TOUGH CALL

Five soldiers were killed by a 'rogue' Afghan police officer they were training in 2009.  The soldier opened fire while they were all on a break at a checkpoint in the Nad-e'Ali District of Helmand Province. The divided loyalty he must have felt and their deaths called into question NATO's strategy of working with Afghans to help them run their own country.

BBC Breakfast interviewed Christina Lamb, the Sunday Times' foreign correspondent, because she had had a change of heart over the issue, having previously thought the strategy was justified .

She said: "I've been going there, back and forth, for years and I've changed my mind.
The worse the situation has got, the more successful the Taliban has been in invading the occupying army. The strategy of local mentoring has become a recruiting tool for the Taliban rather than the opposite. A credible Government needs to be able to sit back and try to find another way out of this, no matter how difficult all of this is.

"There was never much trust but now no British soldiers are going to want to work with Afghan soldiers.  Where Afghan police have been trained and they go on to hold some territory, there have been cases where they've been raping the young boys of people in the village so local people have had to turn against the very people they thought they could trust.
There's been 30 years of war there so many local people haven't had an education - it's difficult to find the quality of people to recruit {to the ANP} and take on the job.

President Obama has been talking about sending more troops but if people don't believe the Government is doing anything for them, and the local police might be more of a threat to them than the Taliban, you're never going to be successful in containing insurgents.”

For anyone close to the British military, as my local community is, the thought that serving soldiers might be killed by someone they thought was on their side is just terrifying.  Here’s hoping our involvement in this very complex war is over soon.