The Afghanistan page

At 1pm on Saturday 29th September at the Council House in the Market Square, Nottingham folks turned out to continue the call for troop withdrawals from Afghanistan and Iraq. To date, the total number of UK troops killed in operations in Iraq to 170 since the US-led invasion of 2003. Further, the numbers killed on operations in Afghanistan since 2001 now stands at 81, after two soldiers died in a road accident on 20 September.

According to the most recent statistics from the Ministry of Defence, 546 troops were admitted to field hospitals up to August 15. In the whole of last year the total was 240. In the first two weeks of August alone, 35 soldiers were injured – 14 per cent of the total figure for 2006.
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But the official injury figures are likely to be just a fraction of the real total, a Royal Marine has told the Daily Express.
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The Marine – who refused to be named for fear of repercussions – claimed that every transport plane returning from Afghanistan and Iraq was packed with injured personnel. He said that on their way to RAF Brize Norton or RAF Lyneham, they first touch down at East Midlands airport where fleets of ambulances are lined up to take the wounded to Selly Oak hospital in Birmingham. And he said that while troops are “hammering” the Taliban, there were unacceptable levels of casualties from the UK. “You only hear about the guys killed in action,” he added. “The figures for the seriously wounded are being massaged like crazy. Most of these guys have had limbs blown off, or their lower limbs shattered by anti-personnel weapons. “Their treatment and aftercare is dreadful.”

Enthusiasts for the catastrophe that is the Iraq war may be hard to come by these days, but Afghanistan is another matter. The invasion and occupation that opened George Bush's war on terror are still championed by powerful voices in the occupying states as - in the words of the New York Times this week - "the good war" that can still be won. While speculation intensifies about British withdrawal from Basra, there's no such talk about a retreat from Kabul or Kandahar.

But to understand why Afghanistan was and remains so important to US strategic interests is to understand the role it has played throughout its history in the global struggle for empire and hegemony waged by the great powers. This mystical land, occupying a strategic location along the ancient Silk Route between the Middle East, Central Asia and the Indian subcontinent, has been the subject of fierce rivalry between global empires since the 19th century, when the then British and Russian Empires vied for control of the lucrative spoils to be found in the subcontinent of India and in Central Asia in what came to be known as the 'Great Game.'

Fighting in Afghanistan has driven tens of thousands of people from their homes and the number of displaced is growing by the day, says a Swiss human rights expert.
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According to the UN, there are already around 129,000 IDPs who were displaced by drought and insecurity in 2000/2001 and who are still unable to return home. In addition there are now those that have been forced out of their homes by ongoing military operations in the south, southwest and central parts of the country. "Their number is estimated at up to 80,000 but nobody really knows because many of these areas are inaccessible both for the international community and the Afghan governmental authorities," said Kälin.

It is all very well to call our mission "long term", but what are its practical goals? Ministers talk vaguely of supporting the democratically elected Afghan government and providing security for the Afghan people. But the truth is that the Government has no plausible plan for achieving these objectives.

The Ministry of Defence confirmed that a serviceman from the 1st Battalion The Royal Anglian Regiment was killed on Saturday during an attack on a patrol base in Helmand province. His death brings to seven the number of British troops in Afghanistan killed in action or from wounds sustained in battle since July 12. This is compared with a monthly average of 0.7 since the conflict began in November 2001. All seven fatalities were members of a 1,500-strong frontline force primarily charged with fighting the Taleban. If the death toll continued at this rate, 42 battle-group personnel would be killed in the next six months and a frontline soldier embarking on a typical tour of duty in the country would stand a one in 36 chance of being killed.

To the British left, Afghanistan was always the "good" war and Iraq the "bad" one. It is permitted for ministers to assert that they were "privately opposed" to Iraq so long as Afghanistan is seen as a worthy cause. With Britain at its helm, Afghanistan would be all it was not under the Americans. It would make Britain look macho. It would revitalise the UN and Nato after perceived debacles in former Yugoslavia and it would fulfil Britain's historic role as nation-builder to the world.

British troops could remain in Afghanistan for more than the 38 years it took them to pull out of Northern Ireland. That is the bleak assessment by Army commanders on the ground in Helmand province. In an interview with The Observer at HQ in the provincial capital Lashkar Gah, Brigadier John Lorimer, commander of UK forces in Helmand, said: 'If you look at the insurgency then it could take maybe 10 years. Counter-narcotics, it's 30 years. If you're looking at governance and so on, it looks a little longer. If you look at other counter-insurgency operations over the last 100 years then it has taken time.'

Recently, however, in Afghanistan, such isolated incidents from U.S. or NATO (often still U.S.) air attacks have been occurring in startling numbers. They have, in fact, become so commonplace that, in the news, they begin to blur into what looks, more and more, like a single, ongoing airborne slaughter of civilians. Protest over the killings of noncombatants from the air, itself a modest story, is on the rise. Afghan President Hamid Karzai, dubbed "the mayor of Kabul," has bitterly and repeatedly complained about NATO and U.S. bombing policies.