No 10 rebukes Hegseth over claim most non-US Nato troops never fought in Afghanistan

Downing Street has publicly reprimanded the US defence secretary, Pete Hegseth, saying he was "wrong" to suggest that most non-American Nato soldiers in Afghanistan did no fighting. Hegseth made the remark in a speech at the University of Tennessee, recalling his own service as a captain: "There'd be 50 flags at the headquarters in Kabul… it was actually closer to one or two that by the end were actually involved in kinetic operations." Of the Isaf patch, he said soldiers joked it meant "I Saw Americans Fighting."

The prime minister's spokesperson told the Downing Street lobby briefing that more than 450 British personnel never returned from Afghanistan, and that the sacrifice of British and other Nato forces was made in the service of collective security, in response to an attack on an ally. "It is wrong to diminish their role," the spokesperson said.

The reprimand is unusual for a government that has tried hard to stay on good terms with Washington. Keir Starmer has invested heavily in a personal relationship with Trump; the two governments disagree on much, but criticism is normally kept private. When Trump made a similar claim about Nato allies avoiding frontline fighting in Afghanistan, Starmer — then in opposition — called it "insulting and frankly appalling."

The pattern is consistent: Washington starts and abandons wars, Europe buries its dead, and is then told it wasn't there. All of this arrives alongside renewed American demands that Europe spend more on its own defence — a ledger in which the continent's casualties are entered as zero. The British contribution to Afghanistan came after the alliance's only invocation of Article 5, following the September 11 attacks.

Hegseth served in Afghanistan himself, at the same headquarters whose fifty flags he now discounts. The 457 British dead — and the hundreds more from other European countries — were killed in a war Washington chose to start and chose to leave.