UK News
Insights from the UK and beyond
from The Great Debate UK:
“Bullet proof” Matt Croucher tells his story
In 2008, as a Royal Marine with 40 Commando in Afghanistan, Matt Croucher threw himself on a booby-trapped grenade to bear the brunt of its blast in an effort to save the lives of three comrades who were with him on a covert operation behind enemy lines at night.
"It's bonkers what goes through your mind when you're about to die," Croucher writes in his candid autobiography Bullet Proof, newly released in paperback by Random House. "All that crap about your life flashing before you, is just that, bollocks."
Croucher's day sack and protective clothing took the main impact when the grenade detonated and he and his friends survived.
"Disoriented and gobsmacked, I couldn't believe I hadn't lost a leg or an arm or anything," he writes.
Cameron: British patience with the Afghan mission is not limitless
New British Prime Minister David Cameron is not giving a timetable for the withdrawal of British troops from Afghanistan but during his first visit to the country as premier on Thursday he was already looking ahead to a time when the British have left the country.
“Even after our troops have left Afghanistan — and I believe that they will — the relationship between Britain and Afghanistan, just as the relationship between Britain and Pakistan, are vitally important relationships for all of our countries,” Cameron said at a press conference with Afghan President Hamid Karzai in Kabul.
Brown takes a different tack on Iraq
Tony Blair said he had no regrets about removing Saddam Hussein when he ended his session before the Chilcot inquiry in January. Gordon Brown, not surprisingly, took a different approach.
Perhaps mindful of the anger that Blair’s words had reignited, Brown topped and tailed his appearance by acknowledging the cost in human lives among British soldiers and Iraqi civilians of the conflict.
from Afghan Journal:
Is demilitarised Europe affecting operations in Afghanistan?
German Bundeswehr army soldiers in Kunduz, Afghanistan. Picture by Fabrizio Bensch)
U.S. frustration with Europe's unwillingness or inability to commit resources to Afghanistan, both in terms of men and materiel, appears to have boiled over. Last week U.S. Defence Secretary Robert Gates said in a speech at the National Defense University in Washington that public and political opposition to the military was so great in Europe it was affecting NATO operations in Afghanistan. The alliance desperately needed combat helicopters and cargo planes, but years of successive cutbacks in defence funding by European nations had left it unable to rise to the challenge.
How chaplains find peace during wartime
A British military chaplain prepares a Remembrance Day ceremony at the British cemetery in Kabul November 11, 2009/Jerry Lampen
Dozens of chaplains from the Church of England are serving with British armed forces in Afghanistan and Iraq. They are there when soldiers seek redemption around the time of battle, and they there are, standing in the operating theatre, waiting until the surgeon can do no more.
from Pakistan: Now or Never?:
In Afghanistan: fighting over the terms of a settlement
At last week's London conference, two of the great truisms of warfare punched their way to the surface. The first is that wars are fought as much on the home front as on the battlefield. With public support for the war in Afghanistan ebbing away, the United States and its allies in NATO have shifted from seeking outright victory to looking for an exit strategy that will allow them to start bringing home their troops next year. Rather as the British did after their two failed invasions of Afghanistan in the 19th century, they are sending in reinforcements in a display of military might which they hope will secure better terms in an eventual settlement.
The other truism is that if you can't win outright victory on the battlefield, then you have to negotiate with your enemies. President Hamid Karzai set the ball rolling by announcing he would hold a peace council to which, according to an Afghan government spokesman, the Taliban leadership would be invited. Karzai has made such suggestions before, and it is by no means clear the Taliban leadership will send representatives. What was different this time, however, was the context. Karzai's suggestion no longer met with the same resistance from war-weary governments, who stressed that it was up to the Afghans themselves to lead the process of reconciliation. He also coupled his call for a peace council with an appeal to Saudi Arabia and Pakistan to bring peace to Afghanistan. Saudi Arabia is a trusted interlocutor between the Afghan government and the Taliban leadership; Pakistan is the only country which still has some measure of leverage over them. Thus Karzai's call for a loya jirga, though not dramatic in itself, became emblematic of a broader shift towards seeking a political settlement to end the war.
from Afghan Journal:
The Afghan conference: a meeting of victors or the vanquished ?
If you listened to some of the rhetoric in the lead-up to Thursday's conference on Afghanistan in London and followed the coverage accompanying it, you would think it is a meeting of the victors of war.
Here we are, at a meeting attended by representatives from more than 50 countries, offering the Taliban a chance for peace before the "surge" of 30,000 additional U.S. troops hits them. They better grasp it before the tide turns decisively against them, seems to be the message. Host British Prime Minister Gordon, according to this report, vowed to "split the Taliban" while offering them a full part in the rebuilt Afghanistan if they united behind the government in Kabul.
from Pakistan: Now or Never?:
Failed airline attack raises fresh questions about battle against al Qaeda
In the absence of a coherent narrative about the failed Christmas Day attack on a flight from Amsterdam to Detroit, the debate about how best to tackle al Qaeda and its Islamist allies has once again been thrown wide open.
Does it support those who want more military pressure to deprive al Qaeda of its sanctuary on the Afghanistan-Pakistan border, or suggest a more diffuse threat from sympathisers across Europe, the Middle East and Africa? Should the United States open new fronts in emerging al Qaeda bases such as Yemen and Somalia, or focus instead on the fact that the attempted airline attack did not succeed, suggesting al Qaeda's ability to conduct mass-casualty assaults on U.S. territory has already been severely degraded in the years since 9/11?
Keith Weir on PMQs wins and losses
Gordon Brown fended off some familiar darts from Conservative leader David Cameron about the recession during prime minister’s questions on Wednesday, says Reuters UK chief correspondent Keith Weir.
Brown also spoke about Afghanistan after the prime minister confirmed on Monday that Britain would send an extra 500 soldiers to Afghanistan, bringing the UK troop level to about 10,000. The U.S. said on Tuesday it will increase its troop levels by 30,000 to about 100,000.
Drawing the line against the Taliban
Fight them there or fight them here?
Former Foreign Office minister Kim Howells poses the question in the Guardian in a piece made grimly relevant by Wednesday’s shooting dead of five British soldiers by an Afghan policeman.
Howells says troops should be brought back from Afghanistan and that the billions of pounds saved should be used to beef up homeland security in Britain – drawing the front line against al Qaeda around the UK rather than thousands of miles away in Helmand province.
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