 October 3, 2009, British soldiers buy souvenirs at a carpet shop at the boardwalk recreational square in Kandahar city military base of the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force in southern Afghanistan.
Five British soldiers died when an Afghan policeman opened fire in a police checkpoint in Helmand province, on Tuesday.
Armed Forces Minister Bill Rammell said, "We believe that we are right to be in Afghanistan." He told GMTV, "If you look back at the country in 2001 there were huge numbers of terrorists operating there targeting this country, and were we and other countries to withdraw undoubtedly the Taliban would come back."
He said that a quick withdrawal would result in, "mass instability" and compromise the security of this country.
Lord Ashdown, the former Liberal Democrat leader and former U.N. high representative for Bosnia, told peers at question time that withdrawal now "would also mean a severe blow to our moderate Islamic friends who are courageously fighting a battle against jihadism and medievalism in their own religion in favour of its true values of tolerance and civilisation”.
He said, "Failure in Afghanistan—and we are quite close to it in my view—or withdrawal would have baleful consequences including abandoning the clear majority of Afghans who want us to be there."
Conservative shadow foreign secretary William Hague also said the soldiers should finish their task of leaving Afghanistan stable. "My view is that what we are there to do is help Afghans govern themselves without being a threat to the rest of the world including ourselves," he told the BBC.
"That is what we have to persist in because the consequences of walking away ... for our own security would be very serious indeed.”
The U.N. is evacuating hundreds of its international staff—of whom there are over a thousand—some to safer centres and some out of Afghanistan as a temporary measure.
It is a week since five U.N. foreign staff were killed by militants in Kabul.
The U.N. special envoy to Afghanistan, Kai Eide, told reporters at a Kabul news conference, "We are simply doing what we have to do following the tragic events of last week to look after our workers in a difficult moment while ensuring that our operations in Afghanistan can continue."
Britain is the second largest contributor to the NATO mission in Afghanistan, with 9,000 troops fighting the Taliban and helping to train local police and soldiers.
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