(Click To Enlarge)Helmand districts (Photo from Wikimedia)
Grim Reality Of Life Beyond Helmand -- Times Online
British officials are pleased with their reconstruction. Our correspondent finds little for them to crow about.
THE glossy photographs on the wall show smiling children and projects with names like “Avenue of Hope” and “Eid Park”, after the Islamic festival. A glass cabinet displays pomegranates, chilli peppers and wheat that the happy population of Helmand is supposed to grow instead of the opium poppy from which most of them make their money.
A press room is dominated by a poster of the proposed Lashkar Gah Industrial Park, complete with grassy lawns, a pet cat and a passenger jet flying overhead.
Known as Helmandshire, the concrete building inside the heavily guarded British headquarters in Lashkar Gah houses what is surely the most bizarre outpost of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) and one of the costliest. By December it will employ 140 people - the size of one of Britain’s larger embassies - for a population of fewer than 2m, smaller than that of Wales.
Most never venture beyond the compound walls. Those who occasionally brave the five-minute drive to the governor’s office do so in armed convoys, surrounded by bodyguards and travelling at high speed. The cracks on the vehicles’ windows from rocks thrown almost every time they go out are a measure of the locals’ appreciation.
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My Comment: If this article is 50% true, what happened in Basra, Iraq for the British is now happening in Helmand Province, Afghanistan. There is something clearly wrong with British procedure, strategy, and leadership.
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