Afghan war grinds towards defeat
by Ken Ferguson - 18th September 2009
Despite shed loads of evidence of vote rigging and other malpractice as I write, the signs were that victory is about to be declared for the current Afghan President Karzai in the August 2009 presidential poll.
So bad are the reports of wrong doing that even some British Tories are reported as being prepared to call or a re-run of the election and it is clear that a Karzai victory will only lead to further instability and division.
Meanwhile the war grinds on with atrocity heaped on atrocity with stomach churning reports of the aftermath of the latest NATO bombing of two hijacked fuel road tankers and its resulting carnage.
The tankers were bombed as local people were siphoning off fuel from them and were caught in the full impact of air raid.
As usual the initial version from NATO was that they had killed “insurgents” but locally sourced reports rapidly established that those killed were mainly locals seeking some free fuel.
This was followed by harrowing press accounts of the impact with one father able to identify his son only from the henna on his toes while others told of being given some unrecognisable body parts in order to hold a funeral for dead children.
This is the reality on the ground in Afghanistan and it bears little resemblance to the mouthings of smart suited western “statesmen” about freedom and democracy.
This despite the well publicised new course set by fresh US commander General McChrystal who was supposedly adopting a softer policy to win the hearts and minds of the people which minimised raining death from the skies.
Clearly the policy has not yet filtered down to some elements in his command but then McChrystal himself is a curious type of liberal with his background in US special forces and fresh from running a murky detention camp in Iraq.
One striking aspect of the justification offered for the continuing British involvement in the war from Brown and his partners in crime is that it now speaks little of Afghan democracy.
Now the talk is of “keeping terrorism of our streets” as if the Taliban were likely to appear in London or Glasgow any day soon. The reality of course is that the cauldron of resentment stoked by the intervention of imperialist troops across the Muslim world is much more dangerous than any Afghan threat to the UK.
Increasingly it is clear that the war is losing support with 57% in one recent UK poll against it and support for Obama on the war sliding to 48% in the US.
The fact that Obama retained the services of Bush era defence secretary Robert Gates shows how wrong he has got the Afghan script.
Now the assurances from the Pentagon that they will not “abandon” Karzai and the Afghans have the eerie ring of an earlier era when the same was said in Vietnam.
And, as in Vietnam, the policy is to stop getting NATO troops killed by replacing them with Afghan forces, In Vietnam it was called Vietnam-isation and it is called the same in Afghanistan—Afghan-isation.
Policy makers in the more realistic Washington think tanks and inside the State Department are already drawing up plans for whisking out key figures in the current set up as was done in those memorable helicopter lifts from Saigon as the axe fell.
The really hard nosed realists are even urging talks with the Taliban to “cut a deal” which would exclude Al Qaeida and probably lease some bases in the country to protect US regional gas and oil interests in exchange for a withdrawal.
Meanwhile in Brown’s Britain the relatives of the war dead are awarded the newly struck Elizabeth Cross medal, some from the sovereign’s hand, and the sombre ritual of the coffins driven through Wooton Basset goes on.
After 12 year in office which began as an era of “modernisation” the New Labour government drifts towards defeat amidst one of that oldest hallmarks of the British state—involvement in a bloody imperialist war
As for modernisation perhaps the latest medal ceremony in the war says it all.
Press report tell of the award of the Military Cross to Lieutenant James Adamson of the Royal Regiment of Scotland after he ran out of ammunition in Afghanistan and bayoneted a Taliban fighter to death.
The officer is quoted in one press account saayiing : “We caught each other's eye as I went towards him but then, for him, it was too late. There was no inner monologue going on in my head I was just reacting in the way I was trained."
"He was young, with dark hair. He only had kind of wispy hair on his chin, not a proper beard, so he wasn't that old, maybe a teenager."
Surely this scene of medieval savagery could serve as a epitaph for New Labour’s wars and the death, despair and destruction they have brought in their wake.
And even more it is surely an eloquent reason for why it is time for Scotland to break with bloodstained British state which makes itself the willing partner of the US in such horrors.