Obama plays God

When pro-establishment media start to be concerned about the excessive powers of the US president, it’s time for all of us to be on extra alert.

The scale of the drone warfare being escalated - by US General Petraeus and the Central Intelligence Agency on the borders of Afghanistan and Pakistan becomes clearer just as a strike killed another 15 people yesterday. Pakistani authorities have protested at this, the eighth and deadliest strike over the last two weeks.

That the US military uses sci-fi method of conducting its wars is not new, of course. We saw “smart bombs” being used in Iraq to wipe out enemy installations, and supposedly avoid “collateral damage”.

But the intensive use of unmanned drones to target supposed al-Qaeda leaders and militants only began in earnest after the election of President Barack Obama.  At that time, the US military and its security machine discovered that the tactics of ground invasion followed by military occupation, which brought down the Taliban in the 1990s, and Saddam Hussein in Iraq, simply did not work in post 9/11 Afghanistan.

And thus, under the Obama presidency, military policy has moved into a third phase seen by observers as  the “new and as yet only partially understood doctrine of secret, unaccountable and illegal warfare.”

An essential element is the use of drones, with more drone-operators now being trained than air-pilots. And why not? It’s the politician’s and general’s dream style way of making war. Your own forces are never put in harm’s way, while you can sit in a war-room and decide who the targets should be.

And there is a secret cabal consisting of Obama and his counterterrorism advisor John Brennan and the CIA who decide who shall live or die. on the borders of Afghanistan. Pakistan and Yemen. A New York Times editorial describes it as “a unilateral campaign of death”. The transformation of Obama – the former liberal law professor– into a man who “approves lethal action without handwringing” now seems complete.

Reporters Jo Becker and Scott Shane have shown how http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/29/world/obamas-leadership-in-war-on-al-qaeda.html?ref=opinion Obama’s aggressive counterterrorism has “baffled liberal supporters and confounded conservative critics alike”.  They provide an insight into how the Obama administration takes on god-like powers over life and death:  

“It is the strangest of bureaucratic rituals: Every week or so, more than 100 members of the government’s sprawling national security apparatus gather, by secure video teleconference, to pore over terrorist suspects’ biographies and recommend to the president who should be the next to die.

“This secret ‘nominations’ process is an invention of the Obama administration, a grim debating society that vets the PowerPoint slides bearing the names, aliases and life stories of suspected members of Al Qaeda’s branch in Yemen or its allies in Somalia’s Shabab militia.

“....The nominations go to the White House, where by his own insistence and guided by Mr. Brennan, Mr. Obama must approve any name. He signs off on every strike in Yemen and Somalia and also on the more complex and risky strikes in Pakistan — about a third of the total.

“Aides say Mr. Obama has several reasons for becoming so immersed in lethal counterterrorism operations. A student of writings on war by Augustine and Thomas Aquinas, he believes that he should take moral responsibility for such actions.”

The use of drones across national borders is rightly seen by many, including the Pakistani government, as not only violating its sovereign rights as a nation, but counter-productive. According to a recent poll, more than two thirds of Pakistanis regard the United States as an enemy. Senior military experts warn that the drone attacks create more extremists than they eliminate.  From “Infinite Justice” to “Enduring Freedom” – such a war can never win.  

But Obama’s efforts to gain the moral high ground in the “war on terrorism” shows that there is less and less to distinguish him from his opponents in the Republican Party.

Corinna Lotz

A World to Win secretary

Young men as killing machines

We’ve been here before. The killing of at least 16 Afghan civilians - nine of them children - in Kandahar province on Saturday night evokes memories of another atrocity committed by US troops some 44 years ago.

On 16 March 1968, 150 US soldiers in a unit called Charlie Company, led by 24 year-old Lieutenant William Calley, marched into a hamlet called My Lai in Vietnam and massacred 500 unarmed civilians.

Charlie Company’s murder binge was witnessed by US helicopter crew circling above who tried to stop the killings and rescue survivors. Calley was eventually brought to justice and found guilty of murder. But his life sentence was reduced to three years and he was paroled in 1974. He was pardoned by President Nixon.

Therefore the US authorities’ promise of “a rapid and thorough investigation” into the Kandahar killings must be taken with a huge pinch of salt – let alone the notion that serious punishment will follow.

US officials claim that only one soldier was involved, but several survivors have given conflicting accounts. Residents heard aircraft and helicopters were overhead after midnight on Sunday morning. And 20-year-old Jan Agha, who survived the murder spree by pretending to be dead, said that more than one soldier entered his home.

In February US troops burned copies of the Koran and in January videos of Marines urinating on the bodies of Taliban were circulated. Similar incidents are well-known from Iraq. So is this really the case of a demented rogue? The truth is that holding civilians in contempt and losing all sense of humanity is what happens to the young men trained to be killing machines in countries whose culture, religion and traditions are totally alien to them.

The mother of one of the 404 British soldiers killed in Afghanistan said she only realised this when visiting the country after her son’s death.

The US-British-NATO operations are being conducted by governments who have increasingly lost legitimacy in the eyes of their electorates. Everyone knows they have no solution to the economic and financial crises except to impose intolerable burdens on ordinary people.

It’s not by chance that the six young British soldiers killed in last week’s attack were from unemployment black spots in Yorkshire.

The claims in parliament by David Cameron and Ed Miliband that the British are in Afghanistan to keep the streets of London safe are risible. Al Qaeda is no longer a force in Afghanistan and the Taliban have no intention of coming to Britain any time soon. British troops are no more than cannon fodder for other interests which include protecting the oil pipelines that criss-cross the region.

Journalist and author Simon Jenkins is on the button when he denounces military and political leaders as having lost all contact with reality. Jenkins is hardly a revolutionary, but could be accused of giving solace to the enemy when he writes: “The war the Taliban fighters are waging with vigour and success is to regain the integrity of Afghanistan, no more or less”.

Eventually, seven years after the My Lai massacre, the United States had to pull out of Vietnam, having spent around $770 billion and killed and maimed countless Vietnamese as well as losing nearly 60,000 US troops. The decade-long conflict left a trail of long-term devastation in its wake.

It’s the same in Afghanistan. Service widow Wendy Rayner has noted that after the war in Afghanistan is over, "the poor people who are left will go back to the same crappy lifestyle that they had before our lot went in".

With the US and Britain now turning their attentions towards Iran, the challenge of ending Nato-led wars is an urgent one. That means facing up to the historical fact that war, profits and capitalism are tied in to each other. Ending atrocities like those visited on the people of Afghanistan at the weekend surely means terminating a social system for which war is an extension of its rotten politics.


Corinna Lotz
A World to Win secretary

Spare us the hypocrisy over Gaddafi

The brutal and sorry end of the Gaddafi era in Libya has brought the expected, sickening outpouring of faked concern in Washington, London and Paris for building democracy in that country and a rewriting of history to suit Nato. Spare us the hypocrisy.

Nato has now bombed the National Transitional Council (NTC) into power. Even yesterday, although Gaddafi was reduced to a handful of supporters in Sirte, French warplanes attacked isolated vehicles trying to flee the area, in clear breach of the UN resolution limited to “protecting civilians”.

The strategic aim was not just access to oil, which Western powers have always had, but to corral the uprising against Gaddafi’s dictatorship and to gain a new foothold in the region in the wake of the Egyptian revolution.

The lynch-mob manner of Gaddafi’s death after his capture, the plans for a secret burial, show that the NTC regime has a great deal to hide, that it scorns any rule of law and has no intentions of ruling in a democratic way.

Gaddafi’s attempt at holding on to power after the uprising began in Benghazi, and the undoubted corruption of his extended family, coupled with authoritarian rule in recent decades, led to his downfall.

But for the West to crow about the end of a dictatorship stretching back to when he came to power in 1969 is nonsense. In the early period, oil revenue was directed towards education, healthcare and housing. Per capita income rose seven fold to one of the highest in Africa.

His regime became a target for the West because of his support for liberation struggles by Palestinians, Irish republicans and Saharan Africans. Tripoli was bombed by the US in 1986, killing one of his children. Gaddafi fought hard to implement the ideals of Pan-Arabism championed by Gamal Abdel Nasser in Egypt.

With his concept of Jamahiriya – “state of the masses” or “republic of the masses”, he sought to foster a direct democracy in which the people would rule through local councils and communes.

Political and economic pressure on Libya increased after the downing of the Pan-Am flight over Lockerbie in December 1988 for which Libya was framed. Libya’s political and economic isolation produced a reactionary political turn.

The 1990s saw increased inequalities and loss of political freedom for ordinary Libyans. A nepotistic dynastic elite grew up in which the rich enjoyed freedoms denied to ordinary Libyans. Rights for opponents became non-existent, with political prisoners being shot down at the Abu Salim jail in 1996.

The sight of Gaddafi making deals over oil and immigration with oil-hungry authoritarians like Blair and Italian leader Berlusconi was particularly shocking. Gaddafi almost certainly became clinically depressed at the failure of his political aims and fell into the arms of world leaders who endorsed him until the uprising earlier this year.

If Gaddafi deserved his summary execution, as some say, where does that leave war criminals like Blair and Bush, whose 2003 invasion of Iraq was unlawful and resulted in hundreds of thousands of deaths, and Obama, whose administration uses drones to kill people illegally in Pakistan, and other Nato leaders, including Cameron, who conduct a murderous war in Afghanistan?

TNC leaders are not exactly the rabid pro-Western alliance Nato dreamt would emerge, containing discredited regime defectors, monarchists, militant Islamists and not a few opportunists. That's the new government of Libya. The people are going to have to overthrow them if they are to achieve any benefit from their revolution.

Now the struggle for democratic and human rights in the Middle East and North Africa merges with a global crisis of capitalism. The new Arab revolution has only just started and it will have to go beyond fair and free elections to find solutions to the pressing problems of soaring food prices, mass unemployment, poverty and inequality.

A World to Win editors

'A blank cheque for America's war state'

Ceremonies that will mark Sunday’s 10th anniversary of the 9/11 terror attacks cannot disguise the fact that the dead have been cruelly misused to justify building a militarised, surveillance state that is a greater threat to Americans than Al-Qaeda will ever be.

The so-called war on terror long ago turned into a war on the American people in terms of their rights and liberties subsumed by a secret state apparatus that registers every cough and sneeze right across the nation.

As the writer Tom Engelhard, whose forthcoming book is aptly named the United States of Fear puts it, September 11 “turned out to be a blank check for the American war state, funding an endless trip to hell”.

In the decade since the attacks, America’s economy may have gone into steep decline – there are now 10 million out of work and a “national crisis” according to President Obama – but one area of spending has boomed and remains immune from any cuts.

Defence spending has doubled since 2001 to over $700 billion a year while “homeland security” employs over 300,000 people and accounts for up to another $300 billion, making it a cool trillion altogether.

Earlier this year, construction started on the National Security Agency’s first data centre, in the desert 25 miles from Salt Lake City. Another one is being built in San Antonio, Texas. The massive facility is designed to capture trillions of emails, web searches and commercial transactions intercepted by the agency.

The state was given extensive powers under the Patriot Act that was introduced by the Bush administration. Interpretation of the clauses allowing the FBI to compel banks, doctors and business to hand over information is remains classified information.

Ron Wyden, a Democrat member of the Senate intelligence committee, admitted that the public would be “shocked” if they knew what the government was able to gain access to. Obama recently extended the legislation until 2015, also continuing the policies of “rendition”, assassination by drones and keeping Guantanamo prison camp open.

A secret intelligence network is now reckoned to constitute a fourth arm of government, with over 1,200 government agencies and almost 2,000 private companies in more than 10,000 locations across the country. Its annual budget is an estimated $80 billion. There are an astonishing 845,000 people with top secret clearance.

Bush and his ultra supporters in the Project for a New American Century took their war state into Afghanistan and Iraq in the arrogant belief that they could remake these countries in their own image. A decade and hundreds of thousands of dead later, Afghanistan remains unconquered and Iraq leans towards Tehran rather than Washington. Project for a new American Nightmare more like it.

Add in the global financial and economic crisis that has left America reeling, and the Financial Times, in its assessment of 9/11 can write about the end of US hegemony, noting:

“Thanks to cheap labour costs, China exported deflation to the rest of the world. China financed the US current account deficit by recycling its own surplus into US Treasury bonds. Now, three years into the financial crisis, the world economy has been turned upside down. The US is diminished, Europe sidelined, and Asia, for now, in the ascendant.”

The revolutionary Arab Spring that has topped stooge regimes – without the help of Al Qaeda – has also helped to diminish the power of the American ruling elites. The only reachable target seems to be the American people themselves, being made to suffer the consequences of the capitalist economic and financial catastrophe.

With the government’s ability to revive growth equally diminished by political deadlock, the monster that is the US surveillance state will more and more be turned against those who resist in defence of their jobs, benefits and communities. Endless ceremonies to mark September 11 won’t cut the mustard. As Abraham Lincoln famously remarked: “You can fool all the people some of the time, and some of the people all the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time."

Paul Feldman

Communications editor

The disaster that is the 'war on drugs'

When the outgoing president of the Royal College of Physicians (RCP), Sir Ian Gilmore, calls for an end to the state’s prohibition of drug use, acknowledging that the policy has failed abysmally, you can guess what the official reaction will be.

So no prizes for those who thought that a spokesperson for the Home Office would say: "Drugs such as heroin, cocaine and cannabis are extremely harmful and can cause misery to communities across the country. The government does not believe that decriminalisation is the right approach.” That’s been the line for 40 years since doctors were banned from prescribing heroin to patients under laws passed by the Labour government of 1966-70.

Farewell emails are more often than not best forgotten. But Sir Ian’s missive to the 25,000 members of the august RCP certainly wasn’t. He told them: “I personally back the chairman of the UK Bar Council, Nicholas Green QC, when he calls for drug laws to be reconsidered with a view to decriminalising illicit drugs use. This could drastically reduce crime and improve health."

He endorsed a recent article in the British Medical Journal by Stephen Rolles, from the think tank Transform Drug Policy Foundation. This demonstrated in a comprehensive and conclusive way that the policy of prohibition had harmed public health, encouraged organised crime and fuelled corruption. It’s a conclusion reached by many official reports, including one by the Police Foundation as long ago as 1999.

And as last night’s Channel 4’s brilliant, eye-opening documentary, Birth of a narco-state, by Angus Macqueen, revealed, prohibition carried into foreign policy by the US and Britain has had a disastrous effect on Afghanistan. Attempts to prevent poor farmers growing poppies has helped create a state dominated by the drugs mafia at the very highest levels. Naturally, the Taleban also uses heroin smuggling to fund its cause. As a result, half of Afghanistan’s gross domestic product is from the drugs trade and bribery of state officials. About 90% of heroin on Britain’s streets is Afghan, smuggled into the country through Iran and Turkey.

Globalisation has created an international, large-scale business in drugs, which operates like any other industry. The market is highly competitive, which ensures that prices remain low and within reach of most sections in society. Between a third and a half of theft and burglary is estimated to be drug-related. The illegal drug market is estimated to be worth between £4bn and £6.6bn a year. As a report by the Royal Society of Arts acknowledged: “There is no reason to think that the illegal drugs business and its accompanying market can simply be closed down. Certainly all efforts so far to close them down have been dismal and often expensive failures.”

The sharp rise in the use of drugs in society is undoubtedly connected to increased levels of alienation produced by the intense, consumer-oriented society. The market economy depends to a greater extent on low-wage, flexible labour and destroys more skilled jobs than it creates. Many working-class communities are deprived of job opportunities that are both sustainable and meaningful. These deep structural inequalities are, of course, insoluble as far as capitalism is concerned.

In his BMJ article, Rolles calls for regulation in place of prohibition and says it would be far cheaper than the ever increasing resources currently directed into efforts to control supply. But a huge state apparatus has grown up around the “war on drugs”, both domestic and military. Its perpetuation serves to sustain a draconian control over sections of society, especially young people, to the point where it has become self-justifying. Getting off the drugs merry-go-round and abandoning prohibition, will require a real dose of democracy that takes us beyond the present state of affairs.

Paul Feldman
AWTW communications editor

Petraeus deepens Obama's problems

Only a month after taking charge of US troops in Afghanistan, General David Petraeus, commander of US and NATO forces, has openly challenged President Obama. Coming amidst increasing political turmoil, it is a dangerous moment for his presidency.

In an NBC television interview, Petraeus said that Obama’s 2011 target date for withdrawal was dependent on conditions permitting. The general’s open defiance comes as the US occupation is suffering its the highest level of casualties since it invaded Afghanistan in 2001.

But it is not only the Afghan people and the US troops killed on the battlefield or on the roads of Afghanistan who are bearing the brunt of the war. When combat troops return home, increasing numbers cannot cope with the psychological after-effects of seeing the carnage inflicted not only by the Taliban but by their own side.

In descriptions of mental trauma reminiscent of the long-term effects on US veterans from the Vietnam war, Time reporter Mark Thompson says that the US army faces a “third front” – trying to rescue its own soldiers from insanity. Soldiers are seeking mental health support more than 100,000 times a month.

One in every 10 soldiers who has completed a single combat deployment has a mental ailment, Thompson has found. The rate rises each time a soldier is redeployed. “More than 500,000 troops have returned home to the US in the last decade with a mental illness,” Thompson estimates.

The result is that suicide rates in the army have been rising. Despite a $7 million expenditure on hi-tech facilities like Fort Campbell, near Nashville, Kentucky, home to the 101st Airborne Division, suicides there have continued to rise.

Not only do they suffer mental breakdowns, but soldiers - and even more significantly – their carers, have turned their weapons on themselves and their superiors. Last November, after a killing spree at the Fort Hood military facility in Texas, Army psychiatrist Major Nidal Hasan was accused of killing 13 people. Hasan, who received medals for service in the Gulf war, had specialist training in the treating traumatic stress at the US armed forces University of the Health Sciences.

But the physical and psychological fall-out amongst his troops, will not deter Petraeus who shows typical disdain for the poor bloody infantry who do the dirty work, and pay the price, while the generals screw up on a consistent basis. Speaking in his Kabul headquarters, he said that he would resist any large-scale or rapid withdrawal of American forces.

Petraeus let the cat out of the bag about the real reason for the continuing US-UK occupation of Afghanistan. He said the country had the potential to become a "new Silk Road", a crossroads for trade, especially in minerals: "Afghanistan is blessed with the presence of what are... trillions of dollars' worth of minerals”.

Behind Petraeus stands the military-industrial complex – the US and global corporations anxious to exploit the lithium and oil resources. The oil corporations’ appetites will have been whetted by an announcement by the Karzai regime that a survey has found a rich new oil field in the north of the country.

The military top brass are deepening the crisis for Obama, whose approval ratings continue to slide. In advance of the November mid-term elections, around half the country disapproves strongly of the government.

Obama appointed Petraeus after sacking Commander General Stanley McChrystal in June. This was after McChrystal had openly attacked the administration in an interview published by Rolling Stone magazine. To have one general defy your government may be regarded as a misfortune; but to have two in quick succession ready to counter the commander-in-chief in public looks like carelessness.

To have all this happen while the US economy continues to tank and a series of rabid right-wingers in and around the notorious Tea Party challenge the authority of the state itself, might be considered to be a dangerous cocktail.

Corinna Lotz
A World to Win secretary

US and Pakistan military - a deadly embrace

Pakistan President Asif Ali Zardari’s current visit to Britain must be one of the most unfortunate ever by a head of state. He has rightly come under fire for lavish junketing while millions of his people are suffering from the worst floods for nearly a century.

In addition, Zardari’s meeting with Cameron behind closed doors this Friday is bedevilled by the Prime Minister’s remark that Pakistan should not be “allowed to look both ways” or be permitted to “promote the export of terror”. Cameron, who remains unrepentant, has himself been attacked by Tory grandee Lord Tebbit who has accused him of running “a sloppy, slap-happy government” a propos these remarks.

Just another spat between the old and new Tories? No, this runs far deeper. Cameron in fact provided a glimpse into the deadly embrace that is the reality of Pakistan’s relationship with the United States and Britain.

The heated exchanges between Cameron and Zardari come hot on the heels of the WikiLeaks Afghan War Diary affair. The 91,000 reports from US military units in the field, embassies, intelligence officers and informers have been denounced as fabrications by Hamid Gul, former chief of Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) agency.

An astonishing investigation by veteran reporter Christina Lamb in last weekend’s Sunday Times provides chapter and verse about the real nature of this sinister body. Lamb, who was twice expelled from Pakistan after pre-dawn raids on her, first in on her flat in Islamabad and later in Quetta, explains how and why Pakistan’s military intelligence has become the ultimate sorcerer’s apprentice and the ultimate nightmare for both the US and Britain.

As Lamb points out, the WikiLeaks documents show that “Pakistan has been accepting billions in US aid while ISI, its military intelligence service, had been arming and sheltering members of the Taliban. The man who headed ISI during the height of this activity was none other than Kayani.”

Kayani is none other than General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, Pakistan’s army chief, who, Lamb says, is the “real power in the country”. She was present on Kayani’s C17 executive jet when he met with Admiral Mike Mullen, chairman of the US joint chiefs of staff, just as the WikiLeaks Afghan war diary affair broke.

Mullen used the opportunity to denounce WikiLeaks. He tweeted from the aircraft: “Appalled by classified docs leak to WikliLeaks and decision to post. It changes nothing on Afghanistan strategy or our relationship w/Pakistan.”

It was, Lamb writes, Mullen’s 19th visit to Pakistan since 2007. The complexity of US-Pakistan relations goes back to the 1980s when the CIA provided billions of dollars of aid to the Afghan resistance movement fighting the Soviet army of occupation. These funds were channeled through the ISI, often to the anger of the mujaheddin fighters, many of whom who paid the ultimate price for the double-dealing ISI.

But the ISI’s activities were not confined to Afghanistan. They also targeted politicians, especially secular ones like former Prime Minister and opposition leader Benazir Bhutto. An official UN investigation into the Bhutto’s December 2007 assassination accuses the ISI of having an agent in the operating room where doctors tried to revive her. There is a body of evidence suggesting that the agency was responsible for terror bombings in Kabul and the Mumbai massacre during 2008.
Hundreds of thousands of people in the flood-stricken areas of Pakistan are dismayed by the lack of concern and help from their government. Reporters on the ground say that while the state has failed to act, Islamist organisations of all kinds, including Jamaat-ud-Dawa which is thought to be a front for Lashkar-e-Taiba, the group blamed for the 2008 assault on Mumbai, have stepped into the breach.
But while Washington’s support for Pakistan’s military - £11 billion since 2001 – continues to provide succour to the very forces that are killing US troops, the US and NATO cannot withdraw their support. They view the collapse of Pakistan as a worse option than an out-of-control Afghanistan. No wonder that Cameron and Zardari will be meeting behind closed doors!

Corinna Lotz
A World to Win secretary

Losing 'hearts and minds' in Afghanistan

If there was ever a discredited phrase surely it’s “winning the hearts and minds of the people”. Used by the Americans in Vietnam and more recently Iraq, it is now on the lips of every commander and politician involved in the latest phase of the debacle in Afghanistan.

Yesterday, after reports that 20 villagers were killed by misguided missiles, no less a person than Bob Ainsworth, the gruff, tough-speaking New Labour defence secretary, uttered the same immortal words that have served as a cover for naked aggression down the ages, saying: "The most important phase of the operations begins now - winning over the hearts and minds of the people ... That's the hard bit…"

Actually, the hard bit is listening to Ainsworth, who personifies the New Labour New Imperialist government, set on remaking the world in their image, overthrowing regimes they don’t like and propping up corrupt governments like the Karzai presidency in Afghanistan if they serve a political purpose.

In 1965, President Johnson gave the phrase its first modern outing, when he declared that "ultimate victory [in Vietnam] will depend upon the hearts and the minds" of the Vietnamese. The US Agency for International Development (USAID) poured billions of dollars into the country in a bid to win over the local population to the American way of life.

The military were having none of it, however. A brutal campaign of “pacification” – epitomised by the My Lai massacre in 1968 when the population of an entire village was slaughtered by US troops – ensured that the support for the National Liberation Front of South Vietnam remained solid. A dramatic documentary by Peter Davis made in 1974 shows what winning “hearts and minds” was about in practice. A year later American troops left Vietnam, defeated.

In Iraq, in November 2004, Fallujah was reduced to rubble by US troops, who used white phosphorous bombs. The execution of a wounded Iraqi was caught on video tape. Before the massacre, a squad leader with 1st Platoon, Company E, 2nd Battalion, 1st Marine Regiment, vowed: “We will win the hearts and minds of Fallujah by ridding the city of insurgents. We're doing that by patrolling the streets and killing the enemy." An Italian documentary made a year later exposed what happened.

Winning “hearts and minds” is in practice an impossibility. The phrase has the stench of a colonial mentality running right through it. When the strategy falters, as it inevitably does, the frustrations of the military come out and the shooting starts all over again. The Afghan people have been “visited” by foreign armies since time immemorial – and rightly resisted them all.

British and American troops come under attack by the Taliban simply because they are the latest in a long line of occupying forces. The killing of Afghans only reinforces this perception inside the country The deaths of US and British troops are pointless because ultimately the soldiers are serving political masters whose imperial mentality prevents any lasting solution.

Only a different kind of government and democratic political system in countries like Britain and America, one that is cleansed of all this “hearts and minds” rubbish, can even contemplate offering the Afghan people the resources and support they want in their legitimate quest for self-determination.

Paul Feldman
Communications editor

It's no wonder we're sceptical about politicians

Under the radar, like a stealth bomber, Armed Forces minister Bill Rammell dropped some “friendly fire designed to stimulate debate” in a recent speech, telling his audience that the public had lost its stomach for war and was much too cynical and this was not a good thing. One reason, Rammell claims, is that “Britain's own security would be at greater risk if we again allow Afghanistan to become a safe haven for terrorists.”

Of our cynicism he gave three reasons. “The decline of deference and the growth in mistrust of those in authority”' second, the 24/7 media and third, a “freedom of information culture”. Whilst not in the top three, “the invasion of Iraq in 2003 has, in my view, had an impact on trust in government and authority and our decision making processes in general”.

Rammell told his Institute of Public Policy Research audience that, naturally, despite being a “liberal minded progressive” he remained convinced that “British participation” in the war in Iraq was right [as do Jack Straw, Alastair Campbell, Geoff Hoon, Tony Blair and Gordon Brown – despite the absence of cause and legality that even the Chilcott inquiry has brought out]

While he was happy with the media now over Afghanistan, saying that since last September they “had fallen into line”, his real beef was with us, saying: “The British public have a deep respect for our Armed Forces, but respect is not the same as understanding.”

He pointed out that “the enemy is responsible for shooting at our troops” and that “we (the government) are not responsible for planting them” (roadside bombs). Blimey, I hold my hands up, I didn't know. Or that with helicopters, “in counter-insurgency warfare, as we are undertaking in Afghanistan, you have to get out of the Chinooks and the Mastiffs, sometimes patrolling on foot and among the people.” Revelatory, I had no idea.

A lot of my knowledge comes from the internet, but thankfully Rammell is on-hand to point to the dangers of this source. He quotes journalist Nik Gowing’s claim that the new information age is a 'tyranny of real time and the tyranny of the time-line”. Whatever that means.

What I do know was that last September, half of the 25 injured Afghan veterans at Selly Oak refused to speak to prime minister Brown when he paid them a visit. To quote one soldier, “The straight fact is this: we don’t like the man, he has done nothing for us and continues to kick us in the teeth over equipment and compensation.” On the question of kit, Hoon told the Iraq Inquiry on January 19 that Brown had starved the forces of cash before the Iraq invasion.

Rammell's big fear is that “if healthy scepticism becomes replaced by blanket cynicism - if every apple is considered bad and the darkest motivations always attributed - then we risk damaging the bond of trust which underpins our democracy between the public, their political representatives and public servants.”

Risk damaging? Damaged. In Afghanistan, history tells us that for the last 200 years you can't win there. Politicians like Rammell tell us British troops have to be in Afghanistan to protect us from terrorism. But compared to alcohol-related deaths or heart disease, deaths from terrorism are way off the scale, almost non-existent in the UK. Instead of spending billions of taxpayers’ money on wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, why are we not spending it on more urgent things?

More generally, with the global financial crisis, banks bail out, forthcoming cuts in public services, Iraq and the MPs expenses scandal is it any wonder the British people are so cynical of their political representatives and public servants?

Dylan Strain

Obama delivers - but not for the people

A year ago, Barack Obama was inaugurated as the first African-American president of the United States on a promise that he would deliver “change you can believe in”, the slogan that together with his “yes we can” appeal, swept him into the White House. His supporters eagerly awaited actions that would transform America. How sorely disappointed many of them are today.

It is reflected in his poor approval ratings. Nearly half of all Americans say Obama is not delivering on his major campaign promises, and a narrow majority have just some or no confidence that he will make the right decisions for the country's future. Over a third see the president as falling short of their expectations, double the level registered in April.

Meanwhile, Democrats fear they could lose the normally safe Senate seat of Massachusetts today in an election to find a successor to the late Ted Kennedy. The liberal activist base seems to have given up the ghost in the wake of the failure to deliver on health care, Obama’s weak response to the economic crisis, his ramping up of the war in Afghanistan and the cop-out at Copenhagen.

On health care, the real winners are the powerful insurance companies. While 31 million Americans will now be entitled to cover, Obama was quick to abandon the public insurance option in search of a compromise in Congress. It wasn’t so much an example of “change we can believe in” but “the best we can hope for”.

With former Goldman Sachs executive Timothy Geithner installed as Treasury Secretary, the banks were never going to be made to pay for the financial crisis. The bail-outs begun under Bush continued at an accelerated rate under Obama and the big bonuses have returned, to the anger of many ordinary Americans. Now Obama says he wants the money back. He will have to whistle for it.

While Wall Street boomed, more in the year to October 2009, 2.8 homes were repossessed from people unable to pay their mortgages. More than one in six people in Florida are behind with payments. Although the official unemployment rate is 10%, when discouraged workers and part-time workers who would prefer full-time jobs are included, the so-called "underemployment" rate was over 17% in October 2009.

At Copenhagen, Obama arrived at the last minute and patched up a meaningless form of words with China and a few other counties. They basically agreed to do nothing. Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack participated in a panel where he reiterated White House support for biotech crops and agro-fuels as a "green" solution to climate change against all evidence to the contrary.

Obama’s nomination for the Nobel Peace prize was embarrassing to say the least. Peace? Not in the Middle East. Palestinian homes in East Jerusalem are razed to the ground on a daily basis by the Israelis and settlement building continues. Gaza remains blockaded. American financial support to Israel remains unchecked. No peace in Afghanistan either. Obama is a war president, sending another 30,000 troops to prop up the corrupt Karzai regime. In his Nobel acceptance speech, Obama talked of “just wars” to defend his actions.

The election of Obama was viewed by many as a last opportunity to breathe some life into the American political system, which is seen by many ordinary citizens as a plaything of lobbyists, bankers and corporations. A year later and the reality has hit home. For real, transformational change – not just to believe in but actually achieve – a new movement has to be built. It has to be independent of the capitalist state (which includes the Democratic Party) and seek to establish in practice the exercise of power by the people and for the people.


Paul Feldman
Communications editor

Obama the new 'war president'

Today is the moment of truth for the Obama presidency so far as prominent supporters like filmmaker Michael Moore are concerned. If, as expected, the president announces that America is sending another 30,000 troops to Afghanistan, he will burn his boats with many who campaigned on his behalf.

Obama has come under tremendous public pressure from the joint chiefs of staff to despatch tens of thousands of more soldiers and marines. The head of US forces in Afghanistan, Gen Stanley McChrystal, has ignored political protocol and gone public with his demands.

Tonight Obama will use the dramatic backdrop of the West Point military academy to accede to most of McChrystal’s demands. This, according to award-winning Moore, will make him the new "war president". In an open letter to the president, the creator of films like Bowling for Columbine and Fahrenheit 9/11 warns Obama:

“With just one speech … you will turn a multitude of young people who were the backbone of your campaign into disillusioned cynics. You will teach them what they've always heard is true – that all politicians are alike.”

Moore accuses Obama of “throwing bones” to the Republicans and warns that his corporate backers will abandon him “as soon as it is clear you are a one-term president and that the nation will be safely back in the hands of the usual idiots who do their bidding. That could be Wednesday morning.”

Moore’s anguish about the direction of the Obama presidency is heartfelt and reflects a growing disenchantment with a government that, while not as authoritarian as the Bush administration, defers to the same vested interests that always own and run America – whoever is in the White House: the banks, insurance companies and the “military-industrial complex”. This term was first coined by President Dwight Eisenhower, himself a former general. In his farewell address in 1961, he warned:

“In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defence with our peaceful methods and goals so that security and liberty may prosper together.”

Well, the subsequent wars in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan demonstrate who pulls the strings in America. Afghanistan alone has cost about $250 billion so far and Obama’s decision – in defiance of polls which show a clear majority against the war – will add another $35 billion a year – that’s about a million dollars a soldier.

While the unemployed from Chicago will die on a foreign field, others will reap the profits. Millions more will lose their jobs and homes as the recession turns to slump. Better to give the unemployed something to do, even if it is killing Afghans in the name of the neo-colonial aim of “nation building”.

Moore doesn’t say what Americans should do next when Obama – whose opposition to the Iraq war was a key reason for his 2008 victory – sells his soul to the generals. No surprise there. What we are perhaps witnessing is the death of liberal America, which has always pinned its hopes on the Democratic Party as an easy option to building an alternative to the two capitalist parties. The end of the cosy, partisan political system would be no bad thing if the opportunity is seized to build a movement that will truly transform American society and put an end to the military-industrial complex once and for all.

Paul Feldman
Communications editor

Vietnam returns to haunt US

Elections are alright if they produce the right results. When the Islamic-based Hamas wins in the Gaza Strip, that’s unacceptable and leads to an international boycott. When Hamid Karzai defrauds his way to the presidency of Afghanistan, world leaders from Obama to Brown line up to offer their congratulations.

Yet there is no disguising the fact that the Karzai government is corrupt from top to bottom, siphoning off international aid and demanding bribes for state contracts. In the first, discredited round of the presidential election, Karzai’s party bought so many votes that it became embarrassing.

Officials discovered ballot papers pre-marked with a vote for Karzai and polling stations where he won 100% of the registered vote! Soldiers from occupying Western armies died in trying ensure that the election could take place. They died in vain, because the second round has been abandoned. Challenger Abdullah Abdullah believed the fraud of the first round was about to be repeated and pulled out, leaving Karzai to be declared the winner!

No wonder Lance Corporal Joe Glento has refused to return to Afghanistan and faces a court martial in January as a result. He defied orders to speak at a recent anti-war rally and called for the withdrawal of British troops. Glenton says that when he returned to barracks, many soldiers supported his point of view. Some of this may be due to the cost-cutting measures that leave soldiers vulnerable to death by negligence rather than Taliban attacks, as the report last week into the crash of a Nimrod aircraft made clear.

In a letter to Brown earlier this year, Glenton wrote: “It is my primary concern that the courage and tenacity of my fellow soldiers has become a tool of American foreign policy. The war in Afghanistan is not reducing the terrorist risk, far from improving Afghan lives it is bringing death and devastation to their country. Britain has no business there.”

His is not the only dissenting voice within military circles. Matthew Hoh, a former senior officer who served in Iraq, quit a leading position in the State Department in Washington in protest against America’s involvement in Afghanistan. In his resignation letter, which has only just become public, Hoh says that he “fails to see the value or the worth in the continued US casualties or the expenditure of resources in support of the Afghan government in what is, truly, a 35-year-old civil war.”

Hoh added that the United States military presence in Afghanistan “greatly contributes to the legitimacy and strategic message of the Pashtun insurgency” and described Karzai’s confidants and chief advisers as drug lords and war crimes villains, “who mock our own rule of law and counternarcotics efforts”.

Hoh points out that Afghanistan has been the graveyard of many a military campaign, including the Soviet Union’s in the 1970s. Most worryingly for the Obama administration – which is contemplating sending tens of thousands more troops to the country – Hoh wrote that the situation in Afghanistan bore remarkable similarities to Vietnam, when America backed “an unpopular and corrupt government … against an insurgency whose nationalism we arrogantly and ignorantly mistook as a rival to our own Cold War ideology.”

Vietnam marked one stage of the decline of the American empire and the Afghan debacle – close on the heels of the disaster in Iraq – marks another. Vietnam broke the back of Democratic Party president Lyndon B Johnson and Afghanistan threatens to do the same for Obama’s administration.

Paul Feldman
Communications editor

Jobless youth turn to the army

You see them on trains in North Yorkshire, fresh-faced teenagers struggling with massive kit-bags. Only they are not off to play football or cricket. They are 16-year-olds attached to army training camps in the area, who in a year or two might end up dead or wounded in Afghanistan.

As youth unemployment has soared – almost a million young people are without work in this country – so has army recruitment, on both sides of the Atlantic. In Obama’s America, the armed forces have reached their target numbers for the first time since conscription ended in 1973. Wall Street may be booming but more than one in 10 on Main Street are unemployed and the army is seen as a “job”, providing an income and training.

In Britain, a highly sophisticated marketing campaign has seen numbers asking to join the army soar by 25% in a year despite the rising death toll in Afghanistan, stories about poor equipment and continuing reports about bullying at training schools. With few job openings for young men in particular, it is not hard to see why the promise of learning new skills and the lure of camaraderie should be a pull. So they sign up for 12 years and serve a minimum of four.

Out of the £95 million spent by the army recruiting group deployed in ten regions across Britain, over a quarter goes on marketing campaigns. And increasingly the money is lapped up by the private sector for putting together things like Internet-based packages targeted at young men who spend hours gaming online.

The army’s current recruitment platform was put together by the award-winning interactive marketing company AKQA — best know for its Nike ads as well as other campaigns. A TV and radio campaign drew people to the website when they could play an interactive game, Start Thinking Soldier. The aim was to get young people to return again and again. And it worked. The site received more than a million visits, collecting 250,000 profiles

Many web visitors were invited to a series of events around the country, including the Wakestock festival in Wales and a custom car show in Edinburgh. Once there, visitors could drive a virtual tank and run with full kit. Almost half of the 9,500 who took part opted to receive further information, which in marketing terms is considered exceptionally high.

The moral of this story is twofold. One is that the state never tires of having to develop its message. Sign up to die for Queen and Country has gone out of the window in favour of “introducing democracy” to countries and “nation building”. The result is the same, of course. The ruling classes play war games at the expense of the poor bloody infantry who die on a foreign field not really understanding what they were doing there in the first place.

The second side of this story is that young men will continue to die needlessly while there’s nothing meaningful for them to do at home because the capitalist society they live in can’t provide a job that’s worthwhile and well paid. But that’s ok, because the stock market is booming and house prices may be on the rise again.

Putting casino capitalism out of business could and should be “sold” in a way that appeals to young men every bit as much as the army’s web-based game does. Then instead of invading countries like Afghanistan, poorer nations could be offered support on a non-military, partnership basis. Now there’s a project worth marketing!

Paul Feldman
Communications editor

New Labour's about-turn on BNP

Targeting the BBC for its decision to invite the neo-fascist British National Party onto its Question Time programme is missing the point. The real volte face is on the part of New Labour, which has decided to abandon its long-standing policy of refusing to sit on a platform alongside the BNP.

Now the party is so desperate for votes that it is prepared to discuss with just about anyone. The only surprise is that it has taken New Labour so long to come round. The BBC knew New Labour’s decision in advance, otherwise it wouldn’t have extended the invitation to the BNP in the first place. Now, according to reports, New Labour will put up a “cabinet heavyweight” to confront the BNP, which will have the neo-fascists trembling in their jackboots.

Anyway, how is New Labour going to “confront” Nick Griffin when its own policies and pronouncements have played right into the hands of the BNP leader and his party? Attacks on “bogus” asylum seekers and refugees began almost as soon as New Labour was elected in 1997, lending credibility to the BNP’s racist policies. The demonisation of the Muslim community, reinforced by invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, have also encouraged the BNP.

Government policies that have widened inequality in society have enriched some sections at the expense of older, white working class communities whose votes New Labour had considered unwelcome and unnecessary. Local authorities where migrant workers were moved to have been denied the resources to build new homes and facilities, allowing the BNP to win seats on local councils and get two Euro MPs elected.

Now the capitalist economic crisis is bearing down most heavily on poorer workers who were encouraged to take out mortgages in the absence of decent, affordable social housing, as well as young people. The BNP is taking advantage of Gordon Brown’s “British Jobs for British Workers” remarks to win support (meanwhile the trade union leaders are encouraging actions against foreign workers, which shows how incapable they are of fighting the BNP).

Having said that, it is mistaken to call for a ban on the BNP appearing on Question Time. To do so would promote the notion that capitalist institutions – and the BBC is a key part of the state – somehow have a role to play in the fight against neo-fascism. They do not for the simple reason that the reappearance of a fascist movement is not something separate from capitalism but an expression of the degeneration of the system itself, especially its democratic aspects.

The parliamentary expenses scandal earlier this year served to highlight a deeper malaise at the heart of the state political system. It now openly serves big business and the banks and the voice of ordinary people counts for little in so far as the major capitalist parties like New Labour are concerned. Into this vacuum has stepped the BNP, posing as the champion of the ordinary (white) man.

Stopping the BNP, and the slide towards authoritarian rule as the economic crisis deepens, means challenging the capitalist state with a view to replacing it with more advanced forms of democratic rule that transfer political and economic power to the majority. You can be sure that no one is going to get an invitation to talk about those sorts of ideas on Question Time!

Paul Feldman
Communications editor

Not worth dying for

So Gordon Brown says that British soldiers are on a “vital mission” in Afghanistan. That mission would appear to be about dying for no good reason, leading some relatives of dead soldiers to accuse the government of “having blood on its hands”. They are right.

It’s election week in Afghanistan, and president Hamid Karzai is relying on the American and British occupiers to allow the polls to take place. But these “elections” are like no others you may recognise. Karzai has a unique way of building support. Take the Shia minority, for example.

A bill allowing a husband to starve his wife if she refuses to have sex has just become law. The law governs family life for Afghanistan's Shias. It allows a man to withhold food from his wife if she refuses his sexual demands; a woman must get her husband's permission to work; and fathers and grandfathers are given exclusive custody of children.

Definitely not worth dying for.

Or the return yesterday evening to Kabul of warlord Gen. Abdul Rashid Dostum from exile in Turkey in an apparent attempt by Karzai to attract ethnic Uzbek voters. Dostum was responsible for the deaths of up to 2,000 Taliban prisoners early in the Afghan war. Karzai has now reinstated him as chief of staff of the armed forces,

Dostum's forces placed Taliban prisoners in sealed cargo containers and drove them for two days to Sheberghan Prison, suffocating them then burying them en masse, according to an American State Department report. US special operations troops were working alongside Dostum's troops at the time.

Definitely not worth dying for.

As to the electoral process itself, it is widely believed (just like in Iran) that the electoral commission is in league with Karzai. Reports suggest that as many as three million out of the electorate of 17.5 million have been fraudulently registered.

Definitely not worth dying for.

Then there’s the corruption. Money earmarked for schools and construction projects is usually diverted into the pockets of Karzai’s supporters. David Kilcullen, an incoming advisor to Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the top US commander in Afghanistan, admits contractors collude to rig the bidding process and sometimes murder competitors.

Definitely not worth dying for.

As the number of British dead swept past the 200 mark over the weekend, the father of a serviceman killed in Afghanistan accused the government of “ignoring the blood on its hands”.

Graham Knight, whose 25-year-old son Ben was killed in a Nimrod explosion in 2006, said:
“My son died because of failures by the MoD and yet still we are hearing that their kit is not good enough out there now.” He added: “As far as I can tell, it [the government] is ignoring the blood on its hands.”

Anthony Philippson, whose son James, 29, died after trying to fight the Taliban without night-vision goggles, said all 200 deaths were “effectively pointless”. He said the entire conflict had been based on “falsehoods”.

He is right. The war in Afghanistan is nothing to do with making “Britain’s streets safer”, as Brown claims, but everything to do with delusions of imperial grandeur. The more-or-less bankrupt British state can’t even afford to equip its soldiers properly, or look after them when they are wounded.

The Brown government is refighting the Afghan wars of the 19th century, which were part of the struggle with Russia for control of the region. The first Anglo-Afghan War of 1839-1842 ended with the destruction of the entire force of 20,000 British and Indian soldiers and the Afghans have hated foreign occupiers ever since.

Today, British soldiers are dying for the honour of New Labour and the corrupt Afghan government. It is a price not worth paying.

Paul Feldman
Communications editor

Poor bloody infantry pays the price

New Labour lied about the reasons for invading Iraq and now they are doing the same about the purpose of the continued occupation of Afghanistan. In fact, ministers have the blood of the young British soldiers on their hands. They are the sacrificial lambs of a failing neo-colonial policy which messages of condolence cannot conceal.

Prime minister Brown and the rest of the talking parrots in the cabinet are deceiving everyone, including the families of the bereaved, when they claim that the soldiers, some as young as 18, are dying on the front line in Afghanistan so that British citizens can walk the streets safely.

This is simply a repeat of the failed mantra of the “war on terror” that New Labour signed up to under George W. Bush’s presidency (which was extended to justify the illegal invasion of Iraq). Obama’s White House has simply dusted down the doctrine and given it a “human face” with talk of “nation building” and minimising civilian deaths in place of torture and random air strikes.

In any case, the idea that fighting the Taliban makes British citizens safer from terror attacks is clearly delusional. It conjures up a 19th century vision of uncivilised and ungrateful Afghans heading for Britain armed to the teeth in search of revenge. As for defeating the Taliban to thwart Al-Qaeda, they are by common consent in Pakistan not Afghanistan and their reach is global rather than national.

The only significant terror attack in Britain, in July 2005, was carried out by British-born Muslims angered by US and British support for Israel’s war on the Palestinians while they invaded Iraq. Significantly, a recent survey for the BBC found that 76% of young Muslims in Britain thought that Britain and the US were wrong to intervene in Afghanistan, while only 25% “fully understood the reasons” for the occupation. You can draw your own conclusions about the implications of this finding if the occupation is allowed to continue.

Rory Stewart, who has been a soldier, diplomat and academic and has travelled extensively in Afghanistan and Iraq, has exposed the government’s policy of building a “stable Afghanistan” as a nonsense when he wrote recently:

Obama and Brown rely on a hypnotising language that can – and perhaps will – be applied as easily to Somalia or Yemen as Afghanistan. It misleads us in several respects: minimising differences between cultures, exaggerating our fears, aggrandising our ambitions, inflating a sense of moral obligations and power, and confusing our goals. All these attitudes are aspects of a single worldview and create an almost irresistible illusion.
It conjures nightmares of "failed states" and "global extremism", offers the remedies of "state-building" and "counter-insurgency", and promises a final dream of "legitimate, accountable governance". It papers over the weakness of the international community: our lack of knowledge, power and legitimacy. It conceals the conflicts between our interests: between giving aid to Afghans and killing terrorists. It assumes that Afghanistan is predictable. It makes our policy seem a moral obligation, makes failure unacceptable, and alternatives inconceivable. It does this so well that a more moderate, minimalist approach becomes almost impossible to articulate.

As always, the poor bloody infantry, or the PBI as British foot soldiers have referred to themselves down the ages as they suffered under incompetent leadership and failed strategies, are paying the price for the Afghan military adventure. Evidence is mounting that New Labour is not even prepared to spend the money to protect and equip the PBI adequately in a war that produces nothing but misery for ordinary people in both countries. Perhaps Brown and company ought to be sent to Afghanistan to try their hand at “nation-building” themselves following their great successes in Britain.

Paul Feldman
Communications editor

Afghan 'Crusaders' claim more lives

The election of Barack Obama has definitely made a difference to the lives of the people of Afghanistan – his administration will offer a public apology and an inquiry when dozens of civilians are indiscriminately killed by American warplanes. And that’s it.

Apart from sanctimonious words from Hillary Clinton, the US secretary of state, there is no essential difference from the policies pursued by George W. Bush. The spurious “war on terror” continues, with over 60,000 foreign troops in occupation of Afghanistan. Obama is rushing another 30,000 American soldiers to the country shortly.

Rohul Amin, governor of Western Farah province where the bombing took place during a battle on Monday and Tuesday, said he feared 100 civilians had been killed. Others said the death toll could be even higher. If confirmed, it could make the incident the single deadliest for Afghan civilians since the US invasion in 2001.

Jessica Barry, spokeswoman for the International Committee of the Red Cross, also sent a team which reached the scene of the air strikes yesterday. "There were women and there were children who were killed. It seemed they were trying to shelter in houses when they were hit," she said. The team saw houses destroyed and dozens of bodies. Barry said that among those killed was a first aid volunteer for Afghanistan's Red Crescent, who died along with 13 members of his family.

As for inquiries, they are ten a penny when it comes to atrocities like these, in Afghanistan, Iraq or even Occupied Palestine. The Israelis hold them into the brutal actions of their soldiers. The United Nations holds inquiries into Israeli war crimes in Gaza – and, of course, nothing happens, apart from the fact that the Israeli government rejects the findings out of hand. The killing goes on.

The Israelis will say that Palestinian civilians were used as human shields, as if this justified the use of banned phosphorous bombs and shooting civilians out of hand; the Americans will say that the Taleban were definitely in the vicinity when their brave pilots launched the air strikes. And the killing will go on.

And if civilians evade the bombs in Afghanistan, there is always a chance that latter-day Crusaders, aka the US army, will tell you that Islam is bad and that Christianity is good. Al Jazeera has broadcast a video showing US soldiers being instructed by the military’s top chaplain to “hunt people for Jesus” as they spread Christianity to the overwhelmingly Muslim population.

The footage was shot by Brian Hughes, a documentary maker and former fighter pilot. In his report for Al Jazeera, Hughes revealed that soldiers had imported bibles translated into Pashto and Dari, Afghan languages. After the Pentagon disputed his account, he retorted: “[U.S. soldiers] weren’t talking about learning how to speak Dari or Pashto, by reading the Bible and using that as the tool for language lessons.” Hughes told Al Jazeera: “The only reason they would have these documents there was to distribute them to the Afghan people. And I knew it was wrong, and I knew that filming it … documenting it would be important.”

Today, Afghans staged an angry protest in the town of Farah, the provincial capital of the province where the bombing took place. They threw stones. Protesters were reportedly injured after shots were fired. The killing will go on.

Paul Feldman
AWTW communications editor

Afghanistan: Brown in Bush's pocket

The love-in between George W. Bush and Gordon Brown in Downing Street yesterday could not disguise the fact that events in Afghanistan are spiralling out of control. Brown’s decision to send more British soldiers to Afghanistan (while yielding to Bush over maintaining troop levels in Iraq) is a real sign that the occupying forces are losing it.

President Hamid Karzai has threatened to take the fight against the Taliban beyond his country’s borders into Pakistan. Karzai’s sable-rattling outburst is not surprising. His always shaky control over his country has been dramatically challenged yet again. Since the weekend, Kandahar, Afghanistan’s second city, has been in a state of emergency following a highly successful jailbreak operation carried out by the Taliban. All 1,200 inmates were freed, including around 400 Taliban members. So powerful was the attack that nearby NATO troops took cover in their base and arrived too late to prevent any escapes.

In the last couple of days, the Taliban have taken over many villages near Kandahar. Yet only last week, the British commander of Helmand Task Force, Brigadier Mark Carleton-Smith announced that the Taliban insurgency had been beaten back and that its local leadership had been “decapitated”. Does he still believe that?

The truth is that neither continued reinforcements bringing NATO troop levels up to 53,000, nor shocking brutality against prisoners and fighters have advanced the fight against the Taliban and against the presumed presence of Al Qaeda fighters one iota. In fact, with 102 killed since 2001, British causalities are rising rapidly and US forces are sustaining increasingly heavy losses, with more Americans killed in Afghanistan last month than in Iraq.

Some optimists may be harbouring the illusion that with such reverses for NATO forces and with the Bush era drawing to a close, Brown and the next US president will re-think their options and withdraw from Afghanistan. But don’t hold your breath. Congress has voted $165 billion more funds for wars in Iraq and Afghanistan while John McCain, the Republican presidential candidate, still believes that US forces are “on a path to victory”.

And Barack Obama’s view of the so-called war against terror differs little from that of Bush. Last August he proclaimed: “We will not repeat the mistake of the past, when we turned our back on Afghanistan following Soviet withdrawal. As 9/11 showed us, the security of Afghanistan and America is shared. And today, that security is most threatened by the al Qaeda and Taliban sanctuary in the tribal regions of northwest Pakistan … It's a tough place. But that is no excuse. There must be no safe-haven for terrorists who threaten America. We cannot fail to act because action is hard.”

And, don’t forget Obama’s thinly-veiled threat to Pakistan’s sovereignty: ”I understand that President Musharraf has his own challenges. But let me make this clear. There are terrorists holed up in those mountains who murdered 3,000 Americans. They are plotting to strike again. It was a terrible mistake to fail to act when we had a chance to take out an al Qaeda leadership meeting in 2005. If we have actionable intelligence about high-value terrorist targets and President Musharraf won't act, we will.”

The US and Britain are locked into destructive wars in Iraq and Afghanistan which have had the effect of dismembering both countries, plunging them into a worse state than before occupation. Soldiers are dying not in the cause of “freedom and democracy” or for the spurious “war on terror” but for strategic, big power political reasons. These are about access to precious resources like oil and reining in the ambitions of countries like Russia. This is the deadly course New Labour is locked into (with the support of the Tories). Ending these military adventures will require some fundamental political changes in both America and Britain.


Corinna Lotz
A World to Win secretary

Free Parvez Kambaksh!

A World to Win calls on its supporters to oppose the death sentence passed on a 23-year-old journalism student in Afghanistan for daring to read and distribute material from the Internet. The conviction of Sayed Pervez Kambaksh, passed and confirmed by Afghan Islamic courts and the Afghan Senate, has sparked a campaign by a revolutionary organisation, Left Radicals of Afghanistan, against the Karzai government and the country’s ruling Ulema Council.

On January 23, the Council of Religious Experts and the Provincial Council of the Mazar district as well as the country’s attorney general demanded the death sentence by stoning on the grounds of blasphemy. It accused the student of disgracing Islam, the Quran and Mohammad and breaking the constitution. Kambaksh’s “crime” was that he downloaded a report from a Farsi website and distributed it to his fellow students. The report said that the notion that the Koran justified the oppression of women was not in accordance with the prophet Mohammed’s views. In a radio interview, the district’s attorney general Hafizullah Khaliqyar said that Kambaksh “as an active Marxist who progandised his opinions to others”.

The death sentence was proposed by Sibghatullah Mojaddedi, who is close to President Karzai and is clearly an attempt to show that he is not a stooge of the NATO troops occupying the country and to curry favour with the reactionary clerics who control the Ulema as well as the Taliban. He recently denounced the British presence in Helmand.

Kambaksh is a journalist student who, like his brother Sayed Yaqub Ibrahimi, reported for the Jahan-I-Naw newspaper. Since being detained in the notorious National Security Department detention centre, Kambaksh has been tortured and denied access to lawyers and meetings with his family and friends. His trial was held in secret and he was not allowed a legal defence. The chief editor of Jahan-I-Naw, Qayoum Babak rejected the accusations of the attorney general, saying that reading documents and copying them from the Internet was not illegal. The Afghan Independent Journalists Association is also opposing the judgement and is asking Karzai to quash it.

But while people like Babak courageously oppose the government, the country’s new constitution legally underpins the persecution of those who seek alternatives to military occupation and the power of religious-inspired organisations like the Taliban. As Left Radicals of Afghanistan point out, the Karzai regime has a history of imprisoning and killing demonstrators and political oppositionists. Government bodies have sent letters to universities, schools and places of work warning them not to allow political activities.

Meanwhile, with the occupying NATO forces killing more Afghans than have died at the hands of the Taliban, the outlook is bleak. Seven years of occupation by US, British and other troops have deepened the internal divisions in the country, whilst causing untold suffering. A report by a leading Australian think tank concludes that any “democratic” [i.e. Western sponsored] government will still be disrupted by Taliban militants and others in 2023. “In 15-years time,” the Australian Strategic Policy Institute says, “Afghanistan is likely to be divided geographically.”

A World to Win supports Left Radicals of Afghanistan and other organisations’ call for the immediate release of Sayed Pervez Kambaksh. We demand the withdrawal of all occupying troops and campaign for a secular Afghanistan with equal rights for all faiths and genders and freedom of expression in all media.

Please send messages of support to lr_afg@yahoo.com.

Corinna Lotz
Secretary
A World to Win

The Afghan debacle

Gordon Brown claims that recent fighting at Musa Qala is a turning point in the six-year war against the Taleban in Afghanistan. The truth is that British and NATO operations in the country have been an unmitigated debacle and a suicide mission for many of the troops involved.

Even Brown’s allies in the “war against terror” - the justification for invading Afghanistan in the first place - don’t necessarily share the prime minister’s confidence. The Bush adminstration and NATO have just launched three major reviews of the entire Afghan mission, ranging from security and counter-terrorism to political and economic development. The New York Times says that the reviews are an admission that earlier successes in fighting the Taleban and Al Qaeda forces may have evaporated.

This has been the most violent year since the invasion of 2001. One senior NATO diplomat has admitted that “now we have significant issues with certain areas producing opium and the Taleban coming back in certain parts of the country, as well”. In addition, the allies are less than complimentary about each other: “The Germans, the Spanish, the Italians don’t send any troops to the south except for 250 troops by Germany,” said Representative Joe Sestak. A retired three-star admiral, Sestak complained that some allies “refuse to do combat ops at night and some don’t fly when the first snowflake falls”.

The balance sheet is as follows:
- a six year-occupation by NATO forces
- 40,000 troops, plus 12,000 other US troops conducting “counter- terrorism” operations
- illegal imprisonment of innocent people at Guantanamo
- billions spent on military operations
- £18 billions spent on NGOs
- high altitude bombing which has killed countless villagers
- a suicide mission in Helmand – dubbed “Hell-land” by British troops – with £1bn being spent on a new base there
- a resurgent Taleban roaming freely through most parts of the country outside Kabul.

And what has all this meant for the people of Afghanistan? Here is what Khaled Hosseini (author of The Kite Runner, which opens as a film next week) found when he returned to his hometown Kabul for the first time in 30 years. The capital, home to some three million people, is nothing less than a disaster area. The poverty and disarray in many areas was, in Hosseini’s words, “unspeakable”.

While visiting the grave of a popular Afghan singer, he was “mobbed again by burqa-clad women and barefoot children, their hair matted with dirt, faces oozing with sores, their teeth rotting already, begging for baksheesh [alms].” A Kabul policeman complained to him about the millions in aid given to the NGOs who spent it on fancy cards, offices and guesthouses.

Whilst the NATO occupation of Afghanistan cannot be blamed entirely for the destruction of what was once a beautiful country and capital city – the Soviet invasion and the Taleban are also responsible - it is certain that six years of occupation and war by mainly US and British forces have taken the country further down the road to hell.

So what exactly is the purpose of this mission, if it cannot succeed? As British forces withdraw from Basra, openly admitting to television cameras, that to remain in Iraq would only unite people against them, Brown badly needs to point to success in Afghanistan as his grip on the economy is seen to falter. It is a heavy price to pay for enhancing the tarnished image of a British Prime Minister.

Corinna Lotz
AWTW secretary