Afghanistan needs interpreters to be brave and stay at home

It is not Britain's 'moral obligation' to give the Army's Afghan war interpreters automatic asylum here

A British soldier (C) and his interpreter (L) talk with an Afghan actor playing the part of a villager during a training exercise in a new "Afghan village" at a military base in Norfolk, in e
(Image credit: 2009 AFP)

OLIVER CROMWELL came within a whisker of emigrating to Connecticut in 1634, eight years before the English Civil War began in which he was to become the outstanding battlefield commander.

He hated the religious restrictions being placed on his fellow Puritans by Charles I and his bullying Archbishop of Canterbury, William Laud. He also despaired that the king's arbitrary power and the violence that might flow from it seemed unstoppable. Some of his closest friends had already departed.

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is a former Welsh Guards lieutenant colonel and intelligence analyst for the British government's Joint Intelligence Committee. His book, 7-7: What Went Wrong, was one of the first to be published after the London bombings in July 2005.