Dear Editor, It remains astonishingly sad that even now – after many years failure, drift and mission creep – when Barack Obama is staggeringly calling for an even greater Nato commitment to provide combat troops in Afghanistan, and with no real consultation with the British people, the Lib Dems in particular can offer no serious analysis of this debacle and run along apologetically beside Brown like wimps to Britain’s US lapdog.

“Things may look a lot better there in three years,” muses one supporter of continuing the aimless and futile conflict.

Yet such false optimism from an armchair warrior devoid of any clear picture of what success could actually look like evidently has no substance whilst wise decision-making relies on good judgment based on the known facts and most likely speculations.

And these facts are that Afghanistan mainly comprises fiercely independent competitive, patriarchal tribal groupings which are without experience of democratic government – and where the main economy is opium-based, which is highly resistant to diversification, not least because farmers can’t grow anything remotely as profitable.

Add to this eight long years of occupation after an initial invasion which had the elimination of terrorist training camps as its main aim.

This has borne no fruit and has culminated in a rigged re-election of the same corrupt government which wants the occupation to continue ad infinitum so as not to bite the hand which feeds it and which consequently will make soothing noises of reforms which never happen.

Add to this far from comprehensive list of difficulties the growing strain on service morale, not simply because of the loss of life and limb, but on account of the utter shapelessness and lack of definition of the overall mission, and more relevant still the absolute inappropriateness of expecting combat soldiers to counter terrorist activity which is quintessentially clandestine by nature.

The result is one huge expensive red herring funded by unconsulted tax-payers.

It, therefore, is evident that the Lib Dems are as compliant to, and as deceived by, the so-called Special Relationship as the other main parties.

Whether or not Obama believes his own rhetoric or is making a trade-off similar to JFK over Vietnam in 1963 is another question.

Bill Haymes,
Coventry.