This is an old story. Political leaders would rather stretch losing wars, how ever many lives and limbs are lost, than admit that the blood and treasure expended has been pointless.
Stop the War Coalition
15 August 2011
A day after another British soldier was killed in Afghanistan, bringing the total to 379, UK Prime Minister David Cameron made a speech saying the riots in cities across Britain were caused by 'people with a twisted moral code'.
Morality is an issue which is never discussed in relation to the forgotten war in Afghanistan. After ten years of death and destruction, the war barely gets mentioned these days, outside of reporting political and military leaders telling us 'progress' is being made.
But it was hard to disguise the implications of the recent shooting down by the Taliban of a US Chinook helicopter, killing 30 US and eight Afghan troops: the war is not going well, the Taliban and other groups resisting occupation are not in retreat, and the US and Nato are no nearer turning the tide than they were a year ago, when Barack Obama sent his troop surge of 30,000.
There are now 140,000 foreign troops in Afghanistan -- three times the number there under George W Bush -- but there has been no improvement in stability or security. Quite the reverse: 2011 will be the most violent year since the invasion in 2001. The death rate for the occupying armies at its highest level yet, with close to 400 US and Nato troops killed so far this year.
No one keeps accurate figures of the number of Afghan civilians who have died, but it's fair to assume that the number runs into thousands.
The economic cost of the war is astronomical, particularly in the context of a world economic crisis which sees governments everywhere insisting that huge cuts in public services have to be rushed through to bring down the levels of public debt. The US is spending $2 billion dollars a week in Afghanistan, with each soldier costing an estimated million dollars for every year of deployment. Britain spends around £5 billion a year.
But the question is, why? What direct bearing does Afghanistan, one of the world's poorest countries -- where life-expectancy at 43 years is the lowest anywhere -- have for the US, Britain or any of the Nato countries now waging war there.
The reason certainly isn't the fight against terrorism, particularly now Osama bin Laden has been assassinated. The CIA has admitted for years that there are less than 100 Al Qaeda operatives in Afghanistan, which hardly requires 140,000 foreign troops to counter it.
The issue in Afghanistan is no longer terrorism, it is what the invading forces call the 'insurgency', but what is in reality a range of groups -- of which the Taliban is one -- which are resisting occupation of their country, just as Afghans have resisted all foreign interventions over the past 200 years.
This is an old story. Political leaders would rather stretch losing wars, however many lives and limbs are lost, than admit that the blood and treasure expended has been pointless.
We're here because we're here, is how the song went, sung by soldiers in the World War I trenches, and that sums up the reason that David Cameron keeps 9,500 troops waging war in a country which poses no threat to Britain or its interests.
But what sort of moral code is it -- twisted or otherwise -- that sends soldiers, many still teenagers, like those involved in last week's riots, to fight a war which everyone knows is lost and is only being dragged out to find a way of saving the face of the politicians and generals who are losing it?
The Antiwar Mass Assembly on Saturday 8 October, to mark ten years of war in Afghanistan, and of the 'war on terror', will be a festival of opposition to the twisted moral code that won't bring the troops home from a futile and unjustified war, despite this being the wish of the majority of people in Britain.
Sign the pledge to be in Trafalgar Square, alongside John Pilger, Len McCluskey, Tony Benn, Jemima Khan, Craig Murray, Billy Bragg, Sanum Ghaffour, George Galloway, John McDonnell MP, Brian Eno, Ahdaf Soueif, and many more: Sign here...
We will be there.
Will you?
Anti-War Mass Assembly Afghanistan 10 Years On Trafalgar Square London Sat 8 October Sign the pledge...
