This is why you don't put women in the cockpit.
Exhausted British troops 'reduced to tears'
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Photo: Reuters
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AdvertisementRichard Norton-Taylor, London
September 24, 2006
British troops in Afghanistan are exhausted and desperately short of helicopters, and there is no sign the casualty rate will fall, according to accounts from officers on the front line.
The reports, including a leaked email describing the Royal Air Force as "useless", put the UK Government under fresh pressure over whether it adequately prepared troops for the hostile south of the country.
It was revealed yesterday that a paratroop major, James Loden, described British forces as desperately short of reinforcements and helicopters and berated the RAF for being "utterly, utterly useless". In leaked emails, he referred to an attack when the pilot of a Harrier fighter bomber fired rockets closer to British troops on the ground than the enemy. "A female Harrier pilot 'couldn't identify the target', fired two phosphorus rockets that just missed our own compound so that we thought they were incoming RPGs (rocket-propelled grenades), and then strafed our perimeter, missing the enemy by 200 metres," Major Loden said.
The major also referred to the death last month of a British corporal and his colleagues' efforts to save the dying man during an intense ground battle. He described two junior colleagues, who appeared "very frightened and slow to react". He said his men were exhausted and at times were reduced to tears.
Another army officer has described the scale of casualties as "very significant and showing no signs of reducing".
-A Taliban ambush killed 19 Afghan workers in southern Afghanistan on Friday, while police killed 25 rebels in fierce fighting in Uruzgan province, where Australians are based.
- Guardian, AFP
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