Colin Fox and Rose Gentle speak at an SSP meeting
Afghanistan - how many more will die ?
by Colin Fox - 4th September 2009
ALL the news agencies bring us the same story this summer, repeated
day after day after day.
‘Another British soldier[s] has been killed in Afghanistan. The soldier belonging to [such and such] a regiment was killed by an Improvised Explosive Device 9IED) in Helmand province.
This brings the total number of troops
killed to 212.
The soldiers family has been informed.’
After the economic recession Afghanistan is the most arresting issue
in British politics now.
In the eight years since America led the invasion of Afghanistan ten
thousand innocent Afghan civilians have been killed, tens of millions
more now see 100,000 foreign troops occupying their country against their
wishes, and more British soldiers have now been killed there than died
in Iraq.
These three points are of course related.
The British casualties, a fraction of those suffered by the native population,
nonetheless monopolise media attention here and in turn heavily influence
public opinion.
The military death rate has boomed this summer as ‘Operation Panthers Claw’ began. Army chiefs knew that it would, they undertook this military mission under political instructions from Downing Street to provide August’s
Presidential elections with an electoral legitimacy.
The plan was to drive the Taliban out of Helmand and it prefigured high
levels of British fatalities. Driving the Taliban out of Helmand meant
British troops had to leave the relative safety of their heavily fortified
encampments and chase the Taliban through open countryside.
The Taliban chiefs had a field day.
Their main weapon is the improvised explosive device [IED] and this came
into its own inflicting high casualties.
The military high command inevitably claimed success for ‘Operation Panthers
Claw’ - when do they ever admit to failures?
But it was soon halted as the casualties mounted. No one, not even the
MOD, suggested the advance would be sustained, indeed it is expected
to be entirely negated as the Taliban win back every inch now that the
election is over and the British troops retreat to their encampments.
The Presidential election itself has been overshadowed by the high level
of contempt for the incumbent Hamad Karsai and his regime of gangsters,
drug dealers and tribal warlords.
Reports from Helmand suggest that in some areas only one in twenty bothered
to vote. So much for the ‘success’ of Operation Panthers Claw. Across
Afghanistan as a whole half those who voted in 2005 didn’t bother this
time.
The new British Army Chief of Staff of British General Sir David Richards has warned that the chances of victory any time soon are slim, indeed he has said ‘we (Britain and America) must resign ourselves to being in Afghanistan military for another 40 years.’
He was immediately rebuked for this remark by his political masters
in Downing Street but he is simply saying what
Gordon Brown daren’t say, that with tens of millions of Afghans now dedicated
to ridding their country of foreign armies of occupation this war is
likely to end as badly for Britain and America as it did for the Russians
and their 100,000 troops in the 1980’s.
In the meantime a majority of the British population want the troops
withdrawn. ‘We are sick to the back teeth of watching our 18 and 19 year
old laddies being blown to smithereeens in another senseless, pointless
war’ one serviceman’s mother told me on Princes Street last Saturday.
She speaks for 58 per cent of the population according to the lastest
polls.
Another mother told me angrily ‘Instead of us resigning ourselves to
another 40 years in Afghanistan its Gordon Brown who should be resigning
and bringing home the troops. We need to end this war.’
Scottish Socialist Party members in Edinburgh have been campaigning on
the issue for the last six weeks with considerable success.
Four young squaddies from the 2nd Rifles Regiment, mostly Geordies, came up to us last month, signed the petition and explained that they are about to begin a six month tour of duty in Helmand and they do not see the point of it nor support its purposes.