In this damnable war, the calumnies and cover-ups just lead to a shrug of the shoulders, as no political party seems willing to prominently take up the cause of the armed forces. That political party which did more than anyone else to neglect soldiers and pay for politics in blood is in the firing line: this adds to the red ink in their balance sheet.
The number of disabled returning from Afghanistan, caused by the huge upsurge in improvised explosive devices (IEDs), has been hard to trace. Their plight is left to charities rather than state funded services, though this is an act of benign neglect as one would prefer the Royal British Legion to the NHS. What is despicable is the inability to read the costs:
Figures obtained by The Sunday Times from medical sources show that 37
soldiers suffered “life-changing injuries” between April 2006, when they
first deployed to southern Afghanistan, and the end of that year.
There were 55 such injuries during the whole of 2007. Last year the figures more than doubled to 114 and there have been 12 cases this year.
Campaigners claim the MoD is deliberately keeping the human cost of the war out of the public eye. They say the government must fund long-term care for maimed or mentally disabled soldiers instead of relying on charities such as Help for Heroes and the Royal British Legion.
At the other extreme, radical Muslims from the United Kingdom are supplying the Taliban with electronic devices and other components to increase the sophistication of their IEDs, making then harder to detect. One example was the switch to non-metallic components to avoid metal detectors: a change that cost our soldiers' lives and limbs. There is no indication of how our government is fighting to detect these jihadists and shut them down.
Find the Taliban, find the terrorist! Again, we see the two sides of the same coin: suffering for our soldiers, impunity towards the Islamists who act to main them.