The support for Britain’s involvement in Afghanistan is, for the first time, showing major signs of fraying. Nick Clegg broke ranks with the other party leaders last week, and this weekend the total number of British deaths went beyond the number of soldiers killed in Iraq. Understandably, the Sunday papers are filled with stories about the lack of troops and kit. The Observer reports that an emergency review is taking place in the MoD to see if more soldiers need to be sent out.
So what to make of it all?
First of all, it is clear that there were too few troops and civilians deployed to start off. I have given my take on what went wrong initially in Helmand to the Foreign Affairs Committee, as have some of the protagonists like Ed Butler. But though there are disagreements in our analysis, everyone agrees: 1) that the deployment was too small given what it was asked to do; 2) that it took the government’s civilian agencies far too long to get involved; and 3) that the US PRT, which had been based in Laskhar Gar for years before the UK arrived, had done very little to extend the writ of the international mission.
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