Obama: It’s time to finish the job in Afghanistan

When enemy action kills our troops, it’s unfortunate. When our own moral fecklessness murders those in uniform, it’s unforgivable.

In Afghanistan, our leaders are complicit in the death of each soldier, Marine or Navy corpsman who falls because politically correct rules of engagement shield our enemies.

Mission-focused, but morally oblivious, Gen. Stan McChrystal conformed to the Obama Way of War by imposing rules of engagement that could have been concocted by Code Pink:

* Unless our troops in combat are absolutely certain that no civilians are present, they’re denied artillery or air support.

I backed the war, but the chance looks squandered. Local agencies battling terrorism need the funds being spilt in Helmand

If we accept that al-Qaida continues to pose a deadly threat to the UK, and if we know that it is capable of changing the locations of its bases and modifying its attack plans, we must accept that we have a duty to question the wisdom of prioritising, in terms of government spending on counter-terrorism, the deployment of our forces to Afghanistan. It is time to ask whether the fight against those who are intent on murdering British citizens might better be served by diverting into the work of the UK Border Agency and our police and intelligence services much of the additional finance and resources swallowed up by the costs of maintaining British forces in Afghanistan.

It would be better, in other words, to bring home the great majority of our fighting men and women and concentrate on using the money saved to secure our own borders, gather intelligence on terrorist activities inside Britain, expand our intelligence operations abroad, co-operate with foreign intelligence services, and counter the propaganda of those who encourage terrorism.

Such a shift in focus would have the benefit of exposing far fewer British servicemen and women to the deadly threats of Taliban snipers and roadside bombs, but would also have momentous implications for UK foreign and defence policy. We would need to reinvent ourselves diplomatically and militarily. Treaties and international agreements would have to be renegotiated. In particular, relationships with our Nato partners, especially with the Americans – our most trusted and valued allies – would alter fundamentally.

Life inside the UK would have to change. There would be more intrusive surveillance in certain communities, more police officers on the streets, more border officials at harbours and airports, more inspectors of vehicles and vessels entering the country, and a re-examination of arrangements that facilitate the “free movement” of people and products across our frontiers with the rest of the EU.

Today’s column is, at root, an expression of horror at the extent to which pandering dhimmitude characterizes our military strategy in Afghanistan. We inferior-minded infidels will do anything, it seems, to win the approval of the Islamic masses. We will sink endless billions into their country; build endless infrastructure; provide state-of-the-art security; train untrainable armies and police forces, and on and on. Now, according to our new commander in Afghanistan, Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, in our effort to “protect [the Afghan people] from everything that can hurt them,” we will even ask our troops to think twice under fire. All of this we will do in the effort to win Afghan “hearts and minds,” which, our geniuses (West Point ’76, many of them) have decided, will win this overnight, as one general recently put it. “Winning hearts and minds” — awful phrase with unfortunate connotations — just means making prehistorically-mired Afghans like us a little better than their babaric co-religionists the Taliban, whose idea of a hearts and minds offensive is to behead, maim, extort, blow up, and assassinate in the name of Allah.