Remember Afghanistan?
At the same time that the U.S. is continuing the screw things up in Iraq, it’s also doing a good job of letting Afghanistan (you know, the one they keep trotting out as a success) fall back into civil war. Fortunately, the British are actually paying attention.
Defence chiefs are planning to rush thousands of British troops to Afghanistan in a bid to stop the country sliding towards civil war, Scotland on Sunday can reveal.
Ministers have been warned they face a “complete strategic failure” of the effort to rebuild Afghanistan and that 5,500 extra troops will be needed within months if the situation continues to deteriorate.
An explosive cocktail of feuding tribal warlords, insurgents, the remnants of the Taliban, and under-performing Afghan institutions has left the fledgling democracy on the verge of disintegration, according to analysts and senior officers.
Some of those troops may have to come from the British force in Iraq though, and the U.S. is already being petulant about that. Of course, if we’d just supported Afghanistan’s new government with the resources and troops they needed in the first place, the British wouldn’t need to try and clean up our mess for us.
[via Daily Kos]
