Lord Ashdown: Get out of Afghanistan quickly

The headline on Lord Ashdown’s piece on Afghanistan in today’s Times (£) will please Lib Dem strategists. ‘This awful mistake mustn’t claim more lives.’ It allows the Lib Dems to play the anti-war card: we are the party that will bring Our Boys (and Girls) home. The strategists could take plenty of other lines from Ashdown’s quotable article. ‘All that we can achieve has been achieved. All that we might have achieved if we had done things differently, has been lost… Our failure in Afghanistan has not been military. It has been political.’

Ashdown’s analysis echoes that of prestigious think tanks such as the Centre to Strategic and International Studies and humble foot soldiers, like Patrick Hennessey, who have toured Helmand. ISAF has acquitted itself well in battle; but the list of political mistakes is long and repetitive: empowering Karzai and Kabul, the Iraq distraction, ignoring Afghanistan’s neighbours, negligible reconstruction efforts, alienating international partners.