LONDON, Nov 8: Britons are not convinced the war in Afghanistan can be won, Britain’s chief of defence staff said on Sunday, as two new polls showed support for the war was dwindling.

“People remain to be convinced about whether or not this is doable,” Jock Stirrup, told the BBC.

His comments came as the defence ministry announced the 231st British military death since fighting began in 2001, the eighth in the last week.

“We have not done a sufficiently good job in answering three basic questions,” he said.

“Is it important enough to us as a country, to our security, to justify the price that our people are paying? ... is it physically doable? ... and are we doing it properly?”

Two polls published on Remembrance Sunday showed public support for the war has fallen, a blow to Prime Minister Gordon Brown who has this week sought to bolster backing at home to keep British troops in Afghanistan.

A ComRes poll for the BBC found 64 per cent of Britons now believe the war is “unwinnable”, up from 58 per cent in July, while two-fifths of people said they did not know why British forces were in Afghanistan.

More than half agreed that corruption in Afghanistan’s government meant the war was “not worth fighting for”.

Stirrup said the troops were not there to defend the Afghan government, reiterating Brown’s comments earlier this week that British troops were there to protect Britain from terrorism.

“We are there to hold the security ring so that political solutions can be delivered, but we are only holding the security ring until the Afghans are capable of doing it themselves.”

He said he thought the estimates of General Stanley McChrystal, commander of US and Nato forces in Afghanistan, that the Afghan national army would be able to take over security by 2013, were “optimistic”, and said 2014 was likely.

A YouGov poll for Sky news found that support for the war had dropped to 21 per cent, from 28 per cent in August, while 63 per cent said British troops should not be in Afghanistan, up from 57 per cent three months ago.

Meanwhile, British politicians defended the mission in Afghanistan as Remembrance services for generations of war dead highlighted the human cost of the unpopular conflict.

Prime Minister Gordon Brown led calls for the public to back the increasingly bloody war. “If we do not take action in Pakistan and Afghanistan then Al Qaeda would be plotting more trouble and more chaos in the streets of our cities,” he told BBC television.

The prime minister joined Queen Elizabeth II in laying a wreath at the Cenotaph memorial for Remembrance Sunday, which marks the end of World War I on November 11, 1918, and all those killed in conflict since.—Agencies
Tags: