Brown defends Afghan campaign in wake of aide's resignation
Time to go overseas (at least from where I am). This article comes from guardian.co.uk.
"Gordon Brown today insisted the government was not making the same mistakes in Afghanistan as the Soviet Union had as he hit back at claims that the British mission in the country was doomed to fail.
In a lengthy defence of the military deployment in Helmand, the prime minister said he asked himself whether the operation was justified every time soldiers were killed - and said he concluded it was every time.
Brown said the Taliban posed a threat to security in the UK, and that British troops would return home when the Afghan army was strong enough to maintain peace in the country.
But he did not offer a timetable for the withdrawal of troops and, when asked during questions afterwards whether he could envisage the mission ending by the end of the next parliament, he said that would depend on the "quality" of the Afghan troops being trained to take over.
The prime minister said there was nothing more "heartbreaking" in his job than writing to the families of the servicemen and women killed in action.
"Each time I have to ask myself if we are doing the right thing by being in Afghanistan," he said.
"Each time I have to ask myself if we can justify sending our young men and women to fight for this cause ... and my answer has always been yes."
Brown rejected claims that the Nato mission was likely to suffer the same fate as the Soviet invasion of the 1980s, which ended in ignominy when the Soviets withdrew because they could not overcome the mujahideen insurgency.
He said Nato had a strategy that was "radically different from the Russian strategy in Afghanistan and indeed from all previous foreign interventions in Afghanistan - which lacked the support of the population, which stayed in the cities and ignored the country, and did not seek to empower Afghans in maintaining security".
Speaking at the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London, Brown did not mention Eric Joyce, the parliamentary aide who resigned yesterday in protest at the government's Afghanistan policy, or the Sun newspaper, which has been campaigning on behalf of troops serving in the country.
But he sought to tackle their concerns directly by defending government policy in Afghanistan in detail.
Brown said UK troops were in Afghanistan "as a result of a hard-headed assessment of the terrorist threat facing Britain".
Ministers have often claimed that three-quarters of the terrorist plots facing Britain emerge from the Pakistan-Afghanistan border.
Brown said that, at present, the threat was "mainly from the Pakistan side", but added that, if the Taliban insurgency were to succeed, al-Qaida and other terrorist groups would again be able to use Afghanistan "as a sanctuary to train, plan and launch attacks on Britain and the rest of the world".
Brown admitted there were problems with the recent presidential elections in Afghanistan.
However, he did not condemn the results as invalid or demand a second round of voting, and insisted that several thousand Afghans had voted in Helmand, not several hundred as has been reported.
Complaints about the poll had to be investigated, he said, adding: "But the very fact of the first elections run by Afghans themselves is an important step forward for the people of Afghanistan."
Brown said people were entitled to ask what success in Afghanistan would look like.
He continued: "The answer is that we will have succeeded when our troops are coming home because the Afghans are doing the job themselves.
"From that day on, we will be able to focus our efforts on supporting the elected government on security and on development and on human rights."
The prime minister said the government had a four-pronged strategy to accelerate the "Afghanisation" of the campaign - partnering the Afghan army and building its capacity, strengthening the civilian-military partnership, strengthening the power of district government in Afghanistan, and extending the "wheat not heroin" initiative aimed at Afghan farmers.
In the past, British troops had focused on "mentoring", or training, Afghan soldiers, Brown said. In future, UK forces would concentrated on "partnering", with British soldiers working alongside their Afghan counterparts.
"This is the best route to success, the most effective way to transfer skills and responsibility to the Afghan security forces, and the best way to gain the trust of the population - and therefore the most effective way to complete our tasks," he said.
He also insisted British troops were being provided with better equipment. Within the next three months, another 20 Ridgeback mine-protected patrol vehicles would be going into operation, while more Merlin helicopters were also being despatched.
"It is simply wrong to doubt the speed of our response as we adapt to the new tactics of the Taliban and the scale of our financial commitment either to our soldiers or to this campaign," Brown said.
"Military spending in Afghanistan - the spending that comes from the Treasury reserve, over and above the defence budget - is going up far in excess of the increase in troop numbers.
"It was around £180,000 per year to support each soldier fighting in 2006, but is now over twice that, £390,000 for each soldier."
The prime minister's speech had been in the diary for some time, but followed on the heels of the resignation of Joyce, who had been an aide to the defence secretary, Bob Ainsworth.
Amid more heavy bloodshed in Afghanistan, Joyce - a former army major - warned that the government could no longer simply claim the conflict was a fight to combat terrorism.
"We have to be honest about what our commitment is," he told ITV News. "It's very high, and I don't think we can simply say the simple statement that we're preventing terrorism back in the UK.
"In many ways that's true, but it's not enough of an explanation. People really need to know what would happen if we weren't there: would the Americans simply fill the gap?""
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http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2009/sep/04/brown-afghanistan-speechWell once again thanks for reading, and there is a Random Readers Comment section be low. So till next time. Later Random Readers
