'My injuries were pointless', says paralysed Afghan veteran

Simon Vaughan warned that British troops would return to the region in a decade.

Mr Vaughan, whose injuries left him confined to a wheelchair and with severe speech problems, said he would like to see former prime minister put in stocks for his role the conflict.

He said watching the events over the past few days on television made him feel his suffering had all been in vain.

The former corporal, of Ercall Heath, near Newport, returned to Britain with a shattered pelvis, a broken neck, back and collapsed lungs after being caught in an explosion in the notorious Helmand Province.

Mr Vaughan, now 37, criticised US President Joe Biden and his predecessor George W Bush for their handling of the situation.

"Watching what is happening now makes me think how pointless it was me getting injured," he said.

Mr Vaughan also said Prime Minister Boris Johnson needed to 'open his eyes' to what was happening.

"We will be back there within 10 years," he said. "There will be another war.

"We are going to be in real trouble if they ever get a nuclear weapon."

Mr Vaughan said it was right to have invaded Afghanistan to remove Osama Bin Laden and disrupt the Al Qaeda terror group which carried out the attack on the World Trade Centre in New York, but said once that had objective had been achieved, the troops should have returned home.

But he said that having made the decision to stay in the country, the allies should have remained to see the job through.

"We stirred up the hornets' nest, and then we abandoned it," he said. "We left things in a much worse state than when we started, just like we did in Northern Ireland before that.

"We will be back there in 10 years, and it will be really bad."

He said the sight of people desperately fleeing the country showed what an evil regime the Taliban was.

"They are now stronger than before we went in," he said.

"I feel very sorry for the women in Afghanistan. Under the Taliban, the donkeys have more rights than the women."

He said the West should now stay out of Afghanistan, and leave them to fight among themselves, unless they started to threaten other countries.

If that happened, he said the threat of nuclear weapons should be used to bring the Taliban to heel.

Mr Vaughan, who joined the Army in 2001, suffered serious brain injuries after the vehicle he was travelling in drove over an unexploded bomb while he was serving with the Royal Electrical Mechanical Engineers in December 2008.

He had been tipped for a top role in the SAS before the explosion.

Doctors warned he might never be able to breathe unaided and could have remained in a vegetative state, but he surprised them by his recovery.

It was two-and-a-half years before he could return home, and for some years he could only speak through a machine.

Now he is receiving speech therapy to help him speak unaided, and he is also receiving physiotherapy to help improve his mobility.