Monthly Archives: August 2017

Afghanistan, Britain, NATO, United States

Return to Afghanistan? Britain may help Trump beat Taliban

AFGHANISTAN

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President Donald Trump has declared that thousands of US soldiers will be deployed again to Afghanistan in reducing the threat of terrorism to the West. He has called on his NATO allies to provide resources and funding.

BRITISH warplanes and drones could be sent back to Afghanistan after Donald Trump announced a major policy U-turn and declared he is expanding the US military there.

A new strategy to defeat the Taliban and Islamic State could also see British personnel being sent back to Kandahar in southern Afghanistan – in a significant expansion of the UK’s current training operation.

US Secretary of Defence, General Jim Mattis, called his UK counterpart, Sir Michael Fallon, to discuss the plans prior to the speech given by the President earlier this week vowing to ‘kill terrorists’.

Mr Trump said that he would beef up the US military presence and others must do the same, adding that a withdrawal would create a vacuum for jihadis. The most senior American commander for the Middle East said the first deployment of new US forces would arrive in Afghanistan ‘pretty quickly’.

Mr Trump said: ‘The men and women who serve our nation in combat deserve the tools they need, and the trust they have earned, to fight and to win.’

It marks an abrupt turnaround from his election campaign, in which he regularly demanded an end to the 16-year conflict.

But since then, Taliban insurgents have recaptured swathes of the country, IS militants have waged terror, and US generals have publicly admitted the war is failing. The Taliban in Afghanistan responded by saying Mr Trump’s plans would make the country a ‘graveyard for the American empire’.

It is understood that during Sir Michael’s discussion with defence secretary General Mattis, the prospect of the UK sending ‘specific capabilities’ such as fighter jets and drones was raised. One option could be re-deploying air assets from Iraq where IS is on the back foot after being pounded by RAF warplanes.

Defence chiefs may also send RAF troops back to southern Afghanistan if they are asked to do so. They would be stationed in Kandahar, previously NATO’s regional HQ, and would form part of a plan to build an Afghan air force training academy.

A senior RAF officer said: ‘Kandahar will be one of the training locations. We are doing an awful lot of work in Kandahar right now to make sure the facilities are right … If the demand signal is to send people to Kandahar we will.’

A further 85 UK troops will be sent to the country in the coming weeks after requests by NATO. The Ministry of Defence commented by saying it is ruling out further increases.

The Defence Secretary welcomed President Trump’s pledge. Sir Michael said he had agreed with General Mattis that ‘we have to stay the course in Afghanistan to help build its fragile democracy and reduce the terrorist threat to the West. It’s in all our interests that Afghanistan becomes more prosperous and safer.’

Mr Trump made repeated calls ahead of his election for US troops to be withdrawn from Afghanistan, where they have been involved in military operations since 2001. But in an address at Fort Myer near Washington DC, he said he had decided to go against his ‘original instinct’.

US policy would now focus not on nation-building but on ‘killing terrorists’, he said, adding: ‘From now on, victory will have a clear definition – attacking our enemies, obliterating ISIS, crushing Al-Qaeda, preventing the Taliban from taking over Afghanistan and stopping mass terror attacks against America before they emerge. We will ask our NATO allies and global partners to support our new strategy with additional troop and funding increases in line with our own – we are confident they will.’

General Joseph Votel, top US commander for the Middle East, estimated the first new deployments would arrive in a few weeks or even days.

COMMENT

AFTER the horror of 9/11, there were clear and persuasive arguments for sending British forces to Afghanistan to join our American allies in attacking Al-Qaeda terrorist training camps.

But more than 15 years on – and three years after we withdrew our combat troops, leaving only some 500 behind to train the local military – shouldn’t we be thinking very carefully before answering Donald Trump’s call to rejoin the war?

During his election campaign, the President pledged to withdraw the 8,400 American soldiers who have remained in Afghanistan since combat operations officially ended in 2014.

But now, under pressure from his generals, he has changed his mind. And though he won’t specify numbers, he is widely expected to send some 4,000 extra troops – and says he expects his NATO allies to beef up their commitment too.

The President declared: ‘From now on, victory will have a clear definition – attacking our enemies, obliterating ISIS, crushing Al-Qaeda, preventing the Taliban from taking over Afghanistan and stopping mass terror attacks against America before they emerge.’

These are laudable objectives. But at the height of its deployment in 2010-11, the US had 100,000 personnel in Afghanistan (with similar aims). If they failed to beat the terrorists and the Taliban, why should Mr Trump believe the smaller force he envisages will enjoy more success?

In the course of a conflict that has already lasted more than twice as long as the Second World War, 456 British personnel have been killed, with thousands more wounded – many on battlefields now back under Taliban control.

Indeed, though it will grieve many to say so, it is very far from clear how much their heroic sacrifice achieved. Is there any reason to believe putting more troops in danger will accomplish anything beyond making more families torn by the futility of returning to fight in Afghanistan?

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Quantum Leaps: Sir Isaac Newton

1642 – 1727

So many extensive books and articles have been written on the life and impact of Sir Isaac Newton over the last three centuries it is impossible to do his achievements justice in a short entry like this. He is quite simply one of the greatest scientists of all time.

. A Slow Beginning

His early years did not necessarily suggest, however, he would end up as such. Born and bred in the quiet village of Woolsthorpe in Lincolnshire, England, and schooled in the nearby town of Grantham, he was not particularly noted for academic achievements as a child. Even on entry to Trinity College, Cambridge, he did not stand out until, ironically, the University was forced to close during the period 1665-1666 due to the high risk of plague. Newton returned to Woolsthorpe and began two years of remarkable contemplation on the laws of nature and mathematics which would transform the history of human knowledge. Although he published nothing during this period, he formulated and tested many of the scientific principles which would become the basis for his future achievements.

However, it would often be decades before he returned to his earlier discoveries. For example, his ideas on universal gravitation did not re-emerge until he began a controversial correspondence on the subject with Robert Hooke in around 1680. Furthermore, it was not until Edmond Halley challenged Newton in 1684 to find out how planets could have the elliptical orbits described by Johannes Kepler, and Newton replied he already knew, that he fully articulated his law of gravitation. Yet he had begun work on the subject back in the 1660s in Woolsthorpe after famously seeing an apple fall from a tree and wondering if the force which propelled it towards the earth could be applied elsewhere in the universe.

Following his declaration to Halley, Newton was forced to recalculate his proof having lost his original jottings, and the result was published in Newton’s most famous work Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica (1687). This law of gravitation proposed that all matter attracts other matter with a force related to the combination of their masses, but this attraction is weakened with distance, indeed, in inverse proportion to the square of their distances apart. This universal principle applied just as equally to the relationship between two small particles on earth as it did between the sun and the planets, and Newton was able to use it to explain Kepler’s elliptical orbits.

. Newton’s Laws of Motion

In the same work, Newton built on earlier observations made by Galileo and expressed three laws of motion which have been at the heart of modern physics ever since. The ‘law of inertia’, states that an object at rest or in motion in a straight line at a constant speed will carry on in the same state until it meets another force. The second stated that a force could change the motion of an object according to the product of its masses and its acceleration, vital in understanding dynamics. The third declares that the force or action with which an object meets another object is met by an equal force or reaction.

Aside from the wide-ranging uses for the laws Newton outlined in the Principia, the important point is that all historical speculation of different mechanical principles for the earth from the rest of the cosmos were cast aside in favour of a single, universal system. It was clear that simple mathematical laws could explain a huge range of seemingly disconnected physical facts, providing science with the straightforward explanations it had been seeking since the time of the ancients. Newton’s insistence on the use of mathematical expression of physical occurrences also underlined the standard for modern physics to follow.

. Further Achievements

Newton achieved major breakthroughs in other areas too. His proof that white light was made up of all the colours of the spectrum was outlined in his 1672 work New Theory about Light and Colours. In Opticks (1704), he also articulated his influential (if partially inaccurate) particle or corpuscle theory of light.

Another achievement significant to mathematics was his invention of the ‘binomial theorem’.

Newton had a practical side too, inventing the reflecting telescope in the 1660s. This new instrument bypassed the focusing problems caused by chromatic aberration in the refracting telescope of the type Galileo had created.

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