Afghanistan has been in the news recently marking the first anniversary of western troops leaving the country. Back in 2009 the predecessor to this blog highlighted the futility of Britain’s military mission in that country. This is the blogpost from that time in full:-
Since the start of British military operations in Afghanistan, nearly 200 service personnel have died. It is worth considering what it is that our armed forces have been sent there to achieve. According to Gordon Brown it is "to break that chain of terror that links the mountains of Afghanistan and Pakistan to the streets of Britain".
There is no doubt that the ideology of the Taliban, the enemy our forces are fighting, is one that is as oppressive and repulsive as it is possible to imagine. However, in this respect its aims are little different to the religious primitivism and suppression of human rights which already exists in Saudi Arabia, a regime that we have rewarded with billions of pounds worth of arms sales. When the Taliban controlled Afghanistan they harboured the Al-Qaeda jihadist training camps. It was clearly necessary to take these out after the terrorist attacks on America in September 2001. Unfortunately, and perhaps predictably, Al-Qaeda moved over the border into Pakistan, a country with far stronger links to Britain.
As a result of the air strikes against the training camps, Al- Qaeda is now probably beyond our reach, and our forces are left fighting an endless conflict with enemy "insurgents" who are often indistinguishable from civilians. Although we know how many of our service personnel have been killed we have no real idea how many Afghan civilians have died as a result of coalition activity, but we can be sure that it is very considerably higher than our own military losses.
Gordon Brown's stated reasons for continuing this unwinnable war are a mendacious deception. Whatever the outcome it will have no effect on the threat Britain faces from jihadist terrorism. All the men behind the recent terrorist plots in Britain, both successful and failed, were either born here or were legally resident here. More to the point, virtually all were here as a result of the immigration policies pursued and supported by all the main political parties. The numbers of such people are continuing to increase, mainly but not exclusively as a result of arranged marriages. Thus the sea in which these potential fifth columnists swim is continuing to expand, and the threat they pose increases accordingly. Consequently, the lives of British soldiers are being lost needlessly whilst the real threat to our security is being ignored.
Enoch Powell long ago warned that "we must be mad, literally mad" to allow open ended immigration on this scale from such a source. But even he failed to foresee the deadly nature of such crazy policies. The war in Afghanistan is the unintended but direct consequence of past and present British governments' reckless encouragement of third world immigration, since without it we would be immune to global jihadism.
This analysis has clearly stood the test of time. Over 200 more service personnel have been killed in Afghanistan since 2009 and the number of civilians killed there during that period has been enormous. Since then there have also been numerous jihadist terrorist atrocities committed in both Britain and other European countries, all of them involving people admitted through reckless immigration policies. Given the ever increasing number of these potential fifth columnists the ‘chain of terror’ mentioned by Gordon Brown has most certainly not been broken, despite our withdrawal from Afghanistan. Thus the inescapable conclusion is that British government intervention in that country has had no lasting impact and our soldiers killed there died in vain.
