UK Army Chief predicts a generation of conflict in Iraq and Afghanistan

Britains Chief of Army Staff, General Sir Richard Dannatt, has reportedly told senior officers of the armed forces that they should prepared for a generation of conflict in the wake of dangers posed by a strident Islamist shadow in Iraq and Afghanistan.

London, Aug.28 : Britain's Chief of Army Staff, General Sir Richard Dannatt, has reportedly told senior officers of the armed forces that they should prepared for a "generation of conflict" in the wake of dangers posed by a "strident Islamist shadow" in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Describing the British Army as being "on the edge of a new and deadly Great Game in Afghanistan", General Dannatt told senior staff that the trust and respect of the public could be "increasingly difficult to gain" in the context of conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan.

"The challenge of this generation is as great as any that have gone before us," The Times quoted him, as saying.

General Dannatt's thoughts were revealed in a speech given to the conference on future land warfare at the Royal United Services Institute in Whitehall in London in June. The speech remained secret because the Ministry of Defence did not allow the media to attend.

However, under a Freedom of Information request, the contents of the address to senior British and overseas military have now been released.

In his address, General Dannatt underlined the importance of achieving success in Iraq and Afghanistan, which he said were the "all-consuming focus" of the Army at present.

But he appeared to play down the prospects of achieving all of the main objectives.

"If we fail in either campaign, then I submit that, in the face of that strident Islamist shadow, then tomorrow will be a very uncertain place," General Dannatt said.

However, he envisaged only "some form of success in Iraq" and spoke of "significant achievement in Afghanistan".

Last year General Dannatt said he believed that the troops should be pulled out "some time soon". However, in his June address, he seemed to be preparing for decades of fighting ahead - presumably with Afghanistan in mind.

"We need an army in being in five and ten years' time, not just the memory of one that expended itself in the middle of the current decade," he said.

General Dannatt, who is approaching his first anniversary as Chief of the General Staff, said he believed that the general public had not yet grasped that Britain's Armed Forces were engaged "in a wider conflict that may last for a generation", which meant looking again at the structure and equipping of the services.

General Dannatt said that these threats could not be resolved by military means alone but required a "battle of hearts and minds", adding: "These threats do not just face us abroad . . . increasingly we have identified that we need to understand our own home front."

Helmand province in southern Afghanistan, where 6,000 British troops are based, has become the biggest source of illicit drugs in the world, the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, said yesterday

The UN organisation said that Helmand had produced more than half of Afghanistan's opium, which increased this year to 8,200 tonnes compared with last year's official figure of 6,100, a 34 per cent rise. Afghan opium generates 93 per cent of the world's heroin trade.

Despite the presence of British and other troops and an objective of eliminating the opium crops, the area of cultivation increased this year by 17 per cent to 193,000 hectares (477,000 acres)

The US says that Afghanistan has more land producing drugs than Colombia, Bolivia and Peru combined.

ANI