Afghanistan - the truth no on will tell you

I've seen my fair share of terrorist atrocities in London at close quarters over the years. I walked across the concourse of Victoria Station one minute before a bomb exploded. It is strange how far you can travel in 60 seconds, I didn't even realise anything bad had happened until I reached the office where I was working in Buckingham Palace Road, just heard a dull thud as I exited the station.

I was on the no 30 bus behind the one which Al-Qaida blew up on 7/7. As I walked up the Euston Road and saw people emerge covered in debris, my first thought was that they'd been at a wedding party and were covered in confetti. So what's all this got to do with Afghanistan. Well 300 British troops have died in Afghanistan. That is a large number of highly trained young men and women. What maybe you hadn't realised, I hadn't till I bumped into a friend who returned from a six month stint there, by chance on Thursday evening in a pub. He said this "If we still had the same medical technology as we had in World War II the number of deaths would be six times higher, we've got really good at saving peoples lives". A squaddie in WWII would be given morphine and if he was still alive by the time they got him to hospital, he had a chance. Now paramedics do what they can on the scene, reacting aggresively. Helicopters fly in (often into perilous situations) and extract wounded soldiers,  who are being treated as they fly back.

I asked this question "can we win?". His bitter answer was this "We haven't even decided what winning is". The uncomfortable truth is that the Taliban in places such as Helmand are just the people who live there. They aren't martians. The reason they have barbaric views and pratices is because, unlike us, their civilisation hasn't developed too much since the days of Alexander the Great. Sure Al-Qaida have bases there which they launched terror attacks, but by and large these aren't the people who are killing us. The Taliban know that sooner or later, we'll get fed up and go home, foreigners always do (be it alive or in a box). When they have finished a days terrorism, they go home, have dinner and get ready for the next days work. When we call the Islamic extremists, they are just practising their religion as they have for a thousand years. Helmand is rural Afghanistan.

When we launched the "war on terror" the stated aim was to deny Al-Qaida an operational base. This has been achieved. I have a view, probably not a very popular one, that this is all we ever needed to do. We should pull out and tell the Afghans they can do what they like, so long as they don't let people who wish to wage war on us use their territory. If they do we go back and bomb them incessently until they stop and support any faction who will aid us in this aim. Great Britain is not in the position to sort out everyone elses mess, we have enough trouble sorting out our own. To an Afghani, we are the problem. If we remove our forces and they know that we'll bomb them if they aid Al-Qaida, then Al-Qaida become the problem.

In Islamic culture, there is the concept of a guest. You have to look after your guests and your guests cannot abuse your hospitality. Our actions make the abuse of the hospitality by Al-Qaida acceptable. If we go, then the rules change. Nice though it would be to think that we can transform a feudal society into a Liberal Democracy in a couple of years, by sending the army to fight a guerilla war, it is actually completely bonkers. The whole country is controlled by warlords, each with their own patch. All we could ever reasonably hope to achieve was to stay on these guys good side.

There is one other nasty little factor in the equation - Heroin. This is the main export of Afghanistan. This is the petrol for the fire. Despite what our papers tell us, it is the real problem. You see, this is what pays for the private armies of the warlords. Whilst Heroin is illegal, there will be huge profits to be made from growing it in lawless regions and exporting it, so that Tarquin and Gemima can get off their face. Every time anyone, anywhere in the UK buys a fix, they are ultimately buying the bullets for the people who are killing our soldiers. Now if I was a member of our bright shiny new Con-Dem government, I would do something about this. You won't like my solution at all (probably). I would go back to the English way of dealing with drug abuse. What we did before the US suckered us into "the war on drugs". I'd grow our own opium, make our own Heroin and give it to all registered users for free. If every Western Country followed suit, the Afghan drug economy would collapse and the warlords power would diminish.

I would plaster the billboards with posters saying "Every time you buy a wrap of smack you buy a bullet to kill a British Soldier". I'm not stupid enough to think my solutions will solve every social problem and I'm not stupid enough to think that Afghanistan will become a Liberal Democracy as a result. I'd settle for no more of our troops being killed in a futile conflict, with no end in sight. I'd settle for us subsidising our own hard pressed farmers by buying opium off them rather than warlords in Afghanistan. Sad though it is I'd rather give smackheads a free fix, than have them rob my house to pay to feed their habit. And last of all, I'd rather not be a terrorist target, because some misguided twat thinks we are on a crusade, when in fact we haven't got a clue what we are doing out there.