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UK Armed Forces in Afghanistan

I support the continued deployment of our armed forces in Afghanistan, but I meet people who do not. That is because no one took the time to explain the reasons at the time of deployment—or, indeed, for years afterwards. We went into Afghanistan because there were people there who wanted to kill us. They wanted to kill our families—indeed, they wanted to kill our way of life—and the Government of that country were not interested in stopping them doing it. We went in because, although we are an island race, we do not live in a bunker and we are vulnerable to terror. We went in because the poisonous propaganda emanating from the training camps of Afghanistan was absolutely toxic. Indeed, it is so pervasive that it has seeped into the minds of young people as far away from Afghanistan as here in the UK, including in my constituency, resulting in a young man bringing a suicide bomb to London. For many, the deployment of UK armed forces in Afghanistan was also the end of a regime of brutality and terror that blighted the lives of ordinary, decent Afghan people, and we should be proud of that. Those young Afghans who travel to join the Afghan national army and go into combat alongside British soldiers do so because they remember the terror that defined the regime introduced by the Taliban in those areas of Afghanistan that they occupied—the same areas where the al-Qaeda training camps thrived. Because it has not been explained properly, people make comparisons between our deployment and that of the Russians, but we are not there to conquer the Afghan people. We are not there to impose a regime. Afghan nationals did not form up and fight alongside the Russians, as they come to train and fight with NATO and British forces.