NATO readies to withdraw combat troops from Afghanistan
Taliban attacks in Afghanistan will continue, including next year when NATO withdraws its combat troops, said the secretary general of the Alliance, Jens Stoltenberg. Duration: 00:50.
By: AFP news agency
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NATO readies to withdraw combat troops from Afghanistan - Video
ARian Afghanistan 12/01/2014
By: ariana zaland
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ARian Afghanistan 12/01/2014 - Video
It was a blur of statistics and impersonal language. As civilians, as observers, we knew them as numbers, not as individuals. When it was announced that we were withdrawing troops from Afghanistan, they were just that: troops. Four hundred and fifty three had died during the thirteen year conflict. 453. Another statistic.
And then the Telegraph decided to create a tribute to the members of the British Forces who died in Afghanistan to mark the end of the Combat Mission on December 31 2014. An appeal went out for staff members from all departments to contact the families, friends and comrades for memories of their loved ones. Im ashamed to admit that it was the first time that I had thought at all about the men and women who had not returned or about the families they had left behind. And I had no idea how moving, inspiring, heart-breaking and powerful a project it would be.
My first call was to Wayne Sparks. His son Georgie, a Royal Marine, was killed on November 27 2008. He was 19. Wayne talked about Georgie winning a swimming competition at the age of five, I remember him getting out of the pool and turning to me. His legs had gone to jelly, he was shaking with exhaustion, and he just looked at me and said: Dad, did I do well? I said, Yes Georgie, you did so well. I was so proud.
Wayne also told me, his voice aching with pain, how Georgie always used to come home on Fridays to spend time with his family. Now, on Fridays, I always find myself thinking Georgie would be on his way home now. I was moved to tears. But, I wondered, what right did I have to cry? Georgie was not my son, my brother, or my friend. And yet...
I spoke to Tony Woodgate. His son Jo was killed on March 26 2010. He was 26. Tony told me that one of Jos friends had described him as a Rockstar in Uniform. That quote is on Jos gravestone.
Tony talked about his home, his job, the fund-raising his wife is doing for Help for Heroes. Then he talked of regret. That his greatest regret was that I didnt actually know him. The friends that he made in the army, all the things that they have all said about him since. Well, he was a bloody hero. And I didnt know it. All I could do was listen. There were no words of comfort I could offer.
Jennifer Loughran-Dicksons husband Robert died on November 18 2009. He was 33. Jennifer told me how they met in their local takeaway, how when their son was young they would go on spur of the moment road trips, which would always end up by a burger van.
Then her voice turned raw: Since he died, it has been horrible. Every time it comes to Remembrance Sunday, its like living through it all over again. Every time it comes and you lay a wreath, the grief comes all over again.
We will never be able to replace what these families have lost, but we hope that our memorial is a place where some of these memories, tributes and tales can live on. More than anything, we hope that the Telegraphs tribute shows that those who died in Afghanistan are not just troops. They are Georgie, Jo, Robert, Olaf, Sarah, Damian, Ben. They are individuals, who were - and still are - loved.
September 11 2001 is a day we will all remember. But each of the families affected have their own day when their world came crashing down. When a man in a uniform arrived at their door and took off his hat.
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Afghanistan 2001-2014: Creating The Telegraph's tribute
BRUSSELS: Afghanistan will face further violence next year after NATO ends its longest ever combat mission, chief Jens Stoltenberg admitted on Monday (Dec 1), but he insisted local security forces could stem the tide.
Stoltenberg, who meets new Afghan President Ashraf Ghani later on Monday, said a recent surge in attacks in Kabul was timed to grab headlines as the Afghan government met its international backers.
"There are going to be violent attacks also next year but the Afghan national security forces are capable and the time has come to leave responsibility for security to the Afghans themselves," he said. "The Taliban are still able to conduct high-profile terrorist attacks but less capable of seizing and holding territory," he added.
In the latest violence, a suicide attack on a funeral in northern Afghanistan killed at least nine people on Monday. This follows a series of attacks in the capital Kabul which have heightened concern that the costly gains of NATO's 13-year operation in Afghanistan could slip away.
From Jan 1, NATO will run a training and advisory mission with about 12,500 troops, mostly US, down from the combat mission's peak of 130,000 in 2010.
President Ghani, who came to power in September, insists he will bring peace to Afghanistan after decades of conflict and that he is ready to talk to any insurgent group to do so. Afghan soldiers and police meanwhile have suffered huge casualties, with more than 4,600 killed this year.
Ghani and chief executive officer Abdullah Abdullah visit NATO headquarters in Brussels Monday before attending a donors' conference in London.
"Our focus now is to end the NATO (combat) mission," Stoltenberg said, adding that he was convinced the Afghan government and its army of some 350,000 would cope. "We have done what we set out to do," he said, looking back on the war which was launched to oust the Taliban government in 2001 after the 9/11 terror attacks on the United States. "Our nations are more secure and Afghanistan is stronger."
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Afghanistan to face more violence but local forces 'capable': NATO
Wars begin with public stories. Broad narratives of politics, history and strategy; a blunting of language and experience through euphemism and technical vocabulary. As they progress, moments of human detail puncture this public discourse through the best of reportage and journalism, in helmet-cam videos on YouTube or via leaked footage and photographs.
But on the whole, for most of us, conflict is an anonymising force. Individuals become soldiers, insurgents, refugees, casualties. People become figures, regiments, victims. It is only at wars end, when the emotional as well as the statistical tally is taken, that the more intimate truths of modern conflict rise to the surface. This is when the long shadows that war casts begin to emerge in their varying shades from the black and the white. When the personal stories of those who have died and those who grieve offer, through prisms of retrospection, memory and loss, a more human testament of what war means.
For the British Armed Services, here is that testament: tributes to the 453 men and women who lost their lives over 13 years of conflict in Afghanistan. In the pages that follow and in even greater detail online, you will find a full spectrum of response to that fact, and those figures. From the family who would have preferred their sons name wasnt included, to others who memorialise through annual commemoration and the founding of charities in their childs or siblings name.
Regardless of the nature of the responses, however, or the broader aftermath of Britains most recent engagement in Afghanistan, it is impossible to read these tributes and not feel them cut through any political or strategic viewpoint. They are the words of parents, children, wives, friends and comrades, who in their remembering share with us just a taste, a painful suggestion, of what it might be like to love someone who joins the military, serves overseas and dies there.
Over the past three years, I have worked with many young men and women who, though psychologically or physically wounded, were fortunate enough to return from Afghanistan alive. In two projects, a stage play The Two Worlds of Charlie F and then a radio verse drama Pink Mist, I drew upon the experiences of recently wounded personnel. In the case of Charlie F, the wounded soldiers and Marines I interviewed also formed the majority of the cast.
Although Charlie Fs subject was the aftermath of wounding, the idea of death was ever present among us as we rehearsed. Some bore vivid memories of their friends being killed. Others held equally sharp recollections of those they had killed themselves. A few weeks before the opening night, one of our company, Major Stewart Hill, lost yet another friend, this time through suicide after he had left the Army. When the play went on tour in 2013 it did so in memory of Jack Davies, a single amputee and cast member who died following an operation on his injuries just a few months before.
Reading these tributes here, Ive been reminded of those weeks in that death-haunted rehearsal room, filled with young people in their twenties and thirties. But they have also reminded me of some of the qualities, and the stories of recovery, the cast and their families shared with me. Though born of the worst of human experience, they display the very best of what it means to be human: care, attachment, perseverance and bravery in the face of horror and trauma.
These tributes are veined with similar attributes, and as such are a powerful reminder of how grief is the rougher side of love, and how neither can exist without the other. How, too, in the wake of loss and damage we witness, with a painful clarity, the fundamental human need of connection. It is surprising, perhaps, that as victims of wars discord, the voices of the families and friends in these tributes should create such a harmonious music of humanity. But they do, returning again and again to memories of care and love, to treasured moments and cherished traits.
At times, the poignancy of a love cut adrift from its subject is made manifest in a physical symbol: the tandem bike now covered in cobwebs, the home renamed after the swallows that sang on the day a husbands body was repatriated, the conservatory that was once a place of peaceful refuge become, in the cold days of a fathers grief, just another part of an empty world.
Some memories are more explicitly peppered with regret. In a moving inversion of the more common father/son equation, Rob Loughran-Dickson, writing of his late father, confesses his regret at never telling him he was gay. Tony Woodgate, in recalling his son, Jonathan, writes that his greatest regret was that I didnt actually know him. In the very first tribute, Beccy, remembering her brother Darren, admits: After Darren died, all the family fell apart, never to be fixed again.
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Afghanistan 2001-2014 tribute: Love cut adrift