Here’s a cut we would applaud... (From The Northern Echo)

Here’s a cut we would applaud...

12:55pm Tuesday 22nd June 2010 in

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THERE have been early signs that the new coalition Government is keen to end our involvement in Afghanistan.

Good. I speak as chaplain to the Royal Fusiliers here in London and the regiment lost six men in a few weeks last summer.

The Afghanistan campaign is the most futile war imaginable. I agree, there was a good reason to send troops there in the weeks after 9/11, when the aim was to try to kill or capture Osama bin Laden and weaken al Qaida in the mountainous region on the border with Pakistan. But our enemies are now more diverse and diffuse so committing large forces to overthrow them will never work.

And declared policy is counter-productive: US President Barack Obama has committed many more troops and at the same time announced the date when he will begin their withdrawal. Well, if you were a Taliban commander, wouldn’t you just bide your time, secure in the knowledge that the occupation of your country by Western armies was not going to last for ever?

Besides, it’s not as if the identity of the enemy is at all clear cut. Whole tribes and regions change sides, corruption is endemic and bribery is a way of life, especially among President Hamid Karzai’s government who are supposed to be our allies. And the idea that we can somehow reform this corruption and bring Western-style democracy to ancient barbarism is a Utopian fantasy.

Yes, we have enemies in Afghanistan, but the main contingents of those who hate us are in Pakistan. The US has poured hundreds of millions of dollars into the coffers of Pakistan’s leaders to encourage them to hunt down and suppress terrorists, but the Pakistani authorities, including the military, are half-hearted about this task to say the least.

They hate Westerners with a vehemence which far exceeds the irritation they feel against the extremists on their own soil, most of whom are, after all, their fellow countrymen.

That Pakistan and not Afghanistan is the main source of the terrorist threat, that their training camps and brainwashing schools –the madrassas – are in Pakistan has never been in doubt.

In any case, the terrorist presence – like Tesco – is worldwide: al Qaida has bases wherever there is instability and lawlessness – in Somalia, the Sudan and Yemen, for example.

And the new disturbances which have destabilised Kyrgyzstan are providing the terrorists with new opportunities.

There is such a thing as a war worth fighting.

This year, we mark the 70th anniversary of the Battle of Britain, a key episode in a war that was worth fighting – the defeat of Nazism.

In that war millions lost their lives, but the alternative, the triumph of Hitler, would have been an even worse catastrophe.

My father fought in the RAF in the Battle of Britain and my father-in-law was at El Alamein with Monty. Many of their friends and comrades were killed, but both told me repeatedly that they never had a moment’s doubt that the war had to be fought.

Not so in the case of Afghanistan. It is a war that cannot be won. Even if it could, our enemies would re-emerge in other places.

When I speak with parents and spouses of our brave soldiers who have lost their lives in this futile campaign, I hope and pray for a speedy end to it. Mr Prime Minister, let there be no more waste of young lives. Bring the troops out now.