As Britain's new Prime Minister struggles with reality and attempts to dress abject defeat up as resounding success - and whilst ordering the troops to leave Sangin, delusionally calls it: "Consolidation", a very brief return to the whole woeful Afghan disaster seems timely. As Iraq, a course embarked on blindly by his predecessor Charles Anthony Lynton Blair, QC., in blind, puppy-like determination to obey His Master's Voice.
It seems some serious lobal affliction strikes those who enter No 10 Downing Street. But not since its previous incumbent stated: "I'm a pretty straightforward sort of guy", has such a departure from reality occurred as David Cameron declaring today: "Any suggestion that British troops have been beaten in Sangin and are retreating with their tales between their legs, is not just wrong, it's disgusting."
Those who ignore history are doomed to repeat it. In another (nineteenth century) British folly in Afghanistan (where they again met their match in Sangin, in spite of: "better guns, better communications, better everything..") Sir Lepel Griffin, wrote to The Times:
"This policy consists in spending a quarter of a million annually on a post of defence and observation which defends and observes nothing, and on the maintenance of a road which leads nowhere".
How history repeats.'
Read more...