Afghanistan, a war Britain can't win

BRITAIN’S top Army commander on the ground in Afghanistan has admitted that British soldiers are dying in a war we can't win.
Brigadier Mark Carleton-Smith, Commander of 16 Air Assault Brigade, which is responsible for the occupation of Helmand Province, said last week:
“We are not going to win this war?.
He said that in the end a deal would have to be done with the Taleban, the very enemy that our troops, at America’s behest, are meant to be driving out and defeating to bring an end to international terrorism!

Since Tony Blair blindly followed George Bush into the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, a policy supinely continued by Gordon Brown, 119 British servicemen and women have died there - with 24 fatalities between March and August this year alone. The death toll is getting worse because the Taleban are taking back control of much of the south of Afghanistan because the people there are turning away from the regime of US puppet Hamid Karzai in disgust at the corruption and incompetence of his officials.

No British Government should be sending our soldiers, whose role is to defend Britain and the British people, to lay down their lives in a war that they can not win. Yet the Conservative opposition and the Liberal Democrats still support the Labour Government’s policy in Afghanistan, instead of asking what we are trying to achieve there and if there’s not a better way of achieving it.

There is only one reason to fight a war. To defend our own national interests that can't be defended in any other way. It is not to “spread democracy? or otherwise impose our way of life on other nations and cultures.

In Afghanistan we have two national interests involved. Firstly, we need to stop the large-scale growing of the opium poppy, from which heroin is produced. Afghanistan is the ultimate source of 90% of the heroin peddled on British streets. Ironically, British troops have now been told to take no action to stop Afghans growing the heroin poppy because doing so “alienates them? and fuels further resistance to our presence in their country.

Secondly, we need to stop the country being used as a safe base and training area from which Islamic terrorists can strike at Britain and other Western nations, but the presence of Western troops on Afghan soil only enables Muslim fanatics to exploit perfectly justified resentment at foreign occupation. - would we be happy with Afghan soldiers patrolling in Kent?

Both these worthy aims can be achieved more reliably and at less cost in British lives and taxpayers' money without putting a single British soldier in harm's way. How? - by applying the lessons Britain learned over 100 years ago after two earlier disastrous bloody failures of British arms in Afghanistan. Then the issue was Afghans raiding over the border into British India and supporting Russian imperial interventions in Central Asia.

After many brave British soldiers died on “Afghanistan's bloody plains?, we learned a better way. We simply paid the tribal warlords who, then as now, ruled the Pashtun lands of Southern Afghanistan, to police themselves and leave us alone. A policy that worked from the 1880's to 1947, apart from one brief period just after the First World War when some Whitehall beancounter cut off the chiefs' payments and started a brief war.

Today, we need simply offer to pay the Afghan warlords, including if need be the Taleban, slightly more than they can each earn from selling their heroin poppy crop to global drug dealers NOT to grow poppies. In effect, we'd give them “set-aside payments? on their fields.

Given that the Afghans earn a minute fraction of the eventual street value of the heroin made from their poppies the cost would be a lot less than is currently being spent on keeping 7500 soldiers fighting there. We would use satellite and high-level aerial reconnaissance to check that they were abiding by the deal and our Imperial forebears found that the Pashtun tribesmen were in the main men of honour who would abide by such agreements. But if poppy fields were to be found growing, the payments would stop and long-acting weedkiller sodium chlorate - would be dropped from high altitude on the offending fields, so the villagers wouldn't be able to grow anything on them.

We would also put a massive bounty on the heads of al-Qaeda leaders and pay the warlords an additional subsidy not to offer hospitality to al-Qaeda or anyone else using their lands as a base to attack Britain. Such a policy would safeguard essential British interests at far lower cost and without sacrificing our servicemen.

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During it's brief tenure at the helm of domestic policy in Afghanistan the Taliban practically destroyed the opium production of the country and despite the propaganda brought stability, peace and a glimmer of hope and prosperity to a country ravaged by decades of war, civil unrest and corruption. Anyone who is involved out there will tell you the whole purpose of this exercise was to restore and support the activities of the Afghan drug barons and the international drug trafficking cartels controlled by the US. It would be a lot easier and certainly less expensive both financially and in terms of human lives if we just gave the Afghan 'heroin industry' an import licence and be done with it.

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