I spent six months with Nato troops in Afghanistan – Trump’s wrong; they were the front line
Donald Trump doesn’t like heroes. Not real men and women who have made the kind of sacrifice he avoided when he swerved the Vietnam draft on medical grounds. For he cannot stand to be seen as less of a global superstar than Volodymyr Zelensky.
In February 2022, the Ukrainian president stayed on with his wife and young family in Kyiv, certain in the knowledge that Vladimir Putin had sent his finest assassins to kill them all. Whether Trump would have hung around, is harder to tell.
And there should be no surprise when he disparages the war dead from the UK and other Nato countries who were killed as a result of the ill-fated “war on terror” that was prompted by an American call to arms answered by Nato.
Trump, after all, has scorned America’s own war dead on numerous occasions and openly sneered at its most celebrated heroes of combat.
I saw US marines race over notoriously dangerous roads and choke points, riddled with hidden bombs, without a moment’s hesitation to aid British troops in Musa Kala, Helmand. A front line Nato operation.
They were there because Afghanistan had harboured al Qaeda which had plotted the 9/11 atrocities – from day one of the US-led invasion of Afghanistan and later of Iraq, so were British troops.
Men like sergeant major Gaz O’Donnell who won a George Medal for diffusing bombs in Iraq, where British troops fought with Americans. He shuttled around Helmand painting the sand with a household brush to expose trip wires and hidden weapons rigged to kill.
He was good-looking, a former musician, a gym fanatic and iconic member of the bomb disposal teams in Britain who sport a Felix-the-Cat badge. I saw him crunching mountains of salad in Camp Bastion between helicopter trips into the front lines and dust of Helmand to clear paths and roads for Nato’s troops.
Then he was dead. A bomb-disposal expert has to score 100 per cent 100 per cent of the time. His friend, Mike Webb, had to crawl to his remains in full view of the Taliban to retrieve Gaz’s body in the dusty river valley close to Musa Qala.
So much for Trump’s remarks that Nato troops “stayed a little back, a little off the front lines”.
In Helmand in 2008 the Nato mission to close down the ungoverned spaces in Afghanistan to terrorist groups had mutated into a war that no Nato officers could accurately explain.
Were they there, having toppled the Taliban in 2001, to protect the new government, get female children into schools, eradicate opium poppies? Maybe all of the above – but they were not there because any Nato country was still in any danger from whoever remained in Afghanistan.
But Nato stayed alongside America.
Its members also fought alongside the US in the ill-fated and stupid mission to invade Iraq in 2003 on the falsified premise that Saddam Hussain was building a nuclear weapon.
