Afghan president criticises British troops

[TonyGosling]

Afghan president criticises British troops

By David Blair, Diplomatic Editor
25/01/2008 - Daily Telegraph

Simmering tensions between Britain and Afghanistan's government came to the surface today after President Hamid Karzai criticised the performance of British troops in Helmand province.

Afghan president criticises British troops in Helmand
Britain has not replied to Hamid Karzai

His remarks, which follow similarly unflattering comments from Robert Gates, the US defence secretary, suggest that Britain's allies are increasingly unhappy with the Army's conduct of operations.

Mr Karzai blames British pressure for disrupting his government's control over Helmand.

At the insistence of his allies, he sacked the province's governor, Sher Mohammed Akhunzada, a move which he says allowed the Taliban to stage a comeback.

"There was one part of the country where we suffered after the arrival of the British forces," Mr Karzai told journalists on the margins of the Davos Economic Forum.

"Before that, we were fully in charge of Helmand. When our governor was there, we were fully in charge. They came and said 'your governor is no good'. I said 'allright, do we have a replacement for this governor, do you have enough forces?"

"Both the American and the British forces guaranteed to me they knew what they were doing and I made the mistake of listening to them. And when they came in, the Taliban came."
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Mr Karzai added: "The mistake was that we removed a local arrangement without having a replacement. We removed the police force. That was not good.

"The security forces were not in sufficient numbers or information about the province. That is why the Taliban came back in."

Last year, British troops and Afghanistan's new national army recaptured the key town of Musa Qala, which had been in Taliban hands.

Mr Karzai pointed out that Musa Qala had previously been controlled by his government and "it took us a year and half" to recapture the town.

Britain insisted on Mr Akhunzada's removal as governor because the Army believed he was running the province's drugs trade. The local police chief, Abdul Wali Khan, was also dismissed because British officers accused him of abusing the population at will.

Yet these sackings created powerful enemies for British forces - a vital factor in the Taliban's resurgence in Helmand since 2006.

Britain has declined to respond to Mr Karzai. The president, who faces re-election next year, is an increasingly assertive and difficult ally for the West.

But one British official described him as the "most popular politician in Afghanistan", adding that the West had no option but to work with him.


http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2008/01/25/wafg12 5.xml

[TonyGosling]

How can this bloody failure be regarded as a good war?

The western occupation of Afghanistan has brought neither peace nor development - and it fuels the terror threat

Seumas Milne
Thursday August 23, 2007
The Guardian

Enthusiasts for the catastrophe that is the Iraq war may be hard to come by these days, but Afghanistan is another matter. The invasion and occupation that opened George Bush's war on terror are still championed by powerful voices in the occupying states as - in the words of the New York Times this week - "the good war" that can still be won. While speculation intensifies about British withdrawal from Basra, there's no such talk about a retreat from Kabul or Kandahar. On the contrary, the plan is to increase British troop numbers from the current 7,000, and ministers, commanders and officials have been hammering home the message all summer that Britain is in Afghanistan, as the foreign secretary, David Miliband, insisted, for the long haul.

"We should be thinking in terms of decades," the British ambassador, Sir Sherard Cowper-Coles, declared; Brigadier John Lorimer, British commander in Helmand province, thought the military occupation might last more than Northern Ireland's 38 years; and the defence secretary, Des Browne, last week confirmed that the government had made a "long-term commitment" to stay in Afghanistan to prevent it reverting to a terrorist training ground. Even allowing for the Brown government's need for political cover if it is indeed to run down its forces in Iraq, that all amounts to a pretty clear policy of indefinite occupation - one on which it has not thought necessary to consult the British people, let alone the Afghans.

All this follows the escalation of Britain's involvement in Afghanistan last year, when Browne's predecessor, John Reid, sent thousands of extra troops to the south to "help reconstruction", hoping they would be a able to leave "without firing a single shot". Two million rounds of ammunition later, what was supposed to be a peacekeeping mission is now an all-out war against a resurgent Taliban that has become an umbrella for Pashtun nationalists, jihadists and all those determined to fight foreign occupation. British casualties have risen sharply - seven have been killed in the past month - along with those of other western forces, while the public at home is increasingly fed a media diet of Kiplingesque deeds of derring-do by "our boys" on the front line. And in a telling echo of the claims that have punctuated each phase of the Iraq disaster, Browne last week said he detected a "turning point" in the British campaign to "bring stability" to Afghanistan........
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/story/0,,2154324,00.html