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With a new Government and the inevitable trip by Senior politicians to our troops in Helmand Province the question looms large as to what we are doing there and just how quickly we can get out. New Government, new look but alas, I doubt any new answers, for now Afghanistan is as devoid of new solutions as reforming the House of Lords is.

We walked blindly into this Afghanistan deployment, remember the famous statement by John Reid, doing his stint at the MOD that likely, our troops would return”without a shot being fired” and over 200 lives lost later, they are still heavily engaged.

Is There a Threat to Blighty ?

I would agree that it would be better if we weren’t there but the problem is that we are and for good or ill, just walking away isn’t an option now, a withdrawal of combat forces will have to be carefully managed over time. Besides which and despite our 10,000 troops being there, it is the Americans who are doing most of the heavy lifting so letting them down and walking away is frankly not a realistic option.

There was a rather daft editorial in the Independent the other day which contained this classic line: “…without providing a scintilla of evidence that the Taliban has any connection to the terrorist plots that have been manufactured in Britain.”

Between the Taliban and some British born Muslim of Pakistani origin in Bradford or Luton, I would see few direct links in the majority of cases and I suspect that the Taliban would only see such people, at best as “Useful fools”. The link is slightly different but represents a no less a clear and present danger to the UK.

The Problem is Pakistan

The biggest single threat to the UK is Pakistan because of the family connections between here and there which combined with young men struggling to find an ‘identity’ between being Muslim and being British and feeling not particularly part of either, the idea of being a “Muslim Warrior”, being recognised as an ‘important person’ and particularly useful if unemployed, has its attractions.

In a sense, Afghanistan today is the sort of equivalent to the 1930s and what the Spanish Civil War was to young idealists then. But it is also much more than that in military terms. Without substantial troop deployments in Afghanistan, would Pakistan have taken serious military action against militants in the Tribal Areas that border Afghanistan, or would it have all been left to fester until we had another 7/7 or series of them here in the UK ?

Being realistic, the threat from Pakistan to the UK is far greater than it is to the USA and yet, it is the Americans who have by far the greatest deployments in terms of troops and hardware, we should be quietly grateful to them.

An Exit Route ?

I have no wish to be an “armchair General” and certainly would like to see all of the Coalition Forces out of Afghanistan asap but let us be realistic about it all please. Leave aside “How we got here” and who is to blame, let History judge that, let us just concentrate on a realistic exit route but accept that we are likely looking to a 4 to 5 year haul and even then, few little girls in Afghanistan will attend school, Opium will still be grown and their form of democracy will bear little relationship to anything we would acknowledge.

If I were to hazard a guess as to when that operation could be scaled down, late 2012 or one year before the next Presidential Race would seem most likely to me.