Just in case you weren't sure about why it is that British soldiers are dying in Afghanistan, you should have worked it out by now. If like me you occasionally felt able to convince yourself that they were dying so that girls could go to school and farmers could grow something other than poppies, then Obama's announcement on the withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan would have put paid to that delusion. In his press conference this week Barak Obama made it perfectly clear that for him the mission in Afghanistan is entering its endphase and his objective now is to get his troops home as quickly as possible.
For the US the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq were never about anything other than revenge and for one or two, oil and money. George Bush took them into war with two 'muslim' nations, in revenge for the attack on the Twin Towers and for a decade the people of Afghanistan and Iraq have paid in blood for the crimes of the Salafi jihadist. American soldiers have been prepared to die in Afghanistan and Iraq because the muslim world was perceived to have committed an attack on their nation and retribution was required.
For us it was different, any original desire to hit back following 9/11 was replaced by two paralell and often contrasting discourses of nation building and fighting terror. The latter in particular has been the cornerstone of the UK government's justification for the loss of their soldiers lives. Yet the intelligence does little to support this position, for a long time now Afghanistan has been superseded by Pakistan, the Yemen and of course the UK, as potential sources of terror. Whilst, Tony Blair's belief, that war could make the world a better place and that the rights and lives of the people of Afghanistan could be improved at the point of a gun, was to prove nothing more than an aspiration and a delusion.
For differing reason's and having travelled along different paths, the UK and US governments have reached the same crossroads in Afghanistan. Each government knows that they no longer have a reason or desire to be in Afghanistan, each wants out and each will do what it must to bring their troops home without losing face. Paradoxically it will be easier for Obama, with the death of Osama bin Laden, the American people may well have laid to rest at least some of the ghosts of 9/11 and the political gaze of the nation and its leader will inevitably turn inward. As he approaches the end of this presidency Barak Obama has come to realise that he doesn't want to make the world a better place, he wants to make the USA a better place.
For the UK, Afghanistan should have been a watershed, it should have been the place where we came to terms with the reality of our place in the world, but it wasn't. Our leaders still continue to believe that we have some ill defined obligation to punch above our weight in world affairs, that we have a right and a duty to export the benefits of British influence. But the good in a future world order, will not come from the helicopter gunship diplomacy of the West, it will come from the refusal of individuals to be oppressed by their governments and in the long term the empowerment of the United Nations.
But in the meantime because of the delusions of their leaders, British soldiers will continue to die in pursuit of the confused motivations of their politicians and generals; who time and again will send them to war without a mandate from the people who will be doing the dying. There is a common perception that the British soldier is one of the best in the world and that may well be true - but as the example of British involvement in Afghanistan makes clear, that could never be said of the people who lead them.
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