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British opposition parties have criticised the government for its spending in the so-called “war on terror”, The Daily Telegraph has reported.
In addition to spending of around one billion pounds (1.89 billion dollars, 1.48 billion euros) in Afghanistan, where Britain has deployed 5,600 soldiers, and five billion pounds in Iraq, where there are around 7,100 British troops, the government has pledged nearly an extra billion pounds recently.
“Money that might have been spent on assisting the poorest countries has been squandered in illegal military action against Iraq,” Menzies Campbell, the leader of Britain's third-largest political party, the Liberal Democrats, told the newspaper.
Blair, currently on a trip to Pakistan, on Sunday pledged to more than double British aid to Pakistan to support President Pervez Musharraf's “programme of enlightened moderation” to 480 million pounds over the next three years.
He is also expected, according to the Telegraph, to highlight on Monday the fact that Britain is pumping 500 million pounds into redeveloping Afghanistan.
Finally, finance minister Gordon Brown on a visit to Iraq on Saturday unveiled 100 million pounds of aid for the war-torn country over the next three years.
The figures may provide fresh ammunition for opponents of the US-led invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, and the wider “war on terror”, just days after Blair's “slip of the tongue” in an interview on Iraq.
In an interview with Al-Jazeera's new English channel on Friday, interviewer David Frost suggested that the intervention in Iraq had “so far been pretty much of a disaster”.
Blair agreed that it had before quickly explaining the reasons for the growing sectarian violence. His official spokesman said on Saturday that it was a “straightforward slip of the tongue”.
The comments were seized on, however, by the British media and the anti-war opposition parties on the day that it emerged that one of Blair's ministers had reportedly said the Iraq war was his “biggest mistake in foreign affairs”.
