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By Henry Porter~London Guardian
Let’s see if we can tease out the logic of the latest New Labour backflip.
The former foreign office minister Kim Howells suggests that the policy in Afghanistan is not working and it is time to consider withdrawing troops and putting the money saved as result into the UK Border Agency and greater surveillance and monitoring in Britain.
Like so many in the Labour party, Howells’s only response to the failure of a government policy is to propose a general attack on freedom and privacy, placing the nation which is already regarded as the most closely monitored after China and North Korea under even greater surveillance.
Howells was an ardent supporter of both the Iraq war and the Afghanistan war, which is important because it’s now accepted that Britain’s participation in the Iraq invasion and the long engagement in Basra has a direct bearing on the position that we now find ourselves in Afghanistan. If British and American efforts had been concentrated in Afghanistan after 2001, and had not been thrown at Iraq, where there was no al-Qaida presence, we wouldn’t now face such a well-organised threat in Helmand province.
This was pointed out by many critics during the evolution of the disastrous Iraq policy but in this article Howells, once a prominent anti-war campaigner during Vietnam, does not take responsibility himself or for his government. “Like many observers of this eight-year conflict,” he says, as though he has been standing on the sidelines for this entire period, “I had hoped that by now a degree of stability might have returned to Afghanistan.”
