Our troops are giving their lives to safeguard a rigged election

Hamid Karzai's appalling and corrupt regime is the West's guilty little secret

All wars have anthems for doomed youth. Afghanistan is no exception. At a memorial service yesterday, senior officers paid tribute to the eight British soldiers who died in the worst day of attrition since the Falklands.

Of the three youngest, William Aldridge had a gift for friendship, Joseph Murphy was a fine artist and James Backhouse, who wanted to be a fitness instructor, could run faster than the wind. Like his two comrades, he was 18 years old. Like them, he was, according to his superiors' eulogies, prepared to kill and to be killed.

Helmand province is not the Somme, but Wilfred Owen's lament for squandered life has seemed, back in the UK, to echo down the years. "What candles may be held to speed them all?/Not in the hands of boys but in their eyes/Shall shine the holy glimmers of goodbyes."

Owen blamed the state for sacrificing the young. Now, once again, government is deemed culpable as every parent sees, in the faces of the juvenile dead, an image of his or her own child. "What passing-bells for these who die as cattle?" Owen asked. More

Voters want Britain to scrap all nuclear weapons