Afghaniscam again...........

Washington seems to be getting in a terrible muddle over Egypt.

Jo Biden says that Mubarak is not a dictator and should not stand down. O made a particularly vacuous comment on TV news. He said that problems are not solved by violence.

Then what are we doing in Afghanistan?

And how do you change a brutal and oppressive regime except by violence when everything else has failed?

The US gives $1.5 billion in aid to Egypt each year but $1.3 billion of this is military aid. This might suggest a rather skewed approach to ‘aid’ for a country in which 30% of the population lives below the poverty line. It might also suggest that the US has an arm-lock on the key player in any future political settlement.

On Afghanistan, the Beeb did an excellent documentary on the preparations by the Queen’s Royal Lancers, a cavalry regiment, for their deployment to Afghanistan and then followed them through the next six months until they returned home minus two.

At the training camp in Norfolk, a complete Afghan village has been created. It has a complement of real live Afghans and is highly realistic. An interesting aspect was that the Regimental Sergeant Major was black. He is clearly an outstanding soldier, because this is one of the most difficult ranks to attain. It is regarded as the most important rank after the Commanding Officer. Racial stereotyping is a fruitless undertaking, is it not?

The war has now been going on so long that the British army is the most battle-hardened since WW2.

So why are we there? The original pretext was to deny Afghanistan as a base for Al-Qaeda. They are no longer there. They have scarpered to Yemen, Somalia and other fundamentalist hell-holes. We were told that the deployment of British forces would be for 18 months. That was 10 years ago. We are mired in a war that is the longest fought by Britain since the Napoleonic Wars. We are fighting the Taliban who have never done us any harm. What are NATO’s War Aims? We have never been told.

It is abundantly clear that foreign military adventure in Afghanistan must fail. This has been the lesson of history from the 18th century to the Russian disaster. ‘The Great Game’ should be compulsory reading for every politician from every NATO country.

Kipling had it right:

When you're wounded and left on Afghanistan's plains,

And the women come out to cut up what remains,

Jest roll to your rifle and blow out your brains

An' go to your Gawd like a soldier.

Daft DT headline of the week

‘Women in Britain are the fattest in mainland Europe’.