Send The Cabinet To Helmand Province

Peter Hitchens writes:

If The Prime Minister and his colleagues think it is so important to have a British presence in Afghanistan, and they claim to, then they are the only people in the country who know why that is. So I suggest that they are given driving lessons in Warrior vehicles, or backpacks for foot patrols, and sent out into the roads and fields of Helmand Province, allowing soldiers, who are much more valuable than politicians, better-trained, smarter and immeasurably more honest, to go home.

We have been through so many idiotic justifications for this war that I thought the government had run out of them. We all remember Dr Comrade Baron John Reid’s claim (at the start of this witless deployment) that our soldiers were going there as a sort of social work brigade and would leave without a shot being fired, which has ever since served to show that these people’s heads are as empty as their salaries are big. On Thursday the latest Defence Secretary, Philip Hammond, a reasonably intelligent man when it comes to economics, emitted the following drivel: ‘The judgment is that Afghanistan would still be a very preferred base for terrorist training and activity if we were not there. The nature of the terrain makes it very attractive to international terrorists. We have done a great job there, our troops have done a fantastic job in clearing and holding the ground and squeezing al Qaida out of Afghanistan.’

‘We are nearly there. We have put in a huge amount of effort. We just need, over the next two and a half years, to complete that task, then we can leave with our heads held high, knowing that we have done the job and knowing that we will not face a further threat from international terrorism in Afghanistan.’

We are not nearly anywhere. We have achieved nothing in Afghanistan, and worse than nothing because 404 good people have died in achieving that nothing - and imagine the long threads and rivers of grief and loss that flow out from each of those deaths.

We have not built a new society, or overcome the Afghan people’s views about women, or prevented the growth of Opium (indeed, the Afghan Opium crop has grown while we have been there, and, as I so often state, the British government licenses the growing of Opium Poppies in Oxfordshire, and elsewhere in England, each summer for the production of medical Morphine, so why can’t we do the same in Helmand?) . And once politicians reach for the bogey of ‘Al Qaeda’, we know we are lost.

It remains the case that this war is never properly debated in Parliament, and that all our supposed democratic political parties cravenly support it, so the huge numbers of British people who want our soldiers brought home have no voice in Parliament (and we call Vladimir Putin undemocratic).

Our various invasions, bombings and interventions in the Muslim world over the past ten years have now created so many zones of Islamic militancy that, assuming a ‘terrorist training camp’ in a desert actually offers many real skills in blowing up a London bus (a crime that could be rehearsed here, and indeed was rehearsed here by the IRA, the terrorists we gave in to, and about whom ignorant fools now lie that they ‘gave warnings’ and so were somehow different from Islamist terrorists), such camps could now be sited in several places (not least ‘liberated’ Libya and ‘liberated’ Iraq) where formerly they would not have been allowed by their dictators. In any case, Helmand province is a small portion of Afghanistan. The Afghan government that we back does not control the country more than about 200 yards beyond the walls of Hamid Karzai’s compound. And it needs saying from time to time that the culprits of the atrocities of 11th September 2001 came not from Afghanistan, but from Saudi Arabia, a country we haven’t invaded and won’t, the ‘ally’ we now seek to propitiate by madly beating the drum for war with Iran, and backing an Islamic revolution in Syria.

I am not safer because our troops are in Afghanistan. You are not safer. But the soldiers themselves are in terrible danger, and for no good reason.

As long as they are there, they more or less control the air and soil within about 20 feet of where they stand. When they leave, the forces they seek to combat will reappear strengthened and undamaged, and resume their briefly interrupted rule.

All we do by sending soldiers to Afghanistan is to transport victims into easy reach of people who want to kill them.

And then, with the politicians noisily pretending their political grief, and their families genuinely stricken with inconsolable lifelong loss and sorrow, we bring their bodies home (and send them out of Brize Norton by the back gate in case the crowds of mourners get too big).

Once again, I feel the need to quote Rudyard Kipling’s savage couplet on politicians who send others to war.

‘I would not dig. I dared not rob.
And so I lied to please the mob.’