ON Remembrance Sunday I was honoured to conduct the annual service for the Royal Regiment of Fusiliers, as their chaplain. We began at the war memorial in Holborn, London. Hundreds attended: bright young cadets, proud veterans and many serving soldiers.

The most moving part, however, was when I read out the names of the seven Fusiliers killed in action this year in Afghanistan.

Back in 2001, in the aftermath of 9/11, I wholeheartedly supported the war against the Taliban and al Qaida in Afghanistan. I do not support it now and will explain why.

I imagined that carrying the war against our enemies in Afghanistan would be a campaign pursued thoroughly. The Western alliance, led by the US, has overwhelming fire power and there was no obvious reason why the war should not have led to victory.

But it was not fought thoroughly. The Western alliance was half-hearted – some countries worse than that – and never committed sufficient troops and equipment.

Then, there was not so much mission-creep as mission-confused. Why were we there?

Was it, as the original declarations made plain, to defeat the enemy? Unfortunately, this laudable and plain aim morphed into a thousand fragments of contradiction.

Our leaders began to talk about spreading democracy, freedom and civil rights to the Afghans and improving their nation’s infrastructure.

Those ideals were always going to prove unpopular in a country which is not really a country, but a mess of warring tribes penetrated by Islamofascists who hate the West.

There is no possibility of grafting the 1,000- year-old system of Western democracy on to ancient tribes used to despotism, government by assassination, corruption, internecine strife and casual cruelty as the prevailing domestic policy for centuries.

With the appropriate amount of force and the singular will to defeat our enemies, we might have achieved success. But we are undermanned, underequipped and no one is clear why we are there.

It is said by Gordon Brown, and seconded by David Cameron, that we need to suppress terrorists in Afghanistan to cut the likelihood of terror attacks in Britain. If they believe that, why won’t they persuade the Western alliance to put in the needed fire power?

Besides, it is folly to suppose that by halfheartedly deploying our forces in a country thousands of miles away we are doing anything to reduce the terrorist threat here. Remember the July 7 bombings? Our terrorists are home-grown.

In Bradford, Leeds, Birmingham, Leicester, Luton, the East End of London and other British towns and cities there are plenty of people who hate our country and who have declared many times that they want us dead.

Bring the troops home and end this useless waste of young lives. Beef up the intelligence and security regime in Britain. And get immigration under control. At present, we don’t even have accurate figures for the number of illegal immigrants. With our troops and our money going abroad, how can we keep track of the enemies in our midst?

These domestic measures are the only policies which have any chance of delivering us from the terrorist threat. And strengthening the home front would be the best way to honour the memory of those brave soldiers who have been killed in our defence.