Friday 9th March

Sorry to bang on about Foreign Affairs two days running.  I had planned to write about something far more personal today but the pointless deaths of six soldiers yesterday has provoked me to say the unsayable.  I have always been a pacifist, but also a realist – in some circumstances it may be justified to go to war to kill people in order to save a larger loss of life later, though you can never be sure, of course.  After 9/11 when Tony Blair stood shoulder to shoulder with George Bush it all seemed so much clearer.  There was little doubt that Al Quaeda had training camps in Afghanistan and in order to protect the West and to prevent further atrocities we had a duty to clear the dreaded Taliban government out, and install a democratic government instead.  And that is where the real problem lies, it is easy to analyse the problem, to diagnose the sickness, but far harder to understand the cure, what will work to make the world better.   And why is democracy, or our version of it, the cure-all for all of mankind.  Just look at our own history and the long struggle to achieve even this limited sort of democracy.  How can we just go in, all guns blazing and simply impose it on others?  But we do, and despite the evidence that it has failed, and quite spectacularly, we will carry on I am sure.  So what exactly are we fighting for in Afghanistan?  In all truth we are fighting to save face now, the experiment has failed; there is a sort of democracy in place, but the Government is as corrupt as ever, and the dreaded Taliban is in control of much of the country, and is probably trusted by a large proportion of the population. It has been eleven years of suffering and death and at huge cost for almost nothing at all.  That is to take nothing away from the bravery of the soldiers of all nations who have taken part in the futility; they along with the battered and bombed and surely sick-and-tired-of-it-all Afghans themselves are the innocent ones.

It is almost sacrilege to admit defeat, and all our politicians have to stand shoulder to shoulder in their resolution to ‘get the job done’.  But the job is really to escape, to get out with as much of our tattered reputation intact as possible.  It is just very sad that we cannot be honest and admit our failure, if only to stop another six families from losing their sons and fathers.