As the sound of bagpipes echoed down Whitehall just before 11am yesterday, I was taken back to a Remembrance Day service held in the shadow of the Kabul mountains seven years ago, when the war in Afghanistan was still young, and hopeful.
On November 11, 2002, I reported on the service at the British military compound Camp Souter. It was a year since the fall of the Taleban. Colonel Simon Levey, who was commander of British Forces in Afghanistan, addressed the 300 troops: “Think of all the soldiers that have died here. The torch has been passed to us.” There was a prayer for the two British soldiers of the International Security Assistance Force who had been killed that year.
Today the death toll of British soldiers in Afghanistan stands at 232. The number of British troops serving there exceeds 8,000. In Britain, support for the conflict is dropping and pressure for a withdrawal is building. According to a BBC poll, about two thirds of the public believe the war to be unwinnable and that British troops should pull out as soon as possible.
Yet support for the troops has probably never been higher. Yesterday crowds were already lining the parade route at 8am. By 11am more than 9,000 people had packed into Whitehall, all wearing poppies. The two-minute silence was so profound that one could hear a single rogue telephone ringing deep inside the Ministry of Defence.
They came, as always, to commemorate the gallantry and sacrifice of earlier wars. Yet this year’s ceremony was infused by the awareness that public opinion on the war in Afghanistan is shifting, and that although not yet lost, it is not being won. “It doesn’t matter whether you agree with the war or not, the important thing is to show support for the people in uniform,” said Claire Watkins, whose grandfather was killed while serving in Italy in 1943.
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Remembrance events commemorate an extraordinary martial history. The memories of old soldiers become even more poignant when young ones are dying daily. Yesterday’s was the first such parade without a veteran from the First World War. As the “war to end all wars” recedes from memory, Britain is again embroiled in a war with no end in sight.
Television commentary provided a roll call of casualties: “The Royal Green Jackets . . . 23 men killed in Afghanistan.” When the Grenadier Guards marched past, a man next to me remarked bleakly: “They lost three men this week.” He was referring to the incident on Tuesday in which an Afghan police officer killed five British soldiers.
The former Foreign and Commonwealth Office minister Kim Howells has suggested that the money needed to maintain British troops in Afghanistan might be better spent on bolstering security at home. The mixed signals from the US Administration, as it ponders whether to send more troops, come amid reports that British Army chiefs are planning to retrench by withdrawing troops from outlying bases.
Today the British are probably more aware of the sacrifices being made by their soldiers than at any time since the Second World War. But then, there was no doubt that the conflict was necessary. Today certainty is rare, and even the most determined now talk of “containment” rather than victory.
The writer Cecil Arthur Lewis, who was at the Somme in 1916, described the “clumps of crimson poppies . . . undaunted by the desolation, heedless of human fury and stupidity”. Yesterday the poppy not only symbolised “The Glorious Dead” of the past but evoked the grim conflict taking place amid the poppyfields of Afghanistan.