The risks of Operation Barras were acknowledged by the MoD and by officers involved in the planning and the assault. It was described by an SAS soldier as "not a clinical, black balaclava, Princes Gate type operation. It was a very grubby, green operation with lots of potential for things to go wrong". Despite the risks, Richard Connaughton observed in "Small Wars &amp; Insurgencies" that the operation showed the Blair government was not averse to the possibility of casualties when they felt the cause was just. During the crisis and its immediate aftermath, the British government came under pressure from opposition politicians to end the deployment to Sierra Leone, and Dorman suggested that the success or failure of Operation Barras was "inextricably linked" to the fate of the wider British operation. He suggested that, had the British forces been defeated, the United Kingdom would have been forced to withdraw all its forces from Sierra Leone.