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It makes my blood boil when I hear the Secretary of State for Defence talk about the NEED for troops in Afghanistan, or any other conflict zone for that matter. For the current Secretary and his predecessors to try to justify the military presence is missing the most fundamental point about their deployment.
The reason we have troops in Afghanistan is because they are implementing British Foregin Policy, or rather they should be. War was defined by someone far better than me as diplomacy by violent means. And that is definitely true now and will be into the future.
Yet for some incomprehensible reason we seem to accept that war fighting and the associated problems is not a Foreign Office matter but a Military matter. It should be for the Foreign Secretary to explain WHY we are prepared to lose lives and for the Defence Secretary to explain HOW those lives are lost when inevitably we do lose some of our finest.
Consequently we prosecute war-fighting without a clear political aim, with an under-funded and over-stretched military and a national budget that is prepared to support the big-ticket items like Trident and Aircraft Carriers, yet ignore the need for essential battlefield mobility.
Yesterday’s announcements, just like the announcer just Aintworth-it.
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