KABUL (Pajhwok): Britain’s two-decade military mission in Afghanistan was a failure, admits the UK defence secretary.
In an interview, Ben Wallace said the reasons for intervening ‘crumbled before our eyes’ during last year’s muddled troop pullout.
Speaking to Mail Online, he said: “We’d gone there for the right reasons and stayed for 20 years, we’d done security, economic development, education, but we’d failed.”
He recalled people were left behind and Afghanistan conceded to the Taliban and the Haqqani network. This happened largely because the West didn’t really want to stay.
“And if they didn’t want to stay, why did they go there at all?” asked the defence secretary, who himself served in the military before joining politics.
PAN Monitor/mud
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