A Dime a Dozen Blog

Does this mean we should run away and pay reparations to the Taliban?

No. Take a look at what the General is saying. He says we are ‘losing’ , not we have ‘lost’. He also says what a loss in Afghanistan will mean. It will mean the loss of Pakistan and a nuclear-armed radical Sunni state.

Britain’s most senior generals have issued a blunt warning to Downing Street that the military campaign in Afghanistan is facing a catastrophic failure, a development that could lead to an Islamist government seizing power in neighbouring Pakistan…

Lord Inge, the former chief of the defence staff, highlighted their fears in public last week when he warned of a ’strategic failure’ in Afghanistan. The Observer understands that Inge was speaking with the direct authority of the general staff when he made an intervention in a House of Lords debate.

‘The situation in Afghanistan is much worse than many people recognise,’ Inge told peers. ‘We need to face up to that issue, the consequence of strategic failure in Afghanistan and what that would mean for Nato… We need to recognise that the situation – in my view, and I have recently been in Afghanistan – is much, much more serious than people want to recognise.’…

‘The consequences of failure in Afghanistan are far greater than in Iraq,’ he said. ‘If we fail in Afghanistan then Pakistan goes down. The security problems for Britain would be massively multiplied. I think you could not then stop a widening regional war that would start off in warlordism but it would become essentially a war in the end between Sunni and Shia right across the Middle East.’

‘Mao Zedong used to refer to the First and Second World Wars as the European civil wars. You can have a regional civil war. That is what you might begin to see. It will be catastrophic for Nato. The damage done to Nato in Afghanistan would be as great as the damage done to the UN in Bosnia. That could have a severe impact on the Atlantic relationship and maybe even damage the American security guarantee for Europe.’…

Adam Holloway, a Tory member of the committee who is a former Grenadier Guards officer, said: ‘We are getting to the point where it will be irretrievable. That’s where we are now. We are in danger of a second strategic failure [after Iraq], which we cannot afford.’

The whole article is here