Sandy Gall Speaks on Afganistan

The school was delighted to host Sandy Gall, CMG, CBE at the Spring meeting of the Parent and Student Speech society, to speak about his latest book: Against the Taliban:Why it All Went Wrong’

Sandy Gall is a veteran news reporter with ITN and his career spans more than five decades, covering hot spots around the globe from the Hungarian Uprising and the Vietnam War, to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and, more recently, the role of US and British-led forces there, thirty years later.

The evening began with a Bagpiper playing some excellent tunes from Sandy Gall’s native Scotland, after which Gall spoke candidly to a packed room about the situation as he sees it.

He identified the key to the problem as the invasion of Iraq noting that once President George W Bush and his right-wing Vice President Dick Cheney, Secretary of Defence Donald Rumsfeld and their Neo-Con supporters had taken the decision to invade, the die was cast; although no one in the Administration would, he said, have dreamt it would turn out to be such a disaster.

He also attacked Tony Blair, then British Prime Minister, who gave Bush his total support, which Sandy Gall identified as a huge and costly mistake. It did, he thought, irreparable damage to British standing in the Middle East and imposed huge financial burdens. Also, he considered that there was no justification for it and quoted Max Cleland, the Senator for Georgia, who shrewdly remarked that: ‘Attacking Iraq after 9/11 was like attacking Mexico after Pearl Harbor’.

As one Western diplomat said to Gall in Kabul: ‘Perhaps the grossest error of all was President George Bush deciding . . . to charge off and invade Iraq, ignoring what was happening in Afghanistan.’ He cited the key problem of corruption both in the continued administration of Afghanistan and the ‘no longer quite so secret’ support of the Pakistani intelligence services, the ISI, for the Taliban.

Mr Gall also noted that British politicians and military men were always fighting one another about how the war in Afghanistan should progress, with General Sir Richard Dannatt, Chief of the General Staff, saying in his memoirs that Gordon Brown’s influence on defence spending was malign and Tony Blair: ‘Lacked the moral courage to impose his will on his own chancellor’.

Sandy Gall’s honest account of how he sees the situation in Afghanistan emerging was fascinating and afterwards he signed books and chatted for a long time with the students, including one whose father has done two tours of duty for the Army in Afghanistan.

All Photographs were taken by UVI Student Johannes Dreier