Foreign secretary David Miliband admitted this morning that the best we have achieved in “certain parts of Afghanistan” (like Helmand, where our troops are being killed) is “strategic stalemate.”
But he still wants other European countries to supply more troops to the shooting bits of Afghanistan but to achieve what? A more secure strategic stalemate presumably.
This is hardly the most rousing war objective and completely unlikely to persuade the sensible government of Germany and even the not-so-sensible one of Nicolas Sarkozy in France to send more troops.
Today programme interrogator John Humphrys almost managed to trap Miliband into saying that he hoped to begin withdrawing troops from Afghanistan by 2012 but Miliband beat a hasty retreat, saying he wasn’t going to be pinned to an “artificial deadline.”
In the meantime we’ll have to wait for British troops to lose a firefight with the Taliban and take heavy casualties for common sense to prevail.