Lest We Forget
While on a visit to British troops in Afghanistan this weekend, David Cameron paid tribute to the British personnel - and sadly the count is now running at 440 - who have given their lives in that country.
We should never forget their sacrifice.
He also said that peace in Afghanistan requires a political solution and not just a military one: and Mohammed Karzai, the Afghan president, agreed with him.
President Karzai also referred to the recent attack by Taleban extremists on his Presidental Palace as "Peanuts" in comparison to the losses which have sometimes been caused in other attacks.
We do need a diplomatic resolution to be part of the solution. Let's hope one can be found.
Of course, most of the military challenge is not coming from Afghans, but from the Pakistani Taleban.
There are massive troubles in Pakistan, but I take some comfort from the fact that the recent election there represented one of the first occasions, if not the first, in Pakistan's history when a government has taken power peacefully through being elected at the ballot box, served one or more full parliamentary terms and then handed over power peacefully through being defeated at the ballot box. Let's hope this may start the country on a trajectory which may lead to a better Pakistan and give hope torwards peace in Afghanistan.
Comments
Don't kid yourself that 9/11 was just an attack on America. It was an attack on any society that believes in the ballot box, a free press, social and religious freedom, and women's right to education and health care (or anything else). And there were more than a hundred British people among the dead. We could no more ignore it than the States could.
Do you see the double standard Chris ? No of course you don't, you're a member of a main stream political party !
One can never be certain there won't be one or two exceptions, but the overwhelming majority of the hundreds of British service personnel who died in Afghanistan were not torturers or murderers but heroes.
For example, some of our people have been killed while trying to defuse IEDs (improvised explosive devices) which are as much of a lethal threat to innocent Afghan civilians as they are to our troops.
Criticism of what the USA has done in Latin America, whether justified or not, does in itself mean that everything the Western powers and the United Nations have done to try to build a better Afghanistan was wrong.
Just as two wrongs don't make a right, neither can you argue that because someone's ally did something wrong on one side of the world that in itself makes what they are doing on the other side of the world wrong as well.
But the same applies in reverse.
Anyone who imagines that the United States, or ourselves, has always been in the right needs to remove their rose tinted spectacles.
But anyone who thinks that the US, or ourselves, has "almost always been wrong" is, in my opinion, making the opposite mistake.
If the USA had retreated into isolationism after world war II and there had been no NATO, I am convinced that there would have been a third major round of wars in the 20th century, probably about the time you and I were boys, that the Soviet Union would still exist and that it would control most of Europe, the Middle East, and Africa.
I don't believe that such a world would have been better than the one we are now living in.
I'm not defending the things we or the USA have got wrong - for example I am on record many times over as opposing some of the mistakes made in Iraq.
But I also think they happen to have got some very major things right, and we in the UK have reason to be very grateful for the USA's support for N.A.T.O.
I stand by the view that to suggest that the USA, or ourselves, have got nearly everything wrong is to be as biased against America as someone who things they got everything right would be biased towards them.