Gordon Brown, justifying the decision to send more British troops to Afghanistan:
He said: “We have resolved, first of all, as we did some years ago, that it is in the British national interest to confront the Taleban in Afghanistan or Afghanistan would come to us.”
Emphasis mine, obviously. The BBC doesn’t seem to have picked up on that, probably dismissing it as the usual New Labourite guff, but that little sentence is not just wrong, it’s despicable. This after all is the government that denied and still denies that the terrorist attacks on London in 2005 were caused by the misadventures in Iraq and Afghanistan, even when the terrorists themselves said that’s why they attacked. It’s therefore quite flabbergasting to hear a British prime minister now say that if they withdraw the Taliban will follow the troops home.
Even if this was true –and notice how many terrorist attacks Russia had to endure from the Muhajedin after their withdrawal from Afghanistan– it takes chutzpah to insist that because the British decided to help their friends in Washington occupy Afghanistan they have created so many enemies the government now has no choice but to continue the occupation, continue getting British soldiers killed for fear of reaping at home what they sow abroad. A special kind of logic is required to swallow that sort of rot — unfortunately the media seems to have no trouble swallowing…