'Troops out of Afghanistan now'

Peter Hitchens argues that British Troops should be brought home:

"Troops out of Afghanistan Now

How exactly could a government minister explain what 100 British servicemen have died for in Afghanistan? We know that the Defence Secretary who sent them there, Comrade John Reid, hadn't a clue why they were going, and famously thought they would not fire a shot . I believe they have since fired five million shots, many of them long after this posing booby and shameless ex-Communist went off into a retirement that couldn't be premature enough for me.

Why aren't they there? They aren't there to abolish the burqa and liberate Afghan women. Most Afghan women, especially in Pashtun areas, are still shrouded or veiled in one Islamic way or another (Persian-influenced Islamists prefer the chador, which is pretty restricting but not restricting enough for the Taleban, to the burqa), and this is not likely to change. if British troops went around ripping off their burqas we'd soon know what a real Afghan war was like. They aren't there to stamp out the opium poppy fields. This would be too dangerous, as it would threaten the farmers involved with destitution. In any case readers of the Mail on Sunday know that opium poppies are being grown commercially and legally in Oxfordshire, for medical purposes, so why couldn't a similar arrangement be made for the Afghan farmers?

They aren't there to stamp out 'The Taleban', a murky body which, like 'Al Qaeda', shrinks and expands to suit our needs. Many Pashtun Afghans more or less favour the sort of Islam and the sort of culture associated with the Taleban. It is based on their tribal traditions. Afghanistan is also an ethnically divided society, in which the differences between the Pashtuns and the Uzbeks are crucial, though there are several other groups as well, including one which adheres to Shia Islam and so is specially loathed by the austerely Sunni Pashtuns. If you get on with one group, the chances are you will be the enemy of the others.

The word also applies (in our own minds) to certain people at certain times, but doesn't apply to the same people at other times. When they are 'village elders' cooperating with us, or being paid off by us, Pashtuns in Helmand are our allies. When they later get behind a rock and shoot at us they are 'The Taleban'. We couldn't stamp them out if we wanted to. They may accept various forms of help from us, but they don't want us there, for dozens of reasons. Even if we carpeted the place with schools, hospitals, factories, irrigation projects and the rest, they still wouldn't want us there. Afghans are very persistent about this and have driven out every would-be conqueror who has ever come their way. So why are we there, where we are so obviously not wanted?

We aren't there to support Afghanistan's 'democratically-elected President' - who barely controls his own Kabul bedroom. But he is a democrat, isn't he ? Well, you can believe if you want to that President Hamid Karzai is in office with the full-hearted consent of the Afghan people after an open contest in a free society, where people voted thoughtfully according to the issues. . Something tells me that he is there because various warlords and faction leaders told their supporters to vote for him. In return, he agreed to leave them alone to tyrannise their slices of the country as they see fit, which is what they do. Some of them are just as bad as the Taleban, but in different ways. General Abdul Rashid Dostum, for example, is not an attractive character (look him up) , and I do not believe he reads 'the Guardian' or 'The New York Times'. Yet he is, on the basis of our enemy's enemy being our friend, the ally of 'The West' in its attempt to build a new Afghanistan.

Even those who have not fallen for any of the above empty reasons for our being in Afghanistan tend to be bamboozled by the propaganda trump card. This goes that under the Taleban. 'Al Qaeda' maintained its headquarters in Afghanistan, and if we let the country fall back under Taleban control, 'Al Qaeda ' will be back, and will organise the next 11th September from there.

How many holes are there in this? The perpetrators of 11th September were mostly Saudis ( from a country whose laws and rules are remarkably similar to those of the Taleban, yet which is a full-scale ally, oil supplier to and arms purchaser from the 'West' , with big embassies in London and Washington). Terrorist atrocities can be cooked up anywhere, not least in our own cities among the many fanatical Islamists who have been brought to Europe by the globalist immigration polices of the 'West', supported so enthusiastically by the Murdoch media and 'neo-conservative' commentators, who also stoke up the 'war on terror', without the slightest sign of seeing any contradiction between these two positions

If there is a second 11th September, it is as likely to have been planned in Leeds as in Kandahar, as our government keeps telling us, though it can't do much about that either. The idea that terrorist outrages can for the most part be prevented by vigilance is, sadly, baseless.

In any case, what sort of Army would we have to deploy even to control the Pashtun areas? ( answer : bigger than we have ) And how hard would it have to fight? (answer , very hard indeed). Casualties dropped recently because we stopped trying to muscle our way into Pashtun tribal zones, and negotiated deals with 'elders' who of course weren't the Taleban ( see above).

Then there's Pakistan. Pakistan is naturally interested in Afghanistan because it's on its northern border, remarkably close to the capital, Islamabad. Also, if there's trouble in Afghanistan, Pakistan has to cope with the refugees. But there's much more to it than that. Pakistan's 'border' with Afghanistan is a silly fiction. It is based on the Durand Line, a British imperial folly forced on the Afghans by naked power in 1893, but one of those imperial granny knots, like the borders of Africa and the middle East, that cannot be unravelled without causing even more problems than we have already.

It runs, madly, right through Pashtun territory. The Pashtuns simply ignore it, making it worthless as a security barrier. The real border is elsewhere. Peshawar, officially in Pakistan, is for all practical purposes an Afghan city, which is why there is a military control post on the Indus River, way inside Pakistan, on the road between Islamabad and Peshawar. That is where Pakistan really stops. There are also huge numbers of Afghan Pashtuns in Pakistan proper, particularly in that vast and volatile city, Karachi. Their votes, and the feelings of their tribal chieftains, cannot be ignored in Pakistani politics.

Now, despite the big fuss about restoring democracy a few months ago, and the overdone praise of the late Benazir Bhutto by her many rather gullible friends in the Western media, Pakistan appears to be drifting back towards control by the same faction that used to be on good terms with the Taleban. This group, not very far distant from the ISI intelligence services and the army, is said to be trying to take over Nawaz Sharif's Pakistan Muslim League, with a view to taking over the country in time. I can't really see how this - a consequence of the recent elections - is better than having the place run by General Musharraf and the Army, though I was never very convinced by the General's claims to be a doughty warrior against 'Terror', or 'our' principal ally in the region. It just goes to show how complicated things become when you start messing around in other people's countries.

Then there's the other question, about where Osama bin Laden actually is. I seem to remember a senior Afghan official saying a few months ago "Well, he's either in Afghanistan or in Pakistan, and he's definitely not in Afghanistan", which I thought was rather a witty way of pointing the finger. In which case, are we going to despatch troops to Pakistan? Of course not. Unlike Afghanistan, Pakistan is not so weakened by repeated invasions and civil wars that foreign armies can impose themselves upon it.

What can we really do about these developments? Search me. But the presence or absence of a British army contingent in Helmand province will certainly not help. All we are doing is sending brave men to a place where they can do no good, and where they provide targets for our enemies. The British presence in Afghanistan is at least as stupid and pointless as their continuing presence in Iraq. they should come home, immediately. They only stay there because the politicians who sent them haven't the courage to admit that they don't know what they are doing. Now we have all seen Foreign Secretary David Miliband's grasp of world affairs on display last week, can we really believe that these people understand what is going on, or have any right to order better men than they are into such danger? One death in this pointless war was indefensible. A hundred are a hundred times as indefensible. Bring them home."