Notwithstanding Defence Secretary Des Browne's Craigiehall Barracks convocation, operations in Afghanistan are more likely to break Nato diplomatically than the Taliban militarily. Many Nato members are still having none of it.
As the second Commons Select Committee report on Afghanistan shows, Isaf, the sort-of coalition, has a policy but no actual plan to eradicate poppy production and lots of policies but no plan to defeat the Taliban. To remove the Taliban's war-fighting ability means going into the Waziristan province of Pakistan, something that even Donald Rumsfeld fortunately balked at. We can be sure that when US Defence Secretary Robert Gates "clarifies" the strategy for Afghanistan early next year, he, like his predecessor, will have nothing specific to say about eliminating the Taliban's war-fighting capability.
Deception, duplicity and evasion are fair game on the battlefield; they are not when deployed against the public. To conflate public support for our military personnel, with support for the war without end, might continue to get Messrs Brown and Browne through press conferences unscathed. Indeed, they will continue to be allowed to shift the goal posts ever so slightly and downgrade expectations bit by bit, stuffing previous bullish assertions into the bin almost unnoticed.
However, when our very own Afghan surge kicks in in a few months' time, and 2008 yields a possibly bigger British body-bag count, that might change. However, by then it will be too late for some of the young men and women preparing to do their professional duty. For some of our military, Afghanistan is, when compared with Iraq at least, "a good war", and the odd empty chair in the officers' mess is something career professional soldiers necessarily thole; not for them an eventual return to civvy streets still ravaged by the poppies' principal product.
Bill Ramsay, 84 Albert Avenue, Glasgow.
Your trenchant editorial on Iraq claims that Basra is a "milestone rather than mission accomplished" (December 17). Dare I suggest that, rather, it is a millstone that we have removed from around our necks, sort of and thank goodness? You conclude by saying that Basra marks "the endgame of this miserable mission" in Iraq and "demands some searching questions". Now that we have handed the place over to the gangsters, not least to those in the Maliki government in Baghdad, may I further suggest that one of those questions is: having lied our way in, was it absolutely necessary that we lied our way out?
Chris Walker, 21/23 Main Street, West Kilbride.
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