DAVID Pratt’s perspective on the US withdrawal from Afghanistan is of course accurate but also steeped in his own professional lived experience as a war correspondent who understands more than most the tragedies that will unfold with the withdrawal. However, as a lifelong political activist of the Scottish independence left, I have always assumed that we” went into Afghanistan for the wrong reasons in the wrong way. Had it been an in-and-out affair to get Al Qaeda I would probably have found it objectionable for other longer-term reasons but at least it would have had a modicum of strategic coherence to obtain the object of the operation as per on the tin.