By 3 News online staff
New Zealand troops have been stationed in Afghanistan since 2001, as part of a global anti-terrorism response to the September 11 attacks.
We've lost 10 soldiers to the war, and with the arrival home of the bodies of the latest three victims questions are being fired at the Government as to why we can't get out now.
Former US military adviser David Kilcullen believes withdrawing troops from the country could cause more problems - saying when Western forces leave Afghanistan, he expects fighting will continue along an ethnic divide, with the possibility of a civil war breaking out.
“People are positioning themselves now and unfortunately one of the things that some people are worried about is that they’ve been too close to the coalition troops or too close to the international community and that they’re going to be targeted after we leave, and so people are trying to distance themselves now,” he told Firstline this morning.
Mr Kilcullen believes Afghanistan’s political past may hold some clues to what happens when coalition troops withdraw.
“When the Russians left they actually left a very strong local Government in charge, which in fact outlived the Soviet Union, it was rather a military success although not a political one for the Russians, but if you look at the way that that Government survived, it did so by making a whole lot of local deals with groups that had been previously fighting it, including the mujahideen and I think that is quite likely to be what we see after 2014.”
Mr Kilcullen believes violence will also slowly shift toward Pakistan, and that country will be the next international problem.
3 News