15 British Troops Dead In 2 Days

By Steve Hynd

The death toll of British troops in Afghanistan has now surpassed the toll in Iraq, with 15 soldiers killed in 48 hours during the British Helmland offensive partnering the one from U.S. Marines. Meanwhile, the Marine's offensive has reportedly stalled in the face of hosts of mines and IED explosives along their lines of advance.

The conservative-leaning Daily Express is the first British newspaper to state the obvious in an editorial: there's no winning strategy and no exit sign for British involvement in America's colonial adventure.

IN case anyone hadn�t noticed, there is a war on. And when this nation is at war it has a tradition of pulling together in support of the troops. But as far as the campaign in Afghanistan is concerned there is precious little sign of that. The death toll of British troops there this week is horrendous.

And yet the Government has been put under almost no pressure to explain what our soldiers are doing and when it expects their mission to be completed.

Gordon Brown does not appear to know whether this war is worth prosecuting with the full might of the nation�s military resources or not. He has already turned down a request from Barack Obama to send significant reinforcements, while the shameful inadequacy of the equipment supplied to our soldiers has already been well documented. After the losses of the past few days, this half-hearted approach has become utterly unsustainable. Britain and indeed the whole of Nato must now decide whether this fiendishly difficult bid to tame a hitherto untamable land is worth all the blood that is being spilt.

This newspaper�s assessment is that the chance of outright victory in Afghanistan vanished the moment US and British forces went into Iraq. The focus on Afghanistan was lost and the coalition against terror broke up. There is now little prospect of the rest of Nato committing wholeheartedly to the fight against the Taliban. In a war of attrition, such as is presently being fought, victory will not be achieved, but heavy losses will certainly be sustained. Our brave soldiers deserve far better than that.

It was always the conservative establishment who were most against Britain's continued enmiring in Bush's Iraq occupation - and now it appears that conservatives will lead the way in calling for an exit from Afghanistan too. There's certainly a part of that which is just the cynical politics of opposition, but there's also a part that's just good sense. The British populace are, if anything, more generally accepting of foreign wars than their American cousins but there's a limit to what even the "fighting Blitz spirit" will countenance when a military entanglement has no plan, no metrics for success and no end in sight. The Tories are just getting out ahead of the curve.

Update: As Gordon Brown defends the UK's involvement and insists the Afghan war is being won (the credibility of that claim being dependent on how credible you think Brown is in general), renowned British military historian Correlli Barnett has an op-ed in the pages of the very conservative Daily Mail in which he argues that Britain must unilaterally withdraw from Afghanistan.

So what should we do? The Duke of Wellington once said that the real test of a general was to know when to retreat and dare to do it. A cool-headed and objective examination of the military and political evidence about the state of play in Afghanistan ought to convince HM Government that Britain must retreat from Afghanistan, and that they must now dare to announce a future date for this.

After all, there are historical precedents. In 1984, Margaret Thatcher unilaterally withdrew the British contingent from the U.S.-led multi-national force in the Lebanon after a truck bomb demolished the U.S. base in Beirut, killing 242 U.S. marines, and it became clear that the Lebanese government could not be preserved from its internal enemies.

No doubt it would take moral courage now to announce that British forces would be permanently withdrawn from combat operations in Afghanistan at the end of the current Panther's Claw campaign. It might even require the courage to tell the French and Germans to do a spot of fighting in our place.

It would take more moral courage on the Government's part to distance Britain from President Obama's positively Bushite pursuit of 'victory' in Afghanistan, and announce a firm date for the final evacuation of British forces.

And it would take even more moral courage still because a decision to pull out would not be supported by the Conservative opposition, with its positively neo-con shadow ministers for defence and foreign affairs, but only by Nick Clegg's Liberal Democrats.

But without such a brave decision, British servicemen and women will go on pointlessly dying, while a more and more disillusioned nation simply wants our troops home - - not in coffins draped with the Union Flag, but marching through cheering crowds.

Barnett is influential among the UK conservative foreign policy "old guard", folks like Heseltine and Rifkin. That he's citing Thatcher is significant and pressages a feud about staying the course in Afghanistan among UK conservative ranks, between the realists and the neocons, similiar to the ones we've already seen in the U.S. and UK over Iraq. Afghanistan will be a major issue in the next UK general election and David Cameron will have to weigh up whether his support for his neocon colleague's preferences might cost him No. 10.