The British Sour on Afghanistan

Last week, on a sunny afternoon in the sleepy English market town of Wootton Bassett in Wiltshire, around 4,000 people gathered and stood and watched as eight coffins carrying the remains of eight British servicemen were driven through the streets. It is a ritual that people in the town, which is close to RAF Lyneham, where the bodies of fallen servicemen are regularly flown into, are becoming numbingly used to.

But last week’s procession was different. The eight soldiers were killed in a bloody 24 hours of violence in Afghanistan, on what was the United Kingdom’s darkest day of combat. And their homecoming came at a time when the British public is becoming disillusioned and angry with the UK’s involvement in the eight-year Afghan war, an attitude that a raft of opinion polls in the last month has only confirmed.