Success Quote by Liam Fox

The line is built to make a distant, complicated country feel like an immediate domestic problem. “We can’t afford” is economic language pressed into moral and strategic service: it implies not just urgency but fiscal prudence, as if skepticism is a kind of irresponsible overspending. Fox doesn’t argue for a particular policy so much as he pre-loads the debate with a cost of dissent.

“Roll backwards” does quiet ideological work. It frames Afghanistan as a linear modernization story in which Western involvement equals forward motion and withdrawal equals regression. That metaphor also launders agency: Afghans aren’t described as political actors with competing visions, but as terrain that can slide into failure unless held in place.

The phrase “failed state” is a blunt, policy-world diagnosis that doubles as an alibi. Once a country is labeled “failed,” extraordinary measures start to sound ordinary: prolonged military presence, expanded surveillance, flexible timelines. Then comes the real payload: “a base from which terrorist campaigns can be launched anywhere in the world.” “Base” evokes a clean, actionable target; “anywhere” turns uncertainty into omnipresent threat. It’s a classic post-9/11 rhetorical move: collapse geography so that Kabul and Cardiff share a single security perimeter.

Context matters. Fox is a British politician speaking into an era when public patience for Afghanistan was thinning and legitimacy hinged on prevention, not nation-building. The subtext isn’t confidence about outcomes; it’s fear management. If the future is framed as global terror “anywhere,” the present becomes the least-bad option, and the hardest question - what we’re actually achieving - can be deferred indefinitely.