Via Make Britain safer – pull our troops out of Afghanistan – Telegraph, Jeff Randall argues that we should pull out of Afghanistan:
Decent people are sick of the carnage, not because they have no stomach for the fight, but because they cannot fathom what the fight is for. In desperation to justify a textbook example of mission creep, the Ministry of Defence has resorted to emotional blackmail. The remarkably unimpressive Bob Ainsworth suggests that in failing to show enough support for the war, some parts of the public are wallowing in “defeatism”.
This is offensive rubbish. Support for the Armed Forces remains widespread and undiminished. What has cracked, however, is enthusiasm for their task, largely because too few of us have the faintest notion of what victory looks like. The idea that, after a bloody military campaign, we can leave behind a “normalised”, democratic Afghanistan, free from the Taliban, with sufficient resources and appetite to police itself, tests credulity to destruction.
For those who seek to dismiss this view as the bellyaching of limp-wristed liberals, I point you to two MPs from either side of the Commons, both of whom served in the Army: Eric Joyce (Labour, Falkirk) and Adam Holloway (Conservative, Gravesham). Mr Joyce resigned recently as a parliamentary aide over government strategy, while Mr Holloway refers to Afghanistan as “a giant film set for al-Qaeda propaganda”.