An Odd Conclusion

There is a strange piece of commentary in today's Telegraph from Brigadier Allan Mallinson. The sum of it, after the usual berating of the Government for this and that, is that we need more troops in Afghanistan.

What's bizarre is how he has arrived at that conclusion:

... General Dannatt's military advice is proving uncomfortable: ministers are said to be furious at his remarks that Gordon Brown vetoed more troops, with David Crausby, a Labour member of the Commons defence committee, adding bafflingly: "Dannatt should just get on with the job. After the conflict, if there are lessons to be learnt, we should do so in a considered manner." Much comfort will that be to widows and orphans.

The argument, then, seems to be that if you pour more troops into Afghanistan, less will die. A strange conclusion when you consider that most of the recent deaths seem to be a consequence of IEDs, cleverly placed according to Taleban observations and obtained knowledge of British troops movements and tactics. One would have guessed that it wouldn't matter how many British troops were marching around the Afghan desert at the time, the soldiers who came by those IEDs would still have been killed by them.

I'm not going to pretend I know a lot about Afghanistan or the current conflict in any fantastic detail, but I'm not sure whether more troops is the answer considering the landscape and the nature of the conflict. As ever, the drudgery of work and college has left me quite ill informed of events, but such seemeth to me that the problem is, partly, resources, but much more strategy and tactics. The Taleban certainly seem to be able to call upon plenty of recruits, but it's their tactics that are doing us over at the moment.