Photo: Church Times
'Is all this heartbreak worth it? The general public seems fairly split on whether the war is right.'

Giles Fraser argues that we should see the conflict in Afghanistan through

In my 20s, I was offered a commission in the Royal Green Jackets. My Mum persuaded me not to take it.

Her line was: “I didn’t go through several miscarriages, then lose your older brother (he died in a cot death), to send you off to get blown up in Northern Ireland.” She won.

Many mothers will have had similar conversations with their sons, and with daughters, too.

Over the past few years, a number of these will have also received the news that they had been dreading: that their child had lost his or her life in some distant corner of a dusty land.

Recently, 15 soldiers were killed in Afghanistan. There will be more.

Is all this heartbreak worth it? The general public seems fairly split on whether the war is right.

Question

As the casualties mount, more and more people are likely to question the whole idea of military intervention. Why Afghanistan, some will ask.

After all, al-Qaeda fighters have mostly scuttled off to the Pakistani borders, and could easily relocate to any number of countries. Indeed, the 7/7 bombers were home grown. So let’s pull out, and save our young soldiers’ lives.

But I cannot agree with that line. For me, the war against the Taliban remains tremendously important. Next month there are elections in Afghanistan.

They won’t be like our elections, and it is silly for us to expect Western-style parliamentary democracy to spring up at the first sniff of a ballot box. Indeed, sometimes elections produce results that liberal Westerners find horrifying — such as Hamas’s election in Gaza.

Yet elections offer the means by which ordinary people in Afghanistan are able to speak out against the religious fascism that is the Taliban.

With help, this country can rebuild itself in such a way that death — in the form of heroin and terrorism — is no longer its main export to the rest of the world.

Lives

The men and women of the British armed forces, with their allies in many other countries, are offering their lives to try to prevent bombs’ going off on Oxford Street.

The war in Afghanistan is not like the misconceived war in Iraq — a war that was premised on the foolish idea that Saddam Hussein, a man who hated religious jihadists, was in league with them against the West.

He had nothing to do with 9/11, and had no weapons of mass destruction.

But the failed state of Afghanistan is the nest from which much world terrorism has been born, and that needs to be changed.

This war is different. We need to see it through, for ever grateful to those who are willing to give up everything in order to keep others safe.

• The Revd Dr Giles Fraser is Team Rector of Putney, in London, and has been appointed Residentiary Canonry of St Paul’s Cathedral. This column was first published in, and appears courtesy of, The Church Times

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