Zardari Is Right, Of Course

Gerald Warner writes:

When the president of what is virtually a failed state, with a recent record of military dictatorship, a disaffected intelligence service, an ominous nuclear capacity, currently suffering a major natural disaster and under imminent threat of succumbing to jihadist subversion is telling the plain, unvarnished truth, while the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom is talking delusional and dishonest rubbish, that is a measure of the deficit of trust that now exists between Government and the public in Britain today.

President Asif Ali Zardari of Pakistan has said that the US and Nato forces in Afghanistan “underestimated the situation on the ground” and that the international community “is in the process of losing the war against the Taliban”. He is right. The whole world knows that is true. All but a tiny minority of wishful thinkers in Britain know it is a fact. The Taliban has won: as Zardari said, time is on their side and they know how to wait.

None of this objective reality stuff cuts any ice with David Cameron, though. In instant rebuttal mode, he sprang into action to contradict Zardari’s embarrassing outburst of truthfulness. Dave, remember, is the man who made a “cast-iron” promise to hold a referendum on the Lisbon Treaty and who sold the Brokeback Coalition to his party by telling them that Labour had offered Nick Clegg the AV voting system without a referendum, so it would not take him long to neutralise a blast of toxic truth from a foreign head of state.

Absolute nonsense, insisted Dave. He dwelt on the fact that British troops in Afghanistan are protecting large numbers of people, enabling them to get on with their lives. So they are; unfortunately the huddled masses they are protecting already know the date of Britain’s projected withdrawal, the date when the Taliban will inexorably begin to take over those parts of the country it does not already control. The vulgar term for withdrawing from a war, leaving an unbeaten enemy to occupy the disputed ground, is defeat.

That is what Britain and its allies are experiencing in Afghanistan. And the longer we loiter there, the more British soldiers will be killed in the cause, not of protecting Afghans, but of saving Dave’s face. Who does Cameron imagine he is deceiving, rhyming off our supposed achievements in Afghanistan? The dogs in the street know it is all fantasy and delusion. It is the kind of propaganda at which we used to guffaw when it was beamed by Moscow Radio as the Mujahideen decimated the Red Army. If Dave continues so deep in denial, he will be parroting statistics about soaring tractor production in the Urals before the year is out.

We have come to a pretty pass when, on an issue of vital importance to Britain’s security, we have to hear the truth from the President of Pakistan while our own Prime Minister, the self-declared Heir of Blair, does precisely what one would expect Blair’s heir to do – tells the public what he would like it to believe, in the heroic tradition of Blair’s Weapons of Mass Destruction, operable within 45 minutes. You are fooling no one, Dave.

Think of Vietnam. On one side, very young interlopers from thousands of miles away, where the politicians who had sent them did not really care all that much about the eventual outcome. On the other side, men to whom first independence and then reunification were, as they saw it, the entire purpose of their lives, men who had nowhere else to go, men who had reached the stage of refusing to allow themselves to die until their end had been attained. Guess which side won.