Airstrip One

Blunkett spells it out

According to David Blunkett:

That [security service] information tells us that because of our alliance – quite rightly – with the United States and because of our vulnerability we are at risk.

So the one "national interest" argument for British participation in this adventure - that terrorism is a risk to us - is negated as we are actually at more risk than if we hadn't taken part. I don't think that our rulers really mind as they are not going to be at risk from WTC type attrocities, its going to be Joe Public.

One should not be churlish and thanks must go to David Blunkett for effortlessly confirming the main charge against the British involvement.

More and more feedback

I've got a nice e-mail on my Afghan coverage:

Keep up writing your ed columns! We need more critical (and at times dissenting) voices in this country (US). The main press is pretty opportunistic accepting too easily "feed" from the officialdom and their biased information channels. Keep it up!

This from a British correspondant, on the Mazar article:

I agree with you that there was a massacre, probably with our connivance - but I disagree that, although deeply unpleasant, not to
say inhuman, it was a bad thing. To kill the most warlike & dedicated of one's opponents is an ancient principle of warfare: the alternative is not to spare them to fight another day - which they inevitably will - but to enlist them on one's own side, which, in the case of al-Qa'eda shock troops, I should imagine to be impossible. It is both decent & prudent to take prisoners when you are fighting a country which you hope & expect, once the war has ended, to be on peaceful terms with again; but we neither hope nor expect ever to be on peaceful terms with al-Qa'eda, so their warriors are fair game. The vaunted Arab "street" has fewer terrors than al-Qa'eda,
& I do not see much sign of the massacre's becoming a cause celebre anyway, not least because a little local difficulty in "Palestine" has supervened.

I must hasten to say that I do not know whether this was a massacre, I just don't think that the official version adds up.