House Points: What are British troops doing in Afghanistan?

My House Points column from today's Liberal Democrat News.Afghan recapHouse Points has been going for so long that, while writing a column, I sometimes have the feeling that I have on paper it before. I’m sure you frequently have that feeling when you read them. But then there are a lot of subjects on which this administration has complete little progress over the past 10 years.Take Afghanistan. Back in March 2006, just as Ming Campbell was being chosen Liberal Democrat leader, I questioned what exactly our troops were action there. The then defence secretary John Reid, I reported, had described their job as “establishing democracy, ending terrorism, achieving security in the south of Afghanistan, helping the Afghan economy and dealing with poppy destruction”.He didn’t, I pointed out with mordant sarcasm, say what they would be action after lunch.Three and a not whole years on, the confusion over the purpose of the British presence remains. As Nick Clegg place it in the Commons on Monday, “For the past eight years, the Government have been sending varied signals about the nature and purpose of the deployment. In the past week we have had the Prime Minister and the Defence Secretary giving different justifications for the war.”Perhaps we now hear less about our hopes of establishing a Western liberal democracy in Afghanistan â€" ministers second-hand to make the British Army sound like the Islington Labour Party under arms â€" and additional of the claim that our troops out there are defending Britain.But it is that claim right? What Islamist terror we have seen in Britain has been homegrown â€" almost homemade, in fact, though negative less deadly for that â€" and it is debatable that our entanglements overseas in recent years have complete us additional vulnerable, not safer.Nick Clegg’s remark that the Government’s plan has been over-ambitious in aim and under-resourced in practice was widely reported. Paddy Ashdown second-hand the same line in the Lords on Monday, but went on say more.Paddy said we have learnt that through bitter experience that if not the global community can act to a single plan and speak with a single voice, we will not succeed somewhere like Afghanistan.Unless everyone learns that lesson, I fear an important person will be writing a column very like this single years from now.
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