The Taliban, NATO and Afghanistan
The sad news of the death in the midst of a rescue attempt of the courageous British aid worker, brings this torturd region back to the top of the news. Soon all those in authority will have to emerge from denial and face reality. The NATO mission has failed. The military cannot win, the Karzai government is the most corrupt and ineffectual in the world, the Taliban operate at will on the Pakistan border blowing up tankers by the score almost every day. Within Afghanistan they run a parallel government with police, courts, prisons, schools and medical services under the noses of NATO military.
If the Taliban are driven from one place they pop up in another. Returning correspondents talk of a seriously deteriorating situation on the ground. A retiring official described the Afghan Security Force as of doubtful reliability and the Afghan Police Force as ‘mainly bandits’. Yet every day the craven fear throughout NATO that to admit failure is a no go area, requires more and more troops, mostly British and American, to lay down their lives for a cause which has lost all connection with reality.
The mantra that our streets are safer because of this project is manifestly absurd. The reverse is the case. More terrorists are being recruited every day because of the befuddled strategy of this war, ploughing on deeper and deeper into a bloody quagmire because there is no politician in the West with the guts to stand up and say enough is enough, we screwed up and we are coming home.
What a terrible mismatch between cowardice of Western leaders to accept what has happened and the courage of those they daily send to their deaths.