British troops face "nightmare" of leaving early
BRITAIN and the US risk the “nightmare scenario” of having to return to Afghanistan if they take troops out too swiftly.
Britain believes it can give control of five provinces to the Afghan Army this year while the US says the first of its troops could go home by 2011.
However, Colonel Christopher Langton, of the Institute for Strategic Studies, has doubts. He told the Sunday Express: “It is a little bit early to be talking about a draw-down, which depends on Afghanistan’s security capabilities. It is a tight timetable."
"If we dismantled the world’s biggest terrorist training network between 1998 and 2001 can we say if we left that it would not recreate itself? The wisdom suggests it might return in an ungoverned space. The nightmare scenario is we might have to go back and do this all over again.”