A sort ofOn the last rescue flight Afghanistan -Britain brought a total of 15,000 people to safety-and hundreds of elite soldiers of the Afghan National Army. They helped 1,000 British soldiers in the final evacuation of Kabul Airport. Will the comrades-in-arms of the Hindu Kush Mountains fill the scarce british army soon? This is what influential foreign and security politicians are calling for with the support of former generals.
“If you want to serve, we should welcome you,” said Tom Tugendhat, chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee of the House of Commons. These soldiers who were trained by the British and fought alongside them have “proved their loyalty a thousand times.” Although some politicians advocate regular integration into the military, Tobias Elwood, chairman of the National Defense Commission, suggested integrating it as an independent unit, similar to the “Gurkhas.”
Nepalese Gurkha Model
The Gurkhas of Nepal have more than 200 years of contact with the army of the former empire. Their merger was also the result of a war, although not a failed war. When the soldiers of the East India Company fought against the kingdom of Gurkha (later the rise of Nepal) with the surrounding empires, they proposed defectors to join their ranks. After the signing of the peace treaty in 1816, recruitment was formalized. Since then, the Gurkha brigades have not only served the British in the Indian colonies, where they helped suppress the Sepoy uprising of 1857—the British army still talks about the “Indian mutiny”—but on almost all imperial fronts.
In the two world wars, their number rose to 250,000 soldiers. Since the division of the Gurkha Army into independent India and Britain, the number has dropped to several thousand. Before the return of Hong Kong to China, the Gurkhas were mainly stationed in the former royal colonies. Since then, these three camps have spread throughout Brunei, especially the United Kingdom. Most of the units are located in Kent, Nottinghamshire and Hampshire, England. After small operations in the Falkland Islands and the Balkans, the Gurkha infantry fought briefly on the front lines in Afghanistan and Iraq.
The brigade currently has approximately 4,000 people. If Afghan soldiers are accepted according to the Gurkha model, they will have the right to stay during their service and will be converted to permanent status after retirement. Gurkhas not only have long-term low wages, but they have also been deprived of their residency rights after they stop working and have to fight for these rights.
According to the “Daily Telegraph” report, a senior general recently notified members of Congress that elite Afghan soldiers had been “undercover” by the British in the past two weeks. They mixed with the crowd at the airport and swarmed into the Taliban-controlled area, looking for local staff, and handing them over to British soldiers. General Richard Ballance, the former commander of the Joint Forces Command, said that the elite Afghan soldiers are “excellent in accordance with international standards.” Prime Minister Boris Johnson, who delivered a televised speech at the end of the evacuation mission on Sunday, promised to help all arriving Afghans “contribute to the life and economy of this country in every possible way.”
