"I do not accept that all the same failures are apparent in some way when it comes to planning in Afghanistan. I do not accept that. In Afghanistan there was a very clear connection between the Taliban regime… and the goal of government policy, which I supported at that time," Cameron said in the UK parliament on Wednesday.
Cameron's comments came after the publication of the Chilcot Report earlier in the day, which found that the UK government of Prime Minister Tony Blair made a decision to join the Iraq War in 2003 on the basis of false intelligence data and assessments. The consequences of the war, which left hundreds of thousands dead, can still be felt, the report underlined.
Blair has been criticized for the United Kingdom’s involvement in the conflict in Iraq that continued until 2011. The campaign to topple then Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein on the grounds that he had weapons of mass destruction and was prepared to use them against the West, resulted in 179 British service personnel being killed and led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, many of them civilians. No weapons of mass destruction were ever found in Iraq.
The US-led NATO mission in Afghanistan, which included the United Kingdom, formally ended its operations in December 2014 after a long presence in the country since 2001 to help local authorities to defeat the Taliban Islamist movement.
Afghanistan, however, continues to be in political and social turmoil as jihadist groups take advantage of the instability in the country, which has persisted since the 2001 invasion.
