Good News from Afghanistan
Afghanistan have just qualified for cricket’s Twenty20 World Cup.
Not bad for a country that haven’t played the game for very long and only a few years ago were in the fifth tier of the game.
Gay Soldiers
I was heartened by this article in The Times about a soldier who is openly gay. Surely the only qualification for a job like that is to be good at it. And brave! I couldn’t have done it!
From the article, I get the impression that no-one is bothered at all. Let’s hope it stays that way!
Good! Very good!
Afghanistan
I have two views on Afghanistan; we should stay and we should come home.
It’s difficult and I think that whatever we do, the number of casualties we are suffering in the country, can’t be sustained for ever. Although rightly, we focus on the number of dead, there is also a real problem in the number who are injured. Wikipedia gives a lot of details.
One telling figure in the article is that between January 2006 and June 2009, we have had to medically evacuate 2,192 personel from Afghanistan for medical reasons. That’s an average of just over 70 a month. Almost three times as many troops have been admitted to UK Field Hospitals for reasons of disease or non-battle injuries, than for those caused in battle.
Can we sustain those losses? And how long before everybody in the UK knows someone who has been killed or injured?
Whether politicians like it or not, we are getting to the point where we have to negotiate our way out of Afghanistan.
The Anonymous Widower 