Liam Fox in Afghanistan

"We are not in Afghanistan for the sake of the education policy in a broken 13th-century country."

So says Liam Fox, the new coalition's Defence Secretary, in an interview with The Times.


OK, so he didn't actually say that Afghanistan is a 13th-century country. But it certainly looks like that's what he thinks. This is troubling.

Con Coughlin, himself no purveyor of politicalcorrectnessgonemaaaad, puts it like this:

Liam Fox ...  managed to be gratuitously offensive to his Afghan hosts while totally undermining one of the pillars of the Nato campaign ... a classic exercise of putting a ministerial foot in an over-eager mouth. I don’t care whether or not Dr Fox was quoting Afghan President Hamid Karzai: it was an ill-judged remark, and one that immediately raises questions about his suitability for this most challenging of ministerial briefs.

We can only agree.