CAMP BASTION, 21 November 2006 — The security of the world will be decided on the desert battlefields of Afghanistan, British Prime Minister Tony Blair told his troops on the frontline of an increasingly bloody war yesterday.
“Here, in this extraordinary desert, is where the future of world security in the early 21st century is going to be played out,” Blair said in remarks here.
Afghanistan’s Western allies say the Taleban is on the run, despite a resurgence, but Blair’s long-planned visit has been kept in strict hour-by-hour secrecy due to security fears.
“You may not know this, but people back home are very proud of what you do, regardless what they think of political leaders,” he told troops in the desert province that is a Taleban stronghold and the opium capital of the world’s main producer.
Fighting in Afghanistan this year is the bloodiest since US-led forces ousted the Taleban’s hard-line government exactly five years ago. The British troops in Helmand and other NATO troops in the south have been at the forefront of the combat.
And with the rise in fighting and a redeployment to the Taleban’s southern heartland, British casualty rates here are now higher than those in Iraq, with 36 killed since June.
British military chiefs say their troops face the bloodiest fighting since the Korean War and are six times more likely to die in Afghanistan than in Iraq.
“We want to be here. We want to be doing our job,” Sgt. Chris Hunter, 31, from Swansea, told Blair at Camp Bastion in the chill morning air of an Afghan winter. “It’s a point that’s lost back home
Blair also signed a drone reconnaissance plane at the base. “I hope it doesn’t get shot down, sir,” joked one soldier.
Blair met President Hamid Karzai in Kabul at the presidential palace before flying back to Pakistan, where he said Kabul’s allies must stick by it for the long term.
“We’ve got the same alternatives we had five years ago,” he told a joint news conference. “You either stick with it until the job is done or you don’t and you leave it to another generation to sort out. And I’m not prepared to do that. “But now is the right time to bring into sharp focus the need to stay with Afghanistan in its move toward progress and redevelopment, to relive the vision that brought us here and should keep us here until the job is done.”
Blair flew in from Islamabad, where he had met President Pervez Musharraf to discuss how to beat the Taleban, pool intelligence and quell militancy in Pakistani religious schools. The Taleban’s resurgence also comes amid mounting debate over Western policy in Iraq and NATO warnings that it cannot defeat the insurgents on the battlefield.
On Friday, Blair agreed with an Al Jazeera television interviewer’s contention that the Western intervention in Iraq had been a disaster — although he went on to point the finger at outside forces fomenting sectarian violence, and his office later said he had not meant to endorse the questioner’s view.
Senior Afghan officials also privately criticize Britain, the United States and other allies for not putting more pressure on Pakistan to stop the Taleban and other militants sheltering and training in its lawless borderlands.
Pakistan says it is doing everything it can to stop the militants, as it does in the face of similar Indian criticism over Kashmiri separatists operating from Pakistani territory.
But senior Afghan intelligence officials say they have given Washington and London clear evidence of continued Pakistani government support of the Taleban, but have been ignored.
