Downing Street Says » Afghanistan

Asked to confirm whether another British soldier had been killed in Afghanistan, the PMOS said that he was aware of reports but he would rather not say any more until the MOD were ready to release details. He took the opportunity to point out to the lobby that last week in similar circumstances a number of outlets identified possible units which troops reported dead might have belonged, and that in turn had caused quite a lot of alarm amongst families of troops posted in Afghanistan. There were set procedures which the MOD observed and he would ask that out of sensitivity for the families everyone observed those set procedures because it did cause genuine problems for families.

Asked how we knew if we were winning or losing in Afghanistan, the PMOS said that it was down to the commander’s assessment on the ground of the difficulties which we faced. As the Prime Minister underlined this morning, the Defence Secretary had set out very very clearly in the full text of what he said in April, not the quote which was unfairly taken out of context, the tough missions we were taking on. That mission, and this point needed to repeatedly emphasized, was to support the first democratically elected government of Afghanistan. The wishes of 6 million people were that there should be a democratic system in Afghanistan. That was what we were supporting.

Put to him that the leader of Afghanistan had said that we were losing the war, the PMOS said that was a particularly one-sided expression of the overall view of President Karzai. What President Karzai had said repeatedly was that he paid tribute to the work of the UK in bringing about democracy in Afghanistan, he paid tribute to the work of the UK army in Afghanistan, he paid tribute to the work of the coalition repeatedly in Afghanistan and he had repeatedly underlined the determination of the Afghan people to have full control over all its territory.

1 Comment »

There is a political phenomenon known as \x93blowback\x94. It represents the unintended consequences of foreign policy actions. For example, the United States and Great Britain overthrew a functioning democracy in Iran in 1953. Then, after years of extreme repression under the Western-backed Shah, the Iranian people finally rose up and installed an Islamic regime fundamentally hostile to the West.

We are living with the consequences to this day.

A similar process is going on in Afghanistan right now.

Afghanistan was always a wild and a lawless country, and there have been numerous attempts over the centuries to tame it. The British had a go in the 19th century. So did the Russians more recently.

In the years of the Russian occupation the West supported Al Qaeda and the narco-trafficking Afghan warlords. After the Soviet withdrawal we allowed that poor, dry, opium-ridden country to go back to its lawless ways.

The Afghans have been fighting each other for over thirty years. The irony here is that it was the Taliban who finally brought order and peace to the land in the mid nineties. It was the Taliban who stopped the heroin trade.

Now we are fighting the Taliban again, heroin is on the rise, and British troops are being killed in some obscure corner of the world that most of us never even knew existed. How many of you had heard of Helmand Province before the latest troop deployments?

It is worth asking who the Taliban are. On film they look like some ragged ghostly army haunting the dusty mountain wildernesses between Afghanistan and Pakistan, like vengeful warriors from a medieval past.

Well I can tell you EXACTLY who the they are. They are not ghosts. They have a history. They are the orphaned sons of thirty years of the Afghan wars, brought up in the madrassa schools of Pakistan, funded by our great \x93ally\x94 Saudi Arabia.

The Taliban are oppressive to women because they have never known women. They have never known mothers or aunts or sisters or wives. They have had a peculiar, violent, repressive form of Islam whipped into them for endless years. That\x92s how they grew up. In other words, this is an army made up almost entirely of abused children.

This is what I mean by \x93blowback\x94. The Taliban are the unintended result of Western foreign policy, the creation of those two Islamic allies in the war on terror, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, and of years of shameful neglect. We allowed them to fight our wars for us during the Cold War era, taking on the might of the Soviet Empire, and then left them to rot.

Tell me: why should we expect them to be grateful now?

http://tenthousanddays.blogspot.com/
Comment by CJ Stone — 11 Jul 2006 on 7:00 am | Link

RSS feed for comments on this post.

Post a public comment

Name (required)
E-mail (required)
(You must give an email address, but it will not be displayed to the public.)
Website
(You may give your website, and it will be displayed to the public.)

Comments:

This is not a way of contacting the Prime Minister. If you would like to contact the Prime Minister, go to the 10 Downing Street official site.

Privacy note: Shortly after posting, your name and comment will be displayed on the site. This means that people searching for your name on the Internet will be able to find and read your comment.

Original PMOS briefings are © Crown Copyright. Crown Copyright material is reproduced with the permission of the Controller of HMSO and the Queen's Printer for Scotland. Click-use licence number C02W0004089. Material is reproduced from the original 10 Downing Street source, but may not be the most up-to-date version of the briefings, which might be revised at the original source. Users should check with the original source in case of revisions. Comments are © Copyright contributors. Everything else is © Copyright Downing Street Says.

» Wednesday, July 5, 2006

Afghanistan

1 Comment »

Post a public comment

Search

Supported by

Recent Briefings

Archives

Links

Syndicate (RSS/XML)

Credits

Enquiries