Over there

Here’s where you can donate money to the Poppy Appeal for our servicemen and their families. What’s you money worth? Your freedom? It can be quantified – in gallons. Remember them.

And here’s why they’re doing the right thing in the right place at the right time.

LONDON – British Foreign Secretary David Miliband and U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton say Pakistan faces a serious threat from terrorism, but the country's nuclear arsenal is not at risk.

Taliban militants have launched a series of increasingly audacious attacks on military and political targets on Pakistan. On Saturday militants attacked the army headquarters, taking dozens of hostages.

At a news conference Sunday, Miliband said Pakistan faced a "mortal threat," but there was not a risk of Pakistan's nuclear weapons falling into terrorist hands.

Clinton said the U.S. had confidence in Pakistani authorities. She said terrorists were "increasingly threatening the authority of the state, but we see no evidence they are going to take over the state."

One thing you can be sure of concerning the wrong-headedness of the non-communist Left in facing evil is its essential conservative nature. They don’t believe that time passes or that uncomfortable changes happen during the passage of time. If it didn’t happen before, it won’t happen later. If it did happen before, it won’t happen again. If it happened in a small way it won’t get worse.

This explains how appeasement of Fascism worked in the 1930’s. The Left feared the probable pain and costs of small losses and if they compared that with potential gains from suppressing and preventing the future massive future losses of another world war they didn’t show any signs of it. They expressed grudging satisfactions with the status quo. Hitler could have been contained if he had been faced down. He was not and scores of millions died.

It also explains President Clinton’s repeated failure to act as if America was under concerted military and ideological attack. A chronology of Islamist attacks can be read here. The USA was in a war but it didn’t fight it, much, and treated their attackers as criminals. No forward planning. No over-view. No speculation about what might happen next. He expressed grudging satisfactions with the status quo.

Every failure to counter-attack: to have a plan to find and defeat the growing number of increasingly confident Islamists led to the moment when Osama bin Laden and Mohamed Atta made their dramatic protest against the stationing of US troops in Saudi Arabia.

If Secretary David Miliband and Hillary Clinton, following in this inglorious tradition, say that they have faith in Pakistan - a grudging satisfactions with the status quo - I say we should be worried.

Political Islam runs deep in Pakistan – helped to form the stat itself. Democratic institutions are skin deep and military coups are commonplace.

Taliban forces have conquered parts of Pakistan’s territory in a series of deeply penetrating attacks of the country, and at one time their control was temporarily legitimized by the Pakistani government.

Take this forward in time. Imagine that our British and the American ‘peace movement’ manage to get our troops out (or mostly out) of Afghanistan. No more ‘illegal wars.’ no more ‘Blood for, er, sand,’ in Afghanistan. Neo-con hell with this kind of fine chap influencing British policy during the Cameron Governor-generalship. The Taliban take power nationwide once more. We won’t hear the screams of the doubly punished women and young men as they are forced to comply with Taliban ultra-Shia once again as the brutish morons do their bloody work. Liberal cameras will politely avert their discrete eyes from the absolute reimposition of the dictatorship, but this is sensible, Left-liberal and Right-libertarian approved realpolitik and bringing our boys home from Brown’s war.

What do the Taliban-supported Islamists in Pakistan do – grab the first camel up the pass to the new earthly paradise to be with their Afghan brothers, or call to them Come on in, the peaceful civilian population is lovely? And what would their victory mean for Pakistan’s nuclear bombs?

Evil doesn’t go away. If you don’t fight it, stamp on it, humiliate it when it’s down and attack it when it’s resurgent, it moves elsewhere because totalitarian, ideological evil is greedy.

Which is the only good British national security reason that our brave troops are in Afghanistan.

Remember them. Honour them. Remember history, and honour their mission.