Killing of five UK soldiers raises ‘troops out’ tempo

The tragic shooting yesterday of five British soldiers by a 'rogue' Afghan policeman in Helmand province will add to calls for British troops to be brought home and is expected to open up a split in government thinking, already exposed by former Foreign Office minister Kim Howells this morning.

Writing in today's Guardian, Howells, who had ministerial responsibility for Afghanistan until 2008, and is now Gordon Brown's intelligence and security watchdog, has called for the phased withdrawal of British troops and for some of the billions saved to be spent instead on making Britain secure from al-Qaeda attacks.

The killing of the five British soldiers - which has been claimed by the Taliban - took place at a checkpoint in the Nad-e'Ali district. It happened when the Afghan officer - called Gulbuddin, according to the BBC's Kabul correspondent Ian Pannell - picked up his weapon and began firing on the troops from the Grenadier Guards and the Royal Military Police and on fellow Afghan policemen. As well as five dead, several were injured.

"The soldiers concerned were mentoring Afghan police," army spokesman Lieutenant Colonel David Wakefield told Sky News. "They were working inside and living inside an Afghan national police checkpoint. It would appear, and it is our initial understanding, that an individual Afghan policeman, possibly acting with another, started firing within the checkpoint before fleeing the scene." The soldiers' next-of-kin have been informed and the wounded men taken to hospital at Camp Bastian.

If the policeman was indeed a Taliban 'double agent' then it marks a new escalation in the conflict in Afghanistan. "It looks like a serious leap forward in Taliban tactics - the ability to actually get inside allied security," said Robert Fox, who writes about defence for The First Post and who has spent time embedded with British forces in Afghanistan. "It raises the question of whether Nato forces have a cohesive strategy for dealing with the insurgents."

Howells, writing before the news of the killings came through, writes in his Guardian article: "The public may be asking whether deploying large numbers of British forces to Afghanistan at great cost, in lives lost as well as in pounds sterling, is actually the most effective way of preventing Islamic terrorist murders in the UK."

Acknowledging that public support for the current mission in Afghanistan is slipping according to recent opinion polls, Howells suggests: "It would be better to bring home the great majority of our fighting men and women and concentrate, instead, on using the money saved to secure our own borders, gather intelligence on terrorist activities inside Britain."

Howells accepts that such an approach would result in "more intrusive surveillance in certain communities": in other words, Britain's Muslims would be subject to greater scrutiny by police and intelligence services as a result. ·