She’s making it up (again)

Britain has pledged $1 billion in aid to the Afghan government ahead of a major EU conference on Afghanistan in Brussels this week.

In pledging the aid, Priti Patel the Secretary of State for International Development stated:
‘The UK’s presence in Afghanistan over the last decade has helped improve security and prevent it from once again becoming a base of operations for global terrorists that would threaten the streets of Britain. We have improved the lives of Afghans significantly – with millions more children in school, better healthcare, and greater prosperity.’

She’s talking complete nonsense of course. None of the improvements in healthcare, schooling and prosperity that she claims apply to the areas in which British troops were fighting. The UK’s presence in Afghanistan over the last decade has destabilised the entire region, is directly linked to the rise of Islamic State and has significantly increased the likelihood of a terror attack on the streets of Britain.

I shouldn’t be surprised. Only a few months ago she was travelling the streets of Britain with Boris Johnson in a bright red German bus pledging to ‘give our NHS the £350 million the EU takes every week’. A pledge that she and her fellow BREXITeers quietly dropped after the referendum.

Being economical with the truth does, however, make her an excellent choice to head up the Department for International Development (DfID), a department known to produce delusional progress reports in Afghanistan that were hopelessly optimistic and an almost complete work of fiction.

I can see from her ridiculous pronouncement that their new boss is going to fit right in.

SPIN ZHIRA: Old Man in Helmand is the unauthorised, unvarnished and irreverent story of one man’s midlife crisis on the front line of the most dangerous district in Afghanistan where the locals haven’t forgiven the British for the occupation of 1842 or for the Russian Invasion of 1979. Of course, all infidels look the same so you can’t really tell them apart.

A JOURNEY OF LOVE, SERVICE AND ADVENTURE. EXCELLENT!

A MODERN WARFARE LITERARY CLASSIC! OUTSTANDING READ.

ENTERTAINING, THOUGHT-PROVOKING AND COMPULSORY TO READ.