We now face a turning point in this unwinnable war

By Jeremy Corbyn MP

Last Sunday at War memorials all over the country, ceremonies recalled the horror of the millions slain in the two world wars, and in other more recent conflicts. The events inevitably encourage discussion on the role of the military, the purposes of war and of those who pay the ultimate price.

As the news of further losses of British soldiers in Afghanistan came out in the instant news fashion we are now accustomed to, the debate inevitably turned to why British troops are there at all.

Remembrance Sunday news coverage variously focused on Gordon Brown’s handwriting, his abilities at bowing his head, and a series of statements by former military chiefs who choose to blame all the problems of the military on equipment and thus the Government. The same process is going on in the USA.

British deaths are rising rapidly and the BBC website takes up a full twenty three pages of pictures of all the young men who have died in Afghanistan since 2001. As the bodies come home and the families grieve and politicians and generals alike mouth platitudes about fighting for their country and making our streets safer, many think rather more deeply about it.

Opinion polls taken for Remembrance Sunday show that nearly two thirds of the people questioned do not support the war and want the British troops home. Perhaps more tellingly, about half do not understand what the war is for. Indeed the more questions that are put to successive defence ministers on the purpose of the troop deployment, the more vague are the answers.

This is now the ninth year that British troops have been in Afghanistan, longer than the two world wars, and longer than any other conflict of the twentieth century excepting Northern Ireland. The best estimate from any of the military is that on current strategy, they could leave in five years; some talk of thirty years.

In 2001 the World Trade Centre was attacked and collapsed, and over three thousand people died. George Bush and the US military decided that Afghanistan was the spiritual and military home of Al Qaeda, and after a perfunctory attempt to show a diplomatic effort which might enable the extradition of Osama Bin Laden, an attack on Afghanistan was launched.

Not surprisingly the Afghan army was quickly defeated and the country occupied. A coalition of war lords and pro-western loyalists formed a Government of sorts, millions of dollars were poured in for “reconstruction”, and the country was meant to become a Western democracy.

Clearly this whole strategy is a failure; thousands of wholly innocent Afghan people have died, drug production is at record levels, the warlords are in the government buildings and support for various groups of Taleban fighters is rapidly rising. The Western forces largely rely on air support to move around as the roads are too dangerous.

Karzai’s proclaimed re-election is a travesty of any democratic process, and the Western public are supposed to believe that there are successes in nation building.

The political problems of withdrawal are a smokescreen for the real purposes of being there.
The Bush doctrine of the Project for a New American Century used the Afghan military effort of 2001 to not only invade that country, but also to create a ring of bases and military capability all over central Asia; issues of oil pipelines to the sea and the huge untapped mineral potential of the country were, and remain, major considerations.

The argument about changing Afghanistan is clearly seriously flawed as the war has spread into Pakistan, and increasingly potential a civil war situation is developing there. The post colonial border has always been the subject of dispute; yet another legacy of Britain’s division of colonial India.

The legacy of the whole Afghanistan adventure is a combination of horror for the people, losses of young soldiers from the USA, Britain and other counties, and enormous damage to international law and civil rights.

Afghanistan brought us Bagram air base, extraordinary rendition, Guantanamo Bay and in the USA the dubious concept of “homeland security”; on this side of the Atlantic we now have the anti terror legislation that undermines the independence of the judiciary.

President Obama seems mired in a debate he cannot win. Having allowed General McChrystal to make public demands for 40,000 troops and envisaging a process of saturation coverage of the country, with embedding troops in every town and village, will surely gobble up thousands more. In Europe the opposition to the war is intensifying. In Britain our 9,000 troops are due to increase by another 500.

This is a turning point. If the McCrhystal formula is adopted, the losses will rise, the costs will rise, and the likelihood of an ever more humiliating withdrawal a few years down the line increases.
Vietnam cost the lives of millions of Vietnamese and 50,000 Americans. Afghanistan, more high technology on both sides, is an equally unwinnable conflict and an indication, as if one were needed, of the terrible to dangers to the whole planet of the thinking of the Bush administration in 2001.

This article was first published in the Morning Star.