Posted by Sigismund on October 26, 2007, at 1:09:45
In today's paper......
Lord Ashdown, the former UN high representative for Bosnia and Herzegovina, delivered his dire prediction after being proposed as a new "super envoy" in Afghanistan.
"We have lost, I think, and success is now unlikely," Lord Ashdown said.
The assessment will be considered extreme by some diplomats but timely by those pressing for more resources to assist NATO military operations in the country.
"I believe losing in Afghanistan is worse than losing in Iraq," Lord Ashdown said. "It will mean that Pakistan will fall and it will have serious implications internally for the security of our own countries and will instigate a wider Shiite-Sunni regional war on a grand scale.
"Some people refer to the First and Second World Wars as European civil wars and I think a similar regional civil war could be initiated by this [failure] to match this magnitude."
Lord Ashdown, 66, the former leader of the British Liberal Democrats, was speaking on Wednesday before a NATO summit in Noordwijk in the Netherlands.
poster:Sigismund
thread:791481
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/poli/20070708/msgs/791481.html