"We are not in Afghanistan for the sake of the education policy in a broken 13th-century country. We are there so the people of Britain and our global interests are not threatened." Liam Fox, our new defence secretary.
On the radio this morning some high ranking officer echoed the British security line. Without that fig-leaf we might think the whole thing was just the UK armed forces on hire to Globocop.

Let's see now -
Invasion of Afghanistan, October 2001
London bombings, July 2005.
Pre-invasion Islamic terrorist atrocities in the UK, 0 (that's a zero).

" ... broken 13th century country", a better description than the one I'm prone to use - (censored). I remember some Yankee bigmouth threatening to bomb Afghanistan back into the Stone Age. Still some way to go then.

I wonder exactly what Fox meant by "global interests".