Jurassic Park

Part 2 is a few days wild camping Seatown near to Chideock on the Dorset coast.

So far so good. The beach does look a bit like the set of Broadchurch!

Tonight, my thoughts rest with my fellow veterans of our war in Afghanistan. My profile picture on blip was taken in my ‘bunk/pit’ in the HQ of Task Force Helmand during my tour in 2007/8 in Lash Kah Gar a town which fell in just 13 days earlier this week.

Did we leave it a better place? On the whole, I think we did. Having listened to the US President just now, I believe broadly he is right in what he says. We have provided to the Afghans everything they needed to succeed. What they couldn’t be given was the Will to fight. This is the vital ingredient in any successful military force. Without it, defeat is certain. Should we be proud of our efforts - damn right we should. We soldiers did everything that was asked of us and did it superbly. Where it failed is that the highest level strategy just wasn’t there. Arguably it was always absent. Were we there to stem the flow of heroin into the UK? No. It actually went up (apparently). Were we there to nation build? No. We were never there in the numbers to do so. We were there to give the Afghan people the one thing the Taliban had loads of - time. Time to prepare for the day when we wouldn’t be there. That time was today, and sadly it appears not to have been enough. There has been a well touted phrase that the Taliban have peddled throughout - ‘you may have the clocks, but we have the time’. How right they were.

Finally my thoughts are with the Afghan people. I wonder what has become of the people who looked after us, those who we employed as locally employed civilians and of the children and young adults like the young ‘grasshopper’ who came to the camp gates every week to sell us the most fabulous Afghan rugs (and spiders in resin casts!) Will his entrepreneurial spirit survive? I don’t know, but I do hope so.