Great Britain’s Defense Secretary Ben Wallace made clear that if it was up to Her Majesty’s government the United States and NATO would be in Afghanistan forever. In an interview in Sunday’s Daily Mail, Wallace revealed that after America made a deal with the Taliban in February 2020, the British government tried to rope in other NATO countries to stay in Afghanistan, but got no takers.
Wallace claimed that “nearly all of” NATO’s member states “were not interested” in Britain’s call to stay on. “We tried a number of like-minded nations. Some said they were keen, but their parliaments weren’t. It became apparent pretty quickly that without the United States as the framework nation it had been, these options were closed off.” Brushing away crocodile tears, he said he was “saddened … about all the blood and treasure that had been spent, that this was how it was ending [in Afghanistan].”
As for the U.K. putting its own forces in, that “was not viable” because “we [Britain] would have had to take ourselves out of a lot of other places around the world.”
