Posted on 01/16/2009 6:13:27 PM PST by neverdem
David Miliband has betrayed a misconception about the nature of this conflict, writes Con Coughlin.
The two British soldiers killed in southern Afghanistan on Thursday died fighting for their country against a deadly and determined foe. Gereshk, the area in central Helmand where they were engaged in a night-time operation against enemy forces, is a stronghold of the Taliban, the hardline Islamist movement that is trying to overthrow the democratically elected government.
The British Army has been at war with the Taliban for more than seven years, since the latter provided a safe haven from which Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda terror network planned the September 11 attacks against the US. Yesterday's deaths brings the total number of British fatalities to 141. Add to that the 178 British service personnel who have been killed during our six-year involvement in Iraq, and the scale of the country's commitment to fighting Islamist militants is not inconsiderable.
And yet David Miliband, our Foreign Secretary, would have us believe that we are not a nation at war, but one that is simply trying to disrupt a number of disparate terror groups. For this reason, Mr Miliband has taken exception to the use of the term "war on terror" to describe the military campaign in which young British men and women are risking their lives on an almost daily basis.
"Terrorism is a deadly tactic, not an institution or an ideology," Mr Miliband claimed in an article published in The Guardian, his newspaper of choice when it comes to making public pronouncements. "The more we lump terrorist groups together and draw the battle lines as a simple binary struggle between moderates and extremists, or good and evil, the more we play into the hands of those seeking to unify groups with little in common."
The timing...
(Excerpt) Read more at telegraph.co.uk ...
For OIIIIIIL, silly! What did you think?
“Talk to any of the young Pashtun tribesmen volunteering to risk their lives fighting for the Taliban against the British and other coalition forces in southern Afghanistan, and they will tell you they are joining the jihad, the holy war, against the West and all it stands for. The same goes for the young Shia recruits joining the many Iranian-backed militias that have been engaged in fierce combat with coalition forces in Iraq.”
...
“Hamas, al-Qaeda, the Taliban, Iran: they all share the same goal – to inflict maximum carnage against the West and its interests. And if that’s not war, then I don’t know what is.”
Of course there is no war on terror. We are joyfully embracing it, nurturing it and excusing it when we are not cowering down to terrorism. Piece of sharia law pie anyone?
Leave pit bulls out of this; they don’t pray to Allah to kill infidels.
Why do some people insist on bringing personal, unrelated baggage into topic-specific threads?
Most Pit Bulls don't deserve the bad press the breed gets.
And the terrorist breed of humans don't get enough bad press.
Total agreement on that!
I can't say the same about murdering, filthy,Satan worshiping pedophiles though.
The illuminists want oil, so our military guys and gals would kill and die for oil.
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