Bush & Blair: The Afghan fantasy

[IndianaGreen]

5 November 2006 11:25

Bush & Blair: The Afghan fantasy

Neither will admit that Afghanistan is a struggle. But their denial is costing the lives of civilians and troops on the frontline

By Raymond Whitaker
Published: 05 November 2006

"Some of the guys think we shouldn't be here, but most of us support it," a Royal Marine told me as we patrolled near Lashkar Gah, the capital of Afghanistan's Helmand province. A huge sun was setting behind the mud walls of Mukhtar, a desperately poor village outside the town which houses refugees from less stable areas.

"We know what we're doing here: supporting the Afghan people," the marine went on. He did not say it, but the implication was that this was different from Iraq, where British troops must be wondering about their mission after the chief of the army, General Sir Richard Dannatt, said they should leave "soon".

British officers in Helmand, from the commander, Brigadier Jerry Thomas, down, are relentlessly on-message about the purpose of their deployment, now six months old. They have not come to this hot, dusty southern province to fight the Taliban, they say, though if the insurgents want a fight, they will get it. Instead the measure of the mission's success or failure will be whether hearts and minds can be won in the "Afghan development zone". This is a triangle in the centre of Helmand whose points are Lashkar Gah, Gereshk, the main commercial centre, and Camp Bastion, the main British base.

If reconstruction and development in this ADZ can be seen to benefit what one officer called Afghan "floating voters", the hope is that this will help to erode support for the Taliban and spread stability to the rest of the province. But the mission, which the then Secretary of State for Defence, John Reid, suggested might be carried out over three years "without firing a shot", has proved infinitely more difficult than that. The problems the troops are seeking to tackle are far worse than they were four years ago, when the West, contrary to Tony Blair's words, turned its attention from Afghanistan to Iraq.

http://news.independent.co.uk/world/politics/article1956546.ece

[aquart]

1. "Struggle" is the new way to say "disaster"?

[IndianaGreen]

2. The US did not want to capture or kill Osama bin Laden at Tora Bora

Killing or capturing bin Laden in 2002 would have meant an end to the war, and the troops coming home. This was not what Bush & Cheney wanted. They needed bin Laden alive in order to whip war fever against Iraq, their real target all along.