Get troops out of Afghanistan now, says Paddy Ashdown (former leader of the UK's Liberal Democrats)

[Turborama]

Source: The Guardian

British forces must withdraw from Afghanistan as quickly as possible before any more troops are killed, former Liberal Democrat leader Lord Ashdown has said.

In a damning assessment of the campaign in Afghanistan, he said allied forces had failed to build a sustainable state and establish a government which was untainted by corruption.

Prime minister David Cameron has said British forces will have been withdrawn from Afghanistan by the end of 2014 but writing in the Times, Ashdown said it should be sooner.

He said: "We cannot pretend there is any more to do in Afghanistan. The urgent priority is to get out. It is not worth wasting one more life in Afghanistan. All that we can achieve has now been achieved. All that we might have achieved if we had done things differently, has been lost. The only rational policy now is to leave quickly, in good order and in the company of our allies. This is the only cause for which further lives should be risked."


Read more: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/nov/16/troops-out-afghanistan-paddy-ashdown

[MisterScruffles]

1. Too Sane

He'll never make it in politics. Noone will listen.

[T_i_B]

2. Let me put it like this

Ashdown's party, the Liberal Democrats are in coalition with the Conservatives right now.

And the Liberal Democrats have become a laughing stock precisely because the Tories don't listen to any of their ideas other then to subvert them.

[LeftishBrit]

4. Sadly very true.

[Spider Jerusalem]

6. Sure, but...

I don't think that the Lib Dems would have gone into coalition with the Tories if Ashdown had been their leader and not Clegg. Or Charles Kennedy. Or Menzies Campbell. (Or probably even Vince Cable, come to that.) Clegg along with David Laws and a few others being representative of the right wing of Liberal thought and more ready ideologically to get into bed with the Tories thanks to some confluence of ideas on limiting the role of the state in favour of private enterprise in many areas, general laissez-faire economics, and so on.

[LeftishBrit]

3. He did make it in politics for a while, as far as a third-party leader can

Unfortunately the current leader of the LibDems is Clegg the Dreg, who has dragged his party into a sort of Stockholm Syndrome relationship with the Tories, and is Cameron's poodle in rather the way that Blair was Bush's, except that Blair got far more in return. As a result, the LibDems are likely to be crushed at the next election.

[bemildred]

5. We can't do that, that would be admitting we lost. nt