Barack Obama’s decision to send 30,000 extra troops to Afghanistan will only increase the level of violence there, claims an influential Tory MP.
Gulf War veteran Adam Holloway – a member of the Commons’ defence committee – returned from a week-long trip to Kabul on Thursday and said the US President’s actions may end up causing more harm than good.
The Gravesham MP has visited Afghanistan at his own expense every year since being elected in 2005, and told KOS Media he had begun to notice a worrying trend.
He said: “If you were to make a graph of the violence in the country, it would directly correlate to a graph of the number of foreign troops there.
“When we talk about the Taliban we think they’re all fighting us for the same purpose, but only about five or 10 per cent are the old crazies.
“The vast majority are fighting because they don’t like the presence of foreign troops in their areas and because they don’t like the Afghan government.
“We don’t have a structure containing the sort of people who would do what needs to be done over there.
“We have huge military barracks and Army headquarters, but there’s no huge hangar full of people working on specific little areas and identifying leaders and villagers and getting out and talking to them.
“If you already have military forces then the easy option is to throw more military forces at them, but it’s actually making things worse.”
There are currently about 100,000 foreign troops in Afghanistan, including about 9,000 from the UK.
Late last month Gordon Brown announced he would be sending a further 500 to help the war effort, while Nato announced on Friday that at least 7,000 allied soldiers from various counties would also be flying in.
Mr Holloway is a former Grenadier Guards officer who fought in the first Gulf War and was an ITN reporter at the start of the second.
The 44-year-old says he believes there are three key elements to winning the conflict in Afghanistan, the first of which is to ensure President Hamid Karzai runs a government that is free from corruption.
He also feels a series of local deals need to be made with reconcilable Taliban leaders, and the American government must put pressure on Pakistan and India to resolve their differences and therefore stop Pakistan turning a blind eye to the fighting on its borders.
Mr Holloway said: “If those three things aren’t done then yes, the extra troops sent in will only make things worse.
“It’s awful to hear Gordon Brown and Barack Obama talking about dates for troops to leave. I want to win this, but the problem isn’t that we haven’t enough troops; it’s that they have been operating with the wrong strategy.
“This war really matters to places like Gravesend and Northfleet because we want to make terrorist attacks over here less likely, not more, so we have to get it right.”
POSTED: 05/12/2009 08:00:00
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