British troops in Afghanistan are brave, says Robert Fox, but the body count doesn’t add up.
In the past two months 'official sources' have claimed that an aggregate of several thousand 'Taliban' have been killed by British, Canadian, Danish and special forces. The Nato commander, General Jim Jones, said last week: "It wouldn't surprise me if 1,500 had been killed" by Canadian forces in Kandahar this month alone.The numbers game - giving increasingly implausible counts of enemy dead - was one of the main factors that undermined the credibility of US forces in Vietnam.
If hundreds of Taliban really have been killed in one attack or another, it raises two questions: Who are they? And what on earth was the Blair government doing sending a force with initially only 650 combat troops against 'thousands' of Taliban fighters?
Only a few of the Taliban appear to be diehard followers of Mullah Omar Mohammed, who founded the movement in Afghanistan a dozen years ago. "I am afraid we have killed an awful lot of local villagers," a special forces commander said this week.
