Scale of casualties in Afghanistan under-reported: UK major
LONDON, Sept 22: The scale of British military casualties in Afghanistan is being under-reported, a press report said on Thursday, citing a report by a senior army officer.
Major Jon Swift, currently serving in Afghanistan, made the comments in the internal Royal Fusiliers newsletter, which was initially placed on a regimental website before being taken down, the BBC reported.
He also apparently said the military operation in Afghanistan was ‘politically’ driven.
According to Major Swift, soldiers in Afghanistan were often patched up and sent back out into the field without the injury being recorded.
“The scale of casualties has not been properly reported and shows no sign of reducing,” the major said.
Swift also alleged: “Political and not military imperatives are being followed in the campaign.”
A spokesman for the Ministry of Defence (MoD) said that while Swift’s comments were reported accurately, the MoD denied the allegations that injuries in Afghanistan were under-reported.
The spokesman also said that Afghan President Hamid Karzai had asked for British troops to be deployed to the southern province of Helmand, ‘and we responded and deployed our troops’.
The news comes after British Defence Secretary Des Browne said in a speech on Tuesday that Britain and its NATO allies underestimated the strength of the Taliban militia’s resistance.
“We do have to accept that it’s been even harder than we expected,” Mr Browne said.
“The Taliban’s tenacity in the face of massive losses has been a surprise, absorbing more of our effort than we predicted it would and consequently slowing progress in reconstruction,” he told the Royal United Services Institute in London.
Britain took over command of NATO forces in the volatile south of Afghanistan in May, and has faced fiercer-than-anticipated resistance from Taliban.
A total of 33 British troops have died since then, compared to a total of 40 since NATO moved into Afghanistan in 2001.
NATO APPEAL: The NATO chief on Thursday urged further efforts to beef up alliance forces fighting the Taliban, even after a target of 2,000 additional soldiers was met earlier this week.
“I am relatively satisfied, but I add more can be done and more should be done,” NATO Secretary General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer said following an informal ministerial meeting of the 26-nation alliance.
Mr Scheffer said NATO troops locked in intense fighting with the Taliban in southern Afghanistan needed more helicopters, heavy transport planes and other force ‘enablers’.
“That is not to say that on the basis of what we have, we cannot do what we have to do, but it is always better with more forces,” he said.
He also said NATO allies with contingents in Afghanistan needed to relax ‘caveats’ or restrictions placed on what those troops can do.
“What is important in discussing troops is that nations do more than they have done to lift their caveats,” he said.
NATO foreign ministers and ambassadors met on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly to lay groundwork for an alliance summit in the Latvian capital, Riga, on Nov 28 and 29.
Thursday’s gathering came as NATO faced growing challenges to its support of the Afghan government of President Hamid Karzai and to its bid to expand its membership into the former Soviet bloc.
NATO announced this week it had met its target of 2,000 fresh soldiers for the Afghanistan mission thanks to contributions from Romania and Poland and a beefing up of the British and Canadian contingents.
Mr Scheffer said other NATO members were considering further contributions to the Afghanistan mission but did not want this publicised.
Thursday’s NATO meeting, hosted by US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, also discussed ways NATO can assist the African Union force deployed in Sudan’s Darfur region.
Such help would involve training and logistics support, but would not include putting NATO troops on the ground at this point, said Mr Scheffer.
Concerning NATO expansion, Mr Scheffer said ministers reaffirmed their commitment to intensified dialogue with Georgia, which is seeking to join the alliance.
But he said this also meant ‘intensified scrutiny’ of Georgia’s handling of disputes with the breakaway regions of Abkhazia and South Ossetia.
Mr Scheffer said his ‘impression’ following Thursday’s talks was that the ‘signal will be forward-leaning’ but that all three countries will remain under scrutiny as they try to satisfy alliance membership conditions.
At the end of July, the alliance embarked on a potentially perilous phase of its most ambitious operation ever when it took command of international forces in the Taliban’s southern heartland.
The NATO-led International Security Assistance Force is on a twin-track mission to spread the influence of President Karzai’s weak government.—AFP
