Their families have been informed!

As three more young men are killed in Afghanistan, we again hear that familiar phrase:

'Their families have been informed'

It seems to imply that the authorities have done the decent thing and we should spend a moment to reflect and move on. Worry about the football, what's for lunch and how may pints we are going to drink in the pub tonight. As Gordon Brown pays tribute to 'those brave young men' and trots out that familiar rhetoric, 'insisting those who died serving their country had achieved something of lasting value'. Not that I blame the current government, we wouldn't get anything different whoever was in power.

A former UK military commander claims the UK forces lack a clear mission and face another 'stalemate' with the Taliban. Our troops may have inflicted heavy casualties on the Taliban in recent months, but that only means they resort to different tactics, such as booby-traps, suicide bomb attacks and other guerillas type action.

I have recently been helping my daughter revise about Vietnam for her A levels, and it all sounds strangely familiar...have we learnt nothing!

What makes us think we can succeed where half a million Russians failed?

I don't have a lot of sympathy for 'families of dead soldiers', when they criticise and condemn after the event. After all, the young men joined voluntarily and only a fool would go ahead without being prepared to take the consequences.

I still think Nathan Cuthbertson, Charles David Murray and Daniel Gamble deserve a little more than a moments reflection, even if it is only to consider the utter futility and waste of so many lives. I include the lives of the Taliban in that! Surly there is a better way?