ASIA: Britain's Ashdown asks whether Afghanistan war can be won
Sun Sep 6 03:45:47 EST 2009
Sat Sep 5 17:45:47 UTC 2009
LONDON, Sept 5 AFP - Britain needs to ask whether the war in Afghanistan can still be won, the former high representative in Bosnia says.
Lord Paddy Ashdown, whose candidacy as international envoy to Afghanistan was vetoed by President Hamid Karzai in 2008, told BBC radio on Saturday that Britain had made "catastrophic errors" in the country.
"Events are still moving against us in Afghanistan and we have lost a very great deal of time," said Ashdown, who was the UN's high representative for Bosnia-Hercegovina from 2002 to 2006.
"This was the right war to fight but we have made catastrophic errors over the last five years and unless we can turn this thing round very quickly I think things will not get better, they are likely to get worse."
He said that Britain should not be asking whether its forces should be fighting in Afghanistan, "but the rather more brutal question - can we win it from where we are now?"
Ashdown criticised the leadership of British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, who made a keynote speech on Friday in support of the war, as more bodies were repatriated from Afghanistan.
"What we needed yesterday was a battle cry to stir the nation. What we got, I fear, was a rather worn exercise in post-rationalisation," Ashdown said.
"In order to give the country a sense of why we are there, we need a little more passion, a little more charisma and a little more clarity.
Ashdown led the Liberal Democrats, Britain's third biggest party, from 1988 until 1999. Before that he served in Britain's elite military forces.
