Sir Jock's a blunt weapon | Mail Online
With a name which might have been invented by Jilly Cooper for a sexmad master of foxhounds, our Chief of Defence Staff, Sir Jock Stirrup, is something of a disappointment in the flesh.
Discreet, grey, cautious - and never likely to rock the boat like his subordinate, Chief of the General Staff Sir Richard Dannatt - Sir Jock appeared on breakfast TV yesterday to utter a string of comforting platitudes about our Armed Forces.
Afghanistan is merely a matter of training locals to do their own fighting and that's going well, he says, although 'the international community' will be there for years.
This makes it sounds as we're all in it together, and equally. But Britain contributes far more than every other ally except America. Some of the ' international community' there won't expose themselves to battle at all.
Overstretched? Our Army is under pressure but it's manageable, he says. Soldiers' pay is poor but that issue is being addressed. The same goes for living quarters. Morale? A recent report said it was rock bottom. Sir Jock points out their high level of job satisfaction. He oozed contentment.
I wonder if he read James Fergusson's sobering account - published in Saturday's Mail - about what our foes in Afghanistan, the Taliban, are really like? They're not fuzzy-wuzzy amateurs in sandals but tough, courageous soldiers fighting impossible odds.
Fergusson met Commander Abdullah, who has two sons aged four and two. He does not give them 'a father's love' he says, 'because when I am killed, it will be much harder for them.
'My father, my grandfather and my great-grandfather all died by the bullet. I will die the same way, and no doubt my sons, too. It is not so sad. It is glorious to be martyred. To die in the service of the jihad is the ambition of all of us here.'
Over the weekend, I watched on TV The Day Of The Kamikaze, a documentary about Japan's suicide pilots in 1945. Most of us have been brought up to believe they were demented automatons brainwashed by their superiors into flying bomb-laden planes into Allied warships.
But they were not so different from our own wartime servicemen and women then who thought dying in the service of their country was a noble sacrifice. Kamikaze was the last throw of the dice when Japan was faced with massively superior enemy naval forces from the U.S. and Britain assembling off her coast.
The Taliban have suicide bombers, too. And their conventional attacks on U.S. and British forces are near suicidal because we can call in jet bombers, Apache gunships or deadly, missilefiring unmanned drones.
Locals say that when one American is hit, whole villages are razed to the ground by U.S. bombers. Last week, 49 people, mainly women and children, were killed on their way to a wedding.
Commander Abdullah told Fergusson that if it wasn't for the 'air support' on which we and the U.S. rely, 'we could take the country in a single day. What we need are missiles to shoot them down. But, insha'allah (God willing) we will get these very soon'.
What a bloody mess. We ought to hear more from our own commanders in theatre and less from Whitehall warriors like Sir Jock Stirrup and his predecessor, Sir Mike Jackson. We won't, though. They got to the top by playing footsie with the politicians. Yesterday's complacent performance by Sir Jock was a blinder.