LONDON: The US-led coalition’s 2001 invasion of Afghanistan prevented further terror attacks on the scale of 9/11, the head of the UK’s armed forces has said.
Gen. Nick Carter told the BBC that British forces were never defeated in the field throughout their deployment in Afghanistan.
He was responding to the mother of the youngest British soldier to die in Afghanistan, William Aldridge, who was killed in 2009 by a bomb in Helmand province seven weeks after he turned 18.
Lucy Aldridge said: “I’d like to see with my own eyes — what did we achieve? What was the sacrifice for? Because it’s too high a price to pay if it was for nothing.”
Carter told BBC Radio 4’s “Today” program: “All those who fought can hold their heads up high. The British military was not defeated. They showed remarkable adaptability against a cunning and nefarious opponent, and phenomenal courage under great pressure.”
He added: “We prevented attacks like the one we saw from Al-Qaeda on 9/11 occurring from Afghanistan in this intervening period.”
He said “not a day goes by” during which he does not think about the 454 British lives lost during the conflict.
The British Army at one point had 9,500 military personnel covering 137 bases in Helmand alone during the Afghan conflict.
The bulk of British forces were withdrawn in 2014, with a deployment of 750 remaining to provide security assistance to the Afghan government. Only around 100 now remain to support the UK’s diplomatic mission.
The withdrawal of coalition troops, culminating in the withdrawal of the US presence in Afghanistan this year, has prompted concerns that the country could fall back into the hands of the Taliban or become a refuge for terrorist groups such as Al-Qaeda and Daesh fleeing Iraq, Syria and elsewhere.
The Taliban on Friday said it now controls 85 percent of Afghanistan, including 250 of the country’s 400 districts, after seizing border regions facing Iran, Turkmenistan and China. The Afghan government denied the claim.
