More troops will just mean more targets

It was Bonfire Night last year in the Officers’ Mess of 2 Rifle and I was jokily explaining how fighting is such a national sport among Afghans that they fight with birds, kites and even boiled eggs, when I suddenly realised my heart had gone out of it. As one of the few journalists to have been reporting from Afghanistan since the days of the Soviet occupation, I had often been asked to visit regiments before they deploy and had always enjoyed talking to young soldiers about a land I love and hearing their expectations.

But that grey November evening in Abercorn barracks in the Northern Irish town of Ballykinler was different. I had been in Helmand the previous month and was shocked at the lack of progress. How could I give a positive presentation of what the troops might achieve when the security situation was so much worse than before British troops arrived in 2006?

In one-camel opium towns like Sangin, Musa Qala and Nawzad, which no one back home had even heard of three years ago, our soldiers were repeatedly fighting over the same dusty scraps of land that previous troops had been killed trying to secure. The top Foreign Office mandarin inside the wire and thick walls of the British headquarters in Lashkar Gah tried to convince me progress was being made because the bazaar was open and we could drive through (albeit at high speed in a heavily armoured convoy). Yet I had stayed in the town for a week before the British deployment when the bazaar was flourishing and people walked around freely.

For the many Helmandis who have lost their homes or relatives in the bombing, it is stretching credulity to say that the British presence has brought them a better life. I’ve met families in tents outside Lashkar Gah who lost everything as they fled from village to village to escape fighting.