Rescuing journalist Farrell was a risk worth taking

The story of the rescue of New York Times reporter Stephen Farrell and the death of his Afghan interpreter and a British Special Forces paratrooper - as well as two Afghan civilians - seems a story of a risk too far at many levels.

Today the finger-waggers of Fleet Street and Westminster are saying that Farrell shouldn't have been there in Kunduz, northern Afghanistan in the first place. He was warned several times, by person or persons unknown, not to go because this was dangerous terrain where the Taliban had been staging their own asymmetric surge to choke Nato supply convoys coming in from the north. He took a risk and four men died as a result.

The risk was political for Gordon Brown and his foreign and defence secretaries, David Miliband and Bob Ainsworth, and for the Director of Special Forces, Major

General Jacko Page. Should they have risked such a valuable asset as a platoon of Special Forces Support Group, otherwise known as 1st Battalion the Parachute Regiment? And all to pull a foolhardy reporter and his Afghan colleague out of the Taliban bag.

Farrell wanted the truth about a Nato bombing that may have killed 125 peopleThe version being pedalled in tabloid land today is a caricature. Farrell is a notoriously risk-taking correspondent – and a very good colleague, may I add – who gets results. He has braved the al-Qaeda punchbowl of Fallujah. He has endured a brief kidnap in Iraq. He and his colleagues have brought us the news we need to know and many wouldn't want us to know. His colleague David Rhode, a Pulitzer Prize winner, spent months as a Taliban hostage last year, and at great risk.

Farrell went to Kunduz in an effort to get at the truth of what had happened when Nato jets bombed two hijacked fuel tankers last week. They let off what was in effect a deadly air-fuel bomb, which according to reports on the ground killed 125 and wounded many more. Many must have been civilians, and this comes after the American commander General Stanley McChrystal had issued specific orders against Nato air strikes if there was any risk of hitting civilians nearby.

Farrell and his interpreter, Sultan Munadi, a journalist and academic in his own right, would have done a thorough risk analysis of their own before travelling to Kunduz . Farrell knows as well as anyone that a dead or captured journalist is no good if he cannot get his story out – he does not court danger for the hell of it.

Special forces would have been “up for it” as they like to “fight for intelligence”Such intrepid wanderers of the news spectrum are hugely valuable, and even our intelligence agencies refer to them as "open sources". The reports from people like Farrell and his colleagues David Rhode, Carlotta Gall and Christina Lamb often provide unique insights into the human landscape of the most dangerous places on earth.

Nor was the Special Forces rescue a diversion from their main effort and purpose in Afghanistan. Special Forces are always on standby for all manner of covert operations, including hostage rescue, in Iraq and Afghanistan. "The boys would have been really up for it," a former SF commander told me today.

Also, British Special Forces like to "fight for intelligence". These forces would want to know who Farrell's captors were – the new Taliban warlords on the vulnerable Kunduz block – and so the opportunity to find the reporter would have been welcome for this reason alone.

For Gordon Brown it was a high risk move, too. He realises he must give a firmer lead on Afghanistan; otherwise failure there will be added to the charges against him in the election campaign.

The only fear is that he did it to grandstand – after all, the SAS have provided the likes of Thatcher, Portillo, Blair and Hoon with quite a few grandstanding opportunities over the years. I hope Brown didn't do it just to boost the MORI ratings. That really would be worthy of blame, and more.