More troops to fight for a lost cause

[Thinking Man's Idiot]

More troops to fight for a lost cause

(Friday 28 November 2008)

by PAUL HASTE




A LOST CAUSE: Foreign Secretary David Miliband meeting with Afghan Foreign Minster Rangeen Dadfar Spanta (left) and the governor of Helmand Gulab Mangal.



ANTI-WAR campaigners accused Foreign Minister David Miliband on Friday of "propping up a lost cause" by preparing to send more British troops to bolster the US occupation of Afghanistan.

Speaking after the revelation that two more Royal Marines have been killed in Helmand province, Mr Miliband offered yet more soldiers to US military commanders trying to "pacify" the country.


Referring to US president-elect Barack Obama's plan for a military "surge" to combat rising resistance to the occupation, Mr Miliband declared that Britain has "never been in blanket refusal to troop requests.


"If there are requests for help - economic, social or military - we'll look at them hard, but the test is whether Britain would be safer if we pulled out now," he claimed.


Liberal Democrat foreign affairs spokesman Edward Davey further undermined his party's shaky "anti-war" credentials by demanding that Mr Miliband "give a wholehearted welcome to Barack Obama's plans to bolster the US presence in Afghanistan.


"The government must rally public support behind the Afghan mission - something which they have so far spectacularly failed to do," he declared.


But Stop the War Coalition officer David Wilson pointed out that the "US plan to ramp up its occupation and try to reverse its defeats will face insurmountable problems.


"An SAS squadron will be taken out of Iraq in January and will be sent straight to Helmand, where the two Royal Marines lost their lives last Thursday," he said.


"Miliband is trying to take us out of the frying pan to throw us into the fire. His comments show that, whoever is US president, the British government will just click their heels and do what they are told."


Mr Wilson highlighted the fact that even the British ambassador in Kabul had branded the occupation a "lost cause," adding: "It is shameful that so many have to die in such a hopeless war."


Independent researchers have estimated that the war and occupation, now in its eighth year, have caused almost 28,000 deaths among the people of Afghanistan.


Some 128 British soldiers have lost their lives, while the total number of casualities among Western occupation troops now exceeds 1,000.

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