“AFGHANISTAN is a safer, more prosperous and democratic place,” Britain’s Defence Secretary Michael Fallon crowed yesterday as the union jack was lowered at Helmand province’s Camp Bastion for the last time.

Simultaneously Afghan police official General Abdul Qadir Sayad reported that at least four police officers were dead and others missing following an attack by “insurgents.”

Roadside bombings in Kandahar had claimed four civilian lives on Saturday, the Afghan government added.

What could better illustrate the total, ignominious defeat of the Western invasion of the country announced with such haste 13 years ago?

Britain’s departure from Afghanistan is to be welcomed. Foreign occupation has cost tens of thousands of Afghan lives.

Four-hundred and fifty-three Britons perished in this pointless conflict too, as did thousands of other Western troops, mostly from the United States.

Those like Mr Fallon who seek to claim some sort of victory from this bloody mess should reflect on the reasons given for George W Bush and Tony Blair’s now infamous “war on terror,” of which the unprovoked assault on Afghanistan was the first act.

British and US troops were dispatched to the long-suffering country on October 7 2001, less than a month after the September 11 terror attack on New York’s World Trade Centre.

The supposed aim was to remove the Taliban in order to deprive Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaida organisation of a “safe haven.”

The Taliban are still going strong in Afghanistan, and it remains to be seen whether the Western-sponsored Afghan government in Kabul can fend them off for long.

In neighbouring Pakistan — where, it turned out, bin Laden was actually hiding — the Taliban have grown massively in strength because of the horrors unleashed by the US and Britain north of the border.

As for al-Qaida, the “war on terror” — especially when it was extended to overthrow the secular dictatorship of Saddam Hussein in Iraq — gave it its biggest-ever boost.

Islamist terror in Afghanistan is, of course, the child of Washington and London.

Bin Laden rose to prominence as a Saudi businessman who organised a huge influx of foreign fighters to pour into the country in the 1980s, when the Soviet Union was attempting to defend Kabul’s socialist government from a radical religious revolt sponsored and armed by the US.

A forward-looking, progressive country which was redistributing the land and promoting women’s rights was gradually captured by the sectarian fanatics of the mojahedin.

Afghanistan has been dominated by religious zealots and tribal warfare ever since its socialist government fell in 1993, two years after the Soviet Union itself had ceased to exist — a calamity at least partly down to the crippling effects of its Afghan war, especially a collapse in the morale of its exhausted and bloodied military.

Britain and the US may have later turned against the monster they created but the indiscriminate killing both countries have visited on the Muslim world since 2001 has only fed the flames.

From Isis to Boko Haram and from al-Qaida in Yemen to the Pakistani Taliban, fundamentalist terrorism is stronger than ever.

What began as conservative resistance to socialist advance now recruits its supporters from the millions outraged by the West’s murderous policies across the Middle East.

As the last of our troops leave Afghanistan, Britain’s peace movement must ensure that we do not repeat this tragedy.

Our politicians’ eagerness to send soldiers to kill and die abroad has to be challenged and permanently defeated.