of domestic political expediency. The Taliban are fighting on and for their own ground, so will eventually prevail.
As for Britain’s role, does anyone in their right mind imagine that the terrorists who will carry out the next attacks on British cities are living in caves in Afghanistan? They are already here, working in our hospitals and other mass employers of anonymous foreigners until they get their chance to strike. The British government itself calculates that there are at least 2000 of them.
The whole ill-conceived Afghan enterprise is simply a sideshow to distract Western voters from the culpable negligence of their governments and is not worth the life of a single British soldier.
- Posted by Mike T