Britain’s suicide a drain on France 79
Muslims of the Middle East, Far East, North Africa and anywhere else, your attention please!
Great good news – if you haven’t already heard it! Just get yourself into Britain and say you’re a ‘refugee’ and ask for ‘asylum’, and you will immediately be given money and a place to live; you can import a wife or several wives, and they’ll all be given ‘benefits’ including ‘child-support’; your children will be given a free education and all of you will have free medical treatment. When you feel nicely settled you can carry out your duty of jihad by demanding that Britain adopt sharia law, or, if you fancy martyrdom, by suicide-bombing trains and buses to kill some British infidels.
From the Mail Online:
Migrant gangs [of Muslims – JB] in Calais are targeting British holidaymakers in terrifying ‘highway robberies’.
Would-be illegal immigrants are forming human roadblocks to force motorists passing through the French port town to stop. Travellers are then robbed at knifepoint by the migrants, who are desperate for funds to help them sneak into the UK. …
Since the closure of the Red Cross refugee centre at Sangatte in 2002, would-be migrants have been sleeping rough in and around Calais while they attempt to sneak on board cross-Channel trains and ferries. There are currently around 2,000, many living in a squalid camp known as the Jungle, which the French government has said will not be cleared away until next year.
In April immigration minister Eric Besson vowed to bulldoze the litter-strewn shanty town … after admitting it had become a hotbed for people smugglers and criminal gangs. But he has now said the camp must remain in place until it can be dismantled ‘in a dignified manner’.
French politicians have blamed Britain for the return of migrant camps to Calais.
The mayor of Calais, Natacha Bouchart, said the lure of the UK’s ‘enormous’ state handouts to asylum-seekers was the reason why thousands of foreigners are using the French port as a staging point to get across the Channel.
Mrs Bouchart said the UK Government’s policies were ‘imposing’ thousand of migrants on the town, costing the local economy millions of pounds.
Emotional Fraud 96
From the Institute for Middle Eastern Democracy (IMED):
“How come Barak, Israel’s Defence Minister, is under threat of being arrested in the UK while Khaled Mashaal, the leader of Hamas, roams London free of concern?” asks Alan Dershowitz.
We note that hypocrisy has always existed and will continue to do so. After all, such tenacious efforts are made by the public here to impede the vile sermons from naively depraved groups such as the BNP. But some of the same people who would help stop such people appearing on a public platform are regularly involved with genocidal persons who advocate the same destruction of liberty that the BNP do.
An example is Hezbollah’s Ibrahim Mousawi, whom Stop the War coalition invited to Britain a few years back. This is a man who, when working for Hezbollah’s TV station Al-Manar, serialised the infamous forgery ‘The Protocols of the Elders of Zion’ and broadcast such odious anti-semitism that the television station was banned in most Western countries. Stop the War did not invite an Israeli representative because, according to their spokesperson, “[Israel is] not interested in peace.”
Even if you discount the huge number of Israeli pro-Palestinian groups, Israeli human rights groups such as B’Tselem and the frequent rallies in support of peace held across Israel that are attended by people of all religious and political viewpoints; it would appear that the insinuation is that Israeli Politicians are not interested in peace.
And so how bizarre, how ironic, how cruel and how unjust! – that as Dershowitz says: Mashaal may visit Britain without worry, despite his personal involvement with countless murders, including the slaughter of Holocaust survivors, while Barak faces the prospect of arrest.
This is the same Barak that in 2001 at Tabla, offered the Palestinians 97% of the West Bank with border adjustments for the remaining 3%, the entire of the Gaza Strip and a shared capital of Jerusalem – the very set of demands that the Palestinians had laid out.
Needless to say, Arafat refused the deal. And so one must ask, where is the justice for Israel, a country that does proffer peace and compromise, the country that has made steps toward an end to violence? It simply does not make sense that these Israeli leaders should face arrest while nihilistic murderers of Hamas might walk freely around the streets of London – it is not rational, it is not moral and it does not portend the advent of peace.
It is the same politically charged emotion that has allowed so many depraved men to perpetuate their depravities, while the innocent suffer on all sides; be they politicians or public – the emotional idealism of so many in the West has ensured – we concede mostly unintentionally – that the misery of all is maintained.
Brutal Britain 227
Life in Britain is increasingly nasty. One of the many conditions making it so are laws conforming to political correctness and EU nonsense about ‘human rights’ – two considerations that guarantee injustice. It was most likely political correctness more than any other consideration that was responsible for the framing of the tyrannical gun laws.
A case in point:
Paul Clarke, an ex-soldier, was standing on the balcony of his home when he spotted a black bin-liner lying at the end of his garden. He went to see what was in it and found a sawn-off shotgun and two shells. He phoned the Reigate police and told them what he’d found, then took it to the police station. On his arrival he was arrested, charged with possession of a firearm, and locked up.
At his trial he was found guilty of having a firearm in his possession and will be sentenced on December 11. The penalty is five years in prison, minimum.
Telling and commenting on the story in Canada Free Press, Jerry A. Kane writes:
In court, Clarke’s defense attorney pointed to a police leaflet that urged citizens to report found firearms. The attorney argued that the leaflet contained no information warning citizens not to touch the firearm, report it by telephone, or take it into a police station.
The prosecutor argued that possession of a firearm is a “strict liability” charge and one’s intent is irrelevant. The prosecutor maintained that Clarke is guilty of having the gun in his possession and therefore has no defense in law against the charge.
Although the judge admitted the case was unusual, he added that “in law there is no dispute that Mr Clarke has no defence to this charge.” …
Only in totalitarian societies can handing in a discarded firearm to the police be construed as criminal behavior punishable by imprisonment.
Quoting from George Orwell’s 1984 Kane concludes:
To picture what lies ahead for the UK, “imagine a boot stamping on a human face — forever.”
Blame it on the Jews 279
Anti-Jewish feeling, speech, and action is intensifying in Britain.
It’s understandable, of course, after what Jews have been doing in that country: killing and maiming with bombs in London underground trains and a bus, leaving a car with a bomb in it on a busy street in the middle of the capital, driving a van full of explosive into an airport – doctors doing this, mark you, people ostensibly dedicated to saving lives! Oh, and much more: terrorist conspiracies; raping, beating up, murdering on the streets; evading deportation and becoming a huge drain on the tax-payer; demanding that their own religious law replace the law of the land; insisting that their polygamous marriages be recognized; building their houses of worship in every town and city and broadcasting their calls to prayer every few hours; setting up religious schools that teach hatred of Christians and sedition against their host country; establishing academic departments and even whole colleges in the great universities in order to promote their never-ending campaign to convert the whole world to their religion; turning areas of London and other cities into no-go areas within which they carry out the traditional honor killings of their wives and daughters without fear of interference from the British police —
The list could go on and on …
A noisy, demanding, aggressive, cruel, useless, ungrateful, parasitical lot, those British Jews!
What did you say? It’s not the Jews doing all that? Oh, who is it then?
The Muslims? Really?
Then why are the Jews being reviled?
The following is from an article in the Wall Street Journal, by Robin Shepherd (who was dismissed from his job at the Royal Institute of International Affairs – Chatham House, as it’s called – for being pro-Israel):
Here is a small selection of events that have taken place in Britain since the end of Israel’s Operation Cast Lead in Gaza earlier this year.
The government has imposed a partial arms embargo on Israel and failed to vote against the Goldstone report in the U.N . The charities War on Want and Amnesty International U.K. have both promoted a book by the anti-Israeli firebrand Ben White, tellingly called “Israeli Apartheid: A Beginner’s Guide.” The Trades Union Congress at its annual conference has called for boycotts of Israeli products as well as a total arms embargo.
In the media, the Guardian newspaper has stepped up its already obsessive campaign against the Jewish state to the extent that the paper’s flagship Comment is Free Web site frequently features two anti-Israeli polemics on one and the same day. The BBC continues to use its enormous influence over British public opinion to whitewash anti-Semitism and Holocaust denial in the Middle East. Its Web site, for example, features a profile of Hamas that makes no mention of the group’s virulent hatred of Jews or its adherence to a “Protocols of Zion”-style belief in world-wide Jewish conspiracies.
Readers may be surprised to learn, therefore, that the British media and political establishment is apparently cowering under the sway of a secretive cabal of Zionist lobbyists who have all but extinguished critical opinions of Israel from the public domain.
Such charges have been aired to mass critical acclaim this week in a landmark documentary, “Inside Britain’s Israel Lobby,” on Channel 4—the same outlet that offered Iran’s Holocaust-denying president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, an uninterrupted, seven-minute propaganda slot on Christmas Day last year.
The makers of the documentary—top Daily Mail columnist Peter Oborne and TV journalist James Jones—have also written about their program in the Guardian. Both furiously deny that they are peddling conspiracy theories. But the mindset we are dealing with was neatly exposed by the authors’ own explanation on how their suspicions were aroused that something sinister is at work in the corridors of British power.
It all transpired, they told readers ominously, during an address earlier this year by Conservative Party leader David Cameron at a dinner hosted by the Conservative Friends of Israel.
“The dominant event of the previous 12 months had been the Israeli invasion of Gaza,” they wrote. “We were shocked Cameron made no reference in his speech to the massive destruction it caused, or the 1,370 deaths that resulted, or for that matter the invasion itself. Indeed, our likely future prime minister went out of his way to praise Israel because it ‘strives to protect innocent life.’ This remark was not intended satirically.”
Since it is inconceivable, the authors obviously believe, that anyone could honestly credit Israel with anything other than the most damnable motives it must therefore follow that those who do in fact praise the Jewish state must be being paid or bullied into doing so.
If you think this all sounds familiar, you’d be right. Messrs. Oborne and Jones produced an extensive pamphlet accompanying the documentary, which openly claimed inspiration from none other than John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, authors of “The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy”—another conspiracy theory alleging malign Zionist influence in the United States.
But if Messrs. Mearsheimer and Walt at least felt the need to dress up their polemic in pseudo-academic wrapping paper, the sheer amateurishness of the British documentary they inspired is breathtaking. There was the endless superimposition of the Israeli Star of David on to the British flag, which, along with some absurdly melancholic background music, was presumably designed to prepare viewers for an astonishing series of revelations. But of course such revelations actually never materialized.
It turns out from the documentary itself that the allegedly secretive Jewish donors have been quite open in declaring their interests in accordance with the law. …
Much is also made of the influence of Friends of Israel groupings in the British Parliament. Such allegations are, of course, rendered ridiculous with a moment’s reflection on the countervailing influence of vast amounts of Arab oil money, not to mention the fact that membership in such groups for many parliamentarians is either purely formal or outright meaningless. Michael Ancram, for example, a former Northern Ireland minister and a member of Conservative Friends of Israel for more than 30 years, is famous for calling for talks with Hamas.
Given the paucity of the arguments, it would be tempting to dismiss the whole thing as unimportant. Would that we could. The documentary has already provoked a torrent of abuse against British Jews, not least on Channel 4’s widely read Web site, whose moderators have seen fit to approve dozens of postings about the Zionist lobby’s “seditious behavior,” its “disgusting attack on British democracy,” “the hand of global Zionism at work,” and several along the lines of the following, which said flatly: “We want our country back. The agents of a foreign power embedded at all levels of our government and politics need flushing out.”
If this sort of language takes hold, a bad situation in Britain may be about to get a whole lot worse.
Jewish leadership organizations have long feared accusations of divided loyalty between Britain and Israel and, ironically given the charges now being made against them, are frequently criticized in their own communities for failing to be sufficiently robust in Israel’s defense. The risk is that some may now be panicked into silence.
Non-Jews who call for a more reasoned discussion of Israel—already a small and diminishing group in Britain—will likely face additional slanders against their integrity: Since there is supposedly no reasonable case to be made in favor of the Jewish state, we must have sold out to the “Lobby.”
Such calumnies cannot be allowed to stand. Now more than ever, the forces of reason and decency must continue the fight to be heard.
In fact, the Jews of Britain, as a group, are a rather flaccid lot. They seldom protest when they have every reason to do so, and if they raise objections to anything they do it as timidly as mice. They don’t firmly contradict the lies put out constantly and insistently about Israel by the BBC and big daily newspapers such as the Guardian and the Independent. Their community activity consists of quietly raising money for charities, not all of them exclusively Jewish. They are anxious to show that they are loyal subjects of Her Majesty, and Israel is their lesser concern. Some stupid British Jews have been so anxious to show that Israel means nothing to them – or how much they intensely hate it – that they have striven to bring about academic and commercial boycotts of that small beleaguered land.
England was the first country in Europe to expel all its Jews in 1290. A few hundred were allowed back by Oliver Cromwell after 1656, and some thousands more after the restoration of the monarchy. In the late 1930s King George VI – the present queen’s father – objected to allowing Jewish refugees from Germany into Britain, calling them the scum of the earth.
Needlesss to say, Jews have made an enormous contribution to Britain, most notably in science, medicine, commerce, literature, and even occasionally in sport (as demonstrated in the film Chariots of Fire). In return Britain has not officially persecuted them in the last four hundred years or so as other European countries have done in the name of Christian love.
But now there is such a rising tide of hatred against them in Britain that they would be best advised to leave. They should emulate the Jews of France, who are emigrating in their thousands. They should not linger anywhere in Eurabia.
Better to risk another genocidal attempt against them, this time by Iranian nuclear attack, in Israel, the one country where they can defend themselves – which is precisely why most of the world wants to destroy it, of course.
Whac-A-Mole war 143
Knock ’em down here, they pop up there! There is no way the ‘coalition forces’ – ie the US and Britain – can win the war in Afghanistan, or make the Afghans peaceful and democratic, or bring relief to their appallingly maltreated women and girls.
The war long since ceased to be for the cause of revenge and punishment. Those aims were accomplished early on. It has become a war of philanthropy. But it is not the business of nations to make other nations happy and good.
Having to accept that others ‘do it all wrong’ and there’s nothing you can do to put them right may be hard, but it’s an essential lesson that the well-meaning have to learn.
Christopher Booker writes in the Telegraph:
As both Britain and America are plunged into an orgy of tortured introspection over what we are doing in Afghanistan, a further very important factor needs to be fed into the discussion, because it helps to explain not only why we have got into such a tragic mess but also why our armed intervention in that unhappy country is doomed.
What we are hardly ever told about Afghanistan is that it has been for 300 years the scene of a bitter civil war, between two tribal groups of Pashtuns (formerly known as Pathans). On one side are the Durranis – most of the settled population, farmers, traders, the professional middle class. On the other are the Ghilzai, traditionally nomadic, fiercely fundamentalist in religion, whose tribal homelands stretch across into Pakistan as far as Kashmir.
Ever since Afghanistan emerged as an independent nation in 1709, when the Ghilzai kicked out the Persians, its history has been written in the ancient hatred between these two groups. During most of that time, the country has been ruled by Durrani, who in 1775 moved its capital from the Ghilzai stronghold of Kandahar up to Kabul in the north. Nothing has more fired Ghilzai enmity than the many occasions when the Durrani have attempted to impose their rule from Kabul with the aid of “foreigners”, either Tajiks from the north or outsiders such as the British, who invaded Afghanistan three times between 1838 and 1919 in a bid to secure the North-west Frontier of their Indian empire against the rebellious Ghilzai.
When the Soviets invaded Afghanistan in 1979, after years of Durrani rule, it was to support a revolutionary Ghilzai government. But this new foreign presence inspired general Afghan resistance which was why, by the late 1980s, the Americans were supporting the almost entirely Ghilzai-run Taleban and their ally Osama bin Laden. In 1996 the Taleban-Ghilzai got their revenge, imposing their theocratic rule over almost the whole country. In 2001, we invaded to topple the Taleban, again imposing Durrani rule, now under the Durrani President Karzai.
As so often before, the Ghilzai have seen their country hijacked by a Durrani regime, supported by a largely Tajik army and by hated outsiders from the West. One reason why we find it so hard to win “hearts and minds” in Helmand is that we are up against a sullenly resentful population, fired by a timeless hatred and able to call on unlimited support, in men and materiel, from their Ghilzai brothers across the border in Pakistan.
Only in towns such as Sanguin and Garmsir are there islands of Durrani, willing to support the Durrani government in distant Kabul. No sooner have our forces “secured” a village from the Taleban, than their fighters re-emerge from the surrounding countryside to reclaim it for the Ghilzai cause. Without recognising this, and that what the Ghilzai really want is an independent “Pashtunistan” stretching across the border, we shall never properly understand why, like so many foreigners who have become embroiled in Afghanistan before, we have stumbled into a war we can never hope to win.
On the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month 34
Written on many war memorials in the lands of the erstwhile British Empire are these lines from a poem called For the Fallen by Laurence Binyon:
They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old:
Age shall not weary them, nor the years contemn.
At the going down of the sun and in the morning
We will remember them.
We hope they will be remembered. We are not sure they will be for much longer.
Hypocrisy Pies 7
An article from the Institute of Middle Eastern Democracy:
A very interesting study here by iKibbitz on the nature of the HRC’s vote last Thursday based on the evidence provided in the Goldstone report. The article looks at the Freedom Index scores given to countries that voted for the resolution, against and abstained.
Although this is never an outright reason to dismiss a democratic vote on a resolution, given the enormous amount of criticism of Goldstone and his study – this now paired with this examination of the Freedom Index scores given to the countries that voted for the resolution – certainly provides a strong basis to levy further examination and criticism of the report’s relevance and usefulness.
Another interesting article that has to come light is…read on
In commemoration of the fall of the Berlin wall 118
Today, November 9, 2009, is the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall.
It was one of the greatest events of history.
The wall both literally and symbolically marked the division between tyranny and freedom.
It was erected on Sunday, August 13, 1961, to prevent people living under the Soviet-controlled Communist regime in East Germany from fleeing into free West Berlin. About 1500 people a day had been migrating westward.
Within 24 hours West Berlin was sealed off from the so-called Democratic Republic of Germany.
At first it was a fence consisting of barbed wire, spread over some 96 miles.
In 1962 an inner wall was built. The 100 yard gravel area between the fence and the wall was booby-trapped with trip wires, and mined.
In 1975 a stronger, higher, thicker wall made of concrete and reinforced with mesh fencing and barbed wire was constructed. It was known as the ‘Grenzmauer 75’. Soldiers stationed in some 300 watchtowers had a clear view of the space, and orders to shoot down anyone attempting to cross it.
Over 100,000 people tried to escape to freedom. Some 5,000 succeeded, mostly in the early years before the ‘Grenzmauer 75’ was built. Later, successful crossings were made through tunnels. Two families succeeded by hot-air balloon, and one man in a light aircraft. At least 136 people were killed in the attempt, most famously 18-year-old Peter Fechter, shot on August 17, 1962, as he tried to climb the wall. He lay for hours in the space between the wall and the fence, crying out for help while he bled to death. The East German border guards waited for him to die before they carried him away.
Twenty-five years later, on June 12, 1987, President Ronald Reagan of the United States stood on the west side of the Brandenberg Gate beyond which the wall ran, and said to the Russian leader in a famous speech, ‘Mr Gorbachev, tear down this wall!’
The speech was symptomatic of the firm stand he maintained against the Soviet Union.
Two and a half years later the wall was brought down.
Its fall heralded the collapse of Soviet Russia and its evil empire. It marked the end of the Cold War and the victory of the free world, led by the United States of America.
The conquering hero of that stupendous victory was President Reagan. How he won the Cold War is the subject of volumes, but win it he did.
Of inestimable help to him was Margaret Thatcher, Prime Minister of Great Britain.
A few days ago Mikhail Gorbachev, George H. W. Bush who was president of the US when the Soviet Union was dissolved in 1991, and Helmut Kohl who was Chancellor of West Germany at the time, met on the stage of a Berlin theatre to commemorate the fall of the wall.
Margaret Thatcher, who had not wanted the reunification of Germany but nevertheless played a decisive part in defeating the Communist tyranny over Eastern Europe, was not included.
The president of the United States, Barack Obama, has refused to attend any of the celebratory ceremonies in Germany. His excuse is that he is ‘too busy’.
Jillian Becker November 9, 2009
A well of poison 194
A diary has been found in the US National Security Archive which reveals details of the relationship between the British Labour Party and the Soviet Union. It was kept by one Anatoly Chernyaev, the man who pandered between the Kremlin and the Labour leaders (particularly Michael Foot and Neil Kinnock). If anyone should know, he should. And it’s quite likely he’s telling the truth, though with such people there can be no certainty, of course.
The diary is making some headlines in Britain, notably in The Spectator, which has made it this week’s cover story, and the Daily Mail.
Among its ‘revelations’ is a story that the Labour leaders tried to get the Soviets to help them beat the ‘common enemy Margaret Thatcher’. The Soviets apparently agreed to help these treacherous men, and maybe they did something or other, but whether they did or not, Mrs Thatcher remained triumphantly in Downing Street throughout the 1980s, to be replaced by another Conservative leader, John Major, in 1990.
The Mail, realizing perhaps that this isn’t much of a revelation, and that as news it is rather stale, does its best to work up something juicier:
More worrying, perhaps, is the fact that the document shows in stark detail how the political ideology of so many of those who govern today was shaped by the unspeakable communist creed of the Soviet Union. The unpalatable truth is that many ministers in Government today rose through the ranks of a British socialist movement that was heavily influenced – and even controlled – by the Kremlin in Moscow. … In Britain, those on the Left who know about the depth of the Soviet influence over this country in the latter half of the 20th century, have maintained an embarrassed silence about this shameful episode in British political history. Above all, the intimate co-operation between Moscow and the trades unions which nearly brought the country to its knees in the Sixties and Seventies has been an utterly taboo subject. … This diary reveals that the cosy relationship between the Kremlin and Labour was far more widespread than previously thought – and had been going on for years. …’
Actually, it was pretty well known that the particular trade union leaders mentioned by the Mail were sponsored by the Soviets. The subject, far from being ‘utterly taboo’ was discussed at length and often in Conservative circles, especially when Prime Minister Thatcher tamed the trade unions good and proper. As for the ‘intimacy’ between the Labour Party rats and the Soviet top brass, such details as the diary records – and only the details are news really, the general picture being well known to anyone who took an interest in such things back then – show the rats in a rather pathetic light. It seems that they had to beg for a few minutes with Brezhnev, and later with ‘the senile’ Chernenko, so they could tell the newspapers back home that they were received by the Man. Hardly a ‘cosy’ relationship!
The Mail tries harder yet:
It is not just the Left’s close connection with the Soviet Union, but the lasting influence of that connection that should concern us all.
By which it means that Gordon Brown, who is still in power though not for much longer, was originally given his safe seat by the decision of two senior trade union officials who were themselves sponsored by the USSR. Thus, urges the Mail, ‘the control the Soviets had over Labour, its leadership and aspiring politicians, is still having a profound impact on Britain.’
Even this, we surmise, will not greatly scandalize or even startle most British readers.
We find one comment interesting. It’s made by Peter Oborne in his Spectator column on the subject. He says that ‘these communist influences’ account for many of the ‘characteristics’ of Tony Blair’s New Labour. The characteristics he notes are:
‘Its deep suspicion of outsiders, its structural hostility to democratic debate, its secrecy, its faith in bureaucracy, embedded preference for striking deals away from the public eye, its ruthless reliance on a small group of trusted activists .’
Why this list strikes us as worth noting is that it applies equally to Obama’s Democratic Party. And the influences are of the same sort, and from the same poison well: not the Kremlin, which was only a conduit, but the Communist creed itself.
Wasted lives 18
Five British soldiers were shot dead Tuesday by an Afghan ‘policeman’ they were training.
An unnamed soldier contributed this to The Independent:
When I heard the news this morning, I thought “Christ, five in one go…” I was shocked and saddened – but I was not surprised that it had happened. I’m surprised it took this long.
We went out to Helmand to mentor the Afghan National Police without understanding the level they were at. We thought we would be arresting people, helping them to police efficiently. Instead we were literally training them how to point a gun on the ranges, and telling them why you should not stop cars and demand “taxes”.
Most of them were corrupt and took drugs, particularly opium. The lads would go into police stations at night and they would be stoned; sometimes they would fire indiscriminately at nothing.
They had no understanding of the basics of what it means to be a policeman. We expected to be teaching adults at a certain level and then realised we would be changing nappies. Give them 20 rounds and they will hit the target once.
The first time I saw them I realised that they had almost no training; some of them had very little ability. Their uniforms were dirty and didn’t fit. Their weapon-cleaning was non-existent.
They certainly didn’t have a concept of being upstanding members of the community. They had no loyalty, esprit de corps or cameraderie. …
How do you train this band of idiots and turn them into a force to be reckoned with if they have no sense of loyalty, no sense of belonging?
The biggest problem was that we didn’t know who we were getting. There were no security checks – they were literally allowed to come into the compound and we had to rely on the local chief of police, who recruited them. We kept a close eye on them because we didn’t know or trust them – it was for our own security.
Perhaps half of them genuinely wanted to try to make the community safe: they had the right intention but the attention span of gnats. Twenty would turn up one day, none the next, then 15, then suddenly a new face would appear.
It was difficult just getting them to a basic level, to do things like man a post. They would take drugs, go to sleep, leave their post, have sex with each other. Very few were vigilant or alert. …
British troops felt extremely vulnerable. If they were going out on patrol they didn’t tell the Afghans where, so they couldn’t pass on the information – they didn’t want improvised explosive devices (IEDs) laid in the area. They didn’t trust them one bit.
There was an operation involving the Brits and the Afghan National Army to clear Nad-e-Ali, and it cost lives. The police were left at checkpoints, but within 48 hours all the checkpoints had been overrun or the police just buggered off. As soon as the ground was won it was lost again. …
Lives get lost for nothing. …
I am convinced that a lot of money has been wasted and people have lost their lives unnecessarily because it was for a political end, and not a military decision. The British Army has been pushed into doing something it should not be. …