UK News
US Defence Secretary labels British troops in Afghanistan 'inexperienced'
By Rich Bowden< M&C Staff Writer Jan 17, 2008, 9:37 GMT
Afghan National Army and NATO troops prepare to launch military operation in Panjwaye district of troubled Kandahar province in Afghanistan 10 December 2007. EPA/HUMAYOUN SHIAB
(M&C) - A row has broken out between the US and its allies after US Defence Secretary Robert Gates referred to allied troops as "lacking experience" in counter-insurgency warfare.
Mr Gates blamed poorly-trained Nato troops as holding up the fight against the Taliban in a wide-ranging interview with an American newspaper.
"I'm worried we're deploying [military advisers] that are not properly trained and I'm worried we have some military forces that don't know how to do counter-insurgency operations," Mr Gates told the LA Times.
However the Bush administration has claimed Mr Gates had been misquoted with the Defence Secretary saying he was expressing inadequacies about the international alliance as a whole, a comment which included the United States.
He has expressed satisfaction with the effort of Dutch, Canadian and British forces in southern Afghanistan.
The Nato-led force in Afghanistan has moe than 37,000 troops deployed in the region.
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Older Talkback
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ROBERT GATES SHOULD DNO THAVE BEEN SO INSULTING TO CANADIAN TROOPS, THE CANADIAN TROOPS HAVE THE BEST TRAINING IN THE WORLD.MAYBE CANADIAN TROOPS ARE NOT SO KILL HAPPY AS US . WHAT A WAY TO TALK. ALLIES?
The Brits, the Canucks, the Dutch and the Aussies HAVE been doing a good job. This says nothing about the viability of NATO overall in Afghanistan.
The truth is, this is really a US fight, not a European fight. We have 119,000 or so troops in Europe pretending to 'protect' Europe from who I don't know. We should be pulling out of Europe and deploying them in Afghanistan where they are actually needed.
Oh, and bye-bye, Bobby Gates. You screwed the pooch with this one.
Hello! So despite all the harassment that you receive for things that you say, you do occasionally say something that we can both agree upon as being true. I also sometimes suffer from riducule concerning something that I post, depending upon who responds to what I said. So the US strategic blunder stems not from going into Afghanistan to tackle the Taliban who protected the al qaeda operatives responsible for the 9/11 attacks; action which the world perceived as a necessary response.
The #1 blunder was for the US to pretend to win, on the cheap, the battle for Afghanistan, only because Bush & Co. were personally preoccupied with attacking Iraq. This caused the US forces to prematurely withdraw from Afghanistan well before the Taliban and al qaeda were neutralized and destroyed. The mistake was compounded by not following osama bin laden into Pakistan, and cleaning out al qaeda safe havens in the border areas. Now, several years later, our enemies have created a vast narco-terrorist network straddling Afghanistan and Pakistan, and have become the world's largest producer of opium and heroin. They use the drug money to buy more weapons to kill our troops. We call this winning the war on terror.
What is needed to defeat terrorism is a strategy based on something more sophisticated than military means .One lesson that can be learbed from every war is that if you fail to win the hearts and minds of the population ,you loose .An experience the USA should have learnt in Cuba,Vietnam and Somalia .Unfortunately there are always some people pretending that if you can't win it is only because you didn't threw in enough soldiers,or fire power .I just read an article on this site from a british think tank that came to similar conclusions .In Vietnam the war lasted for more than three decades.The Vietnamese first ousted the French ,it took them longer to get rid of the maricans but that was only because the USA dropped more bombs in Indochina than during the enire WW2 .The only possible reason why they could have lost is lack of support ogf the local population.
During the Taliban era women were the principal victims of the fundamentalists .THey form half the population;improving their living conditions,education is winnig half of the battle .It can be done ,a fine example of that is Bangla Desh,with similar mysoginical traditions .THe Grameen Bank only loans to women,managing a revolution of the minds ,giving power to that part of the population that was considered little more than domestic slaves .Similar patterns of change can be introduced in Afghanistan .The women are less prone to quarrel on tribal or other archaic matters,more preoccupied with school,household and commerce .
Gates DID NOT say, NATO allied troops are ill-trained for *conventional warfare* or lacked bravery. What he said; allied troops as 'lacking experience' in *counter-insurgency warfare* British forces with twice the manpower of the US Marine, have only 30 helicopters compared to over 100 helicopters for the Marines. You cannot have counter-insurgency warfare experience or fight one, with such pathetically low troop air transport. Get a life chest-thumpers and press your government to do more for your brave troops
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truconserveJan 17th, 2008 - 11:48:41
Leave it to the Bush admin to continue to insult our allies. These guys have an uncanny ability to alienate the world with their double-speak. They do not speak unblemished truth, but prefer to blather biased rhetoric, rather than taking any responsibility for their own blatent mistakes in military stategegy, and their overall failures in foreign policy. These neoconanderthals are mentally and morally bankrupt, so they have very little crediblity in the world.
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