Dying for democracy by Bill Baillie

 

Politicians of all parties support the Afghan war and accept the slaughter of British and allied soldiers. As each young man is killed they chant the hypocritical mantra of government propaganda: “he died doing the job he loved,” and, “he was helping to make Afghanistan a better place.” But the warmongers cannot convince us that there is any point in this aggression.

Britain’s new top general Sir David Richards has predicted that we will be in Afghanistan for thirty or forty years. And NATO’s Lieutenant General Stanley McCrystal has called for more men.

The General praised the UK’s 8,000-plus force and said more would be welcome. He told the BBC: “I don’t know a general who would not like to see more forces, particularly forces as good as the British.” (Daily Mirror 13/06/09)

We can therefore expect to sustain heavy losses in a war that we will eventually quit - just as we did Iraq. But before we pull out we will kill thousands of Afghans and risk bloody retaliation on the streets of our major cities. Far from ensuring domestic security we are endangering ourselves by declaring war on Muslims after letting millions of them into our country.

Once again a blinkered government has gone to war without a plan. They imported cheap labour and created alien ghettos without thinking of the consequences. Their foreign policy consists of blindly following America and their economic policy is tied to “free markets” and “open borders.”

City minister Lord Myners and London mayor Boris Johnson have attacked EU plans to outlaw hedge funds (Guardian 21/07/09). And Home Secretary Alan Johnson says that he doesn’t lay awake at night worrying about the population hitting 70 million (Daily Mail 15/07/09).

We are fighting to impose our failed system on a country that has never done us any harm. The 9/11 terrorists were not Afghans, they were Arabs who trained and plotted in the United States. We are waging war to prop up Hamid Karzai’s corrupt regime of misogynists, warlords and drug dealers who are no better than the Taliban. This war is as pointless as the Iraqi catastrophe and will end in the same humiliating withdrawal.