Brown said UK troops were in Afghanistan "as a result of a hard-headed assessment of the terrorist threat facing Britain".
Ministers have often claimed that three-quarters of the terrorist plots facing Britain emerge from the Pakistan-Afghanistan border.
Brown said that, at present, the threat was "mainly from the Pakistan side", but added that, if the Taliban insurgency were to succeed, al-Qaida and other terrorist groups would again be able to use Afghanistan "as a sanctuary to train, plan and launch attacks on Britain and the rest of the world".
So, you see, provided we fight al-Qaida where they’re not, we don’t need to worry about where they are. Or something. Perhaps we could adapt this to the butterfly’s wings thesis. If we were to invade Botswana, for instance, this might initiate a complex and apparently random chain of events that would lead to a rock dropping on bin Laden’s head as he poked his head out of a cave one morning.
Brown admitted there were problems with the recent presidential elections in Afghanistan. However, he did not condemn the results as invalid or demand a second round of voting, and insisted that several thousand Afghans had voted in Helmand, not several hundred as has been reported.
Complaints about the poll had to be investigated, he said, adding: "But the very fact of the first elections run by Afghans themselves is an important step forward for the people of Afghanistan."
None of them seem to get the point about this. A bent election isn’t half good. It’s just a technique a corrupt or dictatorial regime uses to keep power. What planet is Brown living on if he thinks that the fact that an Afghan government can game an election will motivate people to risk life and limb to go and vote in one? A lot of revolutions and insurgencies have succeeded not just through military victory or because the revolutionaries won enough popular support but because the existing regime was perceived as too rotten to be borne. The Khmer Rouge found it fairly easy to empty Pnomh Penh in 1975 because people actually came out voluntarily into the streets to welcome them. They’d got to the stage where anything might promise some improvement.
In Afghanistan we’re already in the position that foreign troops are often welcomed by locals as much because they protect them from the government as from the Taliban. Now we’ve just gone through a long and complex process to sanctify by electoral means the continuation of the same bunch of warlords and gangsters in government. It’s over. Alles Kaputt. Bring them home.
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