Obama’s war

One of the first things David Cameron will tell Barack Obama when they meet during the American President’s state visit to Britain next week is that hundreds of British soldiers are going to be withdrawn from Afghanistan this summer. Of the 10,000 British troops currently based in southern Afghanistan, around 450 are to be brought home, with the promise of more to follow, as Mr Cameron cashes in the peace dividend he believes will accrue following the welcome demise of the world’s most infamous terrorist.

Huzzah, I hear you cry. And about time too. Never understood what we were doing there in the first place. What’s the point of our young men and women risking their lives or, more to the point, their limbs in this godforsaken country where the locals quite understandably take great exception to our unwelcome meddling in their affairs? Which, of course, is exactly the response Mr Cameron is anticipating.

There has always been a half-hearted air about the Prime Minister’s attitude towards the Afghan conflict. Like any politician, he is not averse to posing for macho photographs with our boys on the front line in Helmand. But from the outset of his premiership he has appeared far more enthusiastic about discussing our exit strategy for Afghanistan than engaging with the altogether more challenging business of working out how on earth we can actually defeat the Taleban so that the country no longer serves as a safe haven for Islamist terrorists.

To be fair to Mr Cameron, he is aware that, even with the demonic bin Laden out of the way, Britain still faces a considerable threat from Islamist terror cells. He does, after all, see all the latest intelligence reports on what diabolical plots bin Laden’s followers are cooking up next. It is mainly for this reason that, somewhat reluctantly, he has made a commitment that British forces will remain on combat operations until 2014.