Prince Harry, a veteran of the war in Afghanistan, said the “sacrifices” made by British troops in the conflict “deserve to be spoken about truthfully and with respect,” pushing back against recent remarks by President Donald Trump about NATO forces.
Speaking in an interview on Thursday, Trump claimed that soldiers from non-U.S. NATO countries remained “a little off the front lines” during the war in Afghanistan.
His remarks sparked strong backlash across Europe, including from British Prime Minister Keir Starmer, who described them as “insulting and frankly, appalling.”
In a statement released Friday, Harry — who completed two tours of duty with the British Army in Afghanistan — said America’s allies “answered” the call to stand alongside U.S. forces after NATO invoked Article 5 following the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.
“I served there. I made lifelong friends there. And I lost friends there. The United Kingdom alone had 457 service personnel killed,” the Duke of Sussex said.
“Thousands of lives were changed forever. Mothers and fathers buried sons and daughters. Children were left without a parent. Families are left carrying the cost.”
“Those sacrifices deserve to be spoken about truthfully and with respect, as we all remain united and loyal to the defense of diplomacy and peace,” Harry added.
Asked to respond, White House spokeswoman Taylor Rogers said: “President Trump is absolutely right — the United States of America has done more for NATO than any other country in the alliance has done combined.”
Trump made his comments during an appearance on Fox Business, where he argued that the U.S. had “never needed” the trans-Atlantic military alliance, a cornerstone of the post-World War II global order.
“We have never really asked anything of them,” Trump said. “You know, they’ll say they sent some troops to Afghanistan or this or that, and they did. They stayed a little back, little off the front lines.”
The remarks further strained relations with long-standing European allies, already unsettled by Trump’s recent push to acquire Greenland, a self-governing territory of Denmark, which is a NATO member.
Trump also angered allies earlier this week during a speech at the World Economic Forum in Davos, where he criticized Europe, saying countries there are “destroying themselves” and that “certain places in Europe are not even recognizable, frankly, anymore.”
Following the 9/11 attacks, the United States led a multinational coalition into Afghanistan with the goal of dismantling Al Qaeda and removing the Taliban from power. NATO activated Article 5 for the first — and so far only — time, with the British military deploying more than 150,000 personnel.
When asked whether Trump should apologize, Starmer said that if he had “misspoken in that way or said those words, I would certainly apologize.”
Prince Harry began his first tour of duty in Afghanistan in 2007 and later returned for a second deployment in September 2012, serving as an Apache helicopter pilot, according to a British government release at the time.
In his 2023 memoir Spare, the Duke of Sussex wrote that he killed 25 “enemy combatants” during his deployments in Afghanistan. “It wasn’t a number that gave me any satisfaction. But neither was it a number that made me feel ashamed,” Harry wrote.
