Britain 'risking defeat in Afghanistan'

[NNN0LHI]

http://observer.guardian.co.uk/uk_news/story/0,,1928576,00.html

Mark Townsend and Peter Beaumont
Sunday October 22, 2006
The Observer


Field Marshal Sir Peter Inge, the former head of Britain's armed forces, has broken ranks to launch an attack on the current military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, warning that British forces risk defeat in Afghanistan.

In one of the strongest interventions in the conduct of the War on Terror, Inge also charged a lack of any 'clear strategy' guiding British operations in Afghanistan and Iraq.

His comments came as President George Bush met his military and political officials to consider fresh tactics over Iraq, amid a mood of crisis in Washington over the violence. snip

Inge's intervention, coming amid growing speculation about Britain's exit strategy from Iraq, is the first criticism of operations by a former head of the British army. His comments, made at a meeting of European experts on Tuesday and published here for the first time, reflect the growing dismay among senior military officers and civil servants involved in defence and foreign affairs, that in the critical areas of Afghanistan and Iraq Britain lacked clear foreign and defence policies separate from the US.

'I don't believe we have a clear strategy in either Afghanistan or Iraq. I sense we've lost the ability to think strategically. Deep down inside me, I worry that the British army could risk operational failure if we're not careful in Afghanistan. We need to recognise the test that I think they could face there,' he told the debate held by Open Europe, an independent think tank campaigning for EU reform.

[Kagemusha]

1. I disagree. It's not a risk. Defeat is now a sure thing.

It's just a matter of delaying the inevitable.

But I stopped writing seriously about Afghanistan about 3-4 months after the fall of the Taliban when victory was declared. It was clear that victory would remain "reality" until defeat and there was no point even trying to discuss it.