The mutterings about this have been around for a while, but now it’s been confirmed: UK troops will be leaving Iraq by July 2009. In a joint statement just now – at the start of a surprise visit to Iraq by our PM – Brown and Nouri Maliki claimed that UK forces will have “completed their tasks” by then. Expect plenty of questions over all this: are those tasks really complete? Are the Iraqis being abandoned? Is the withdrawal operation too rushed? But, as I see it, the most important conflict zone for us is Afghanistan; or, more specifically, the Afghanistan-Pakistan border region. Any signs that the Afghan mission is being given greater priority should broadly be welcomed.
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