Galloway - Blood, empire and peace in Afghanistan

[luke]

Blood, empire and peace in Afghanistan

Afghanistan has been the scene for some of Britain's greatest military disasters over the last century and a half. It prompted the poet of empire Rudyard Kipling to write:

"When you're wounded and left on Afghanistan's plains
And the women come out to cut up what remains
Just roll to your rifle and blow out your brains
And go to your gawd like a soldier."

Bitter and sardonic. But horrifically prophetic.

This is a war that some of us argued should not be fought eight years ago. For many others, however, it was the good war - in contrast to Iraq. Now, the national mood is turning. And no wonder.

As I write, the British death toll stands at 213 in the wake of what looks increasingly like a botched and unnecessary rescue mission of a journalist. Less commented on is the reason the journalist was in that part of Afghanistan. He was investigating the deaths of scores of Afghans incinerated when NATO forces bombed two petrol tankers in their village.

It says everything for the contempt the occupying powers have for the people whose country it is that no-one seemed to have been worried about the inevitable consequence of blowing up several tons of petroleum in a populated area.

The issue is a growing scandal in Germany, where the party opposed to the Afghan mission, Die Linke, may do very well at the general election in two weeks, not least on account of that position.

Public opinion in Britain is turning too despite attempts by the government to cynically exploit the grief of the relatives of the British fallen. A clear and growing majority of people want either immediate withdrawal or the running down of troop numbers and a clear date for getting out.

So great is the shift in mood that the Tories and Liberal Democrats - who both continue to support the war - are engaging in all sorts of contortions to appear detached from the government.

David Cameron says the farcical Afghan elections should be rerun. The leader of the Liberal Democrats - not Vince Cable, the other one... you know, what'shisname - with little logic and great indecision says that the results are so flawed that there should be a second round to complete the process.

Their main difference with Gordon Brown seems to be that they favour a Carlton Browne of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office approach to the colonials rather than the delusions of Tony Blair's liberal imperialism.

All of this means, however, that the once-forgotten war and hidden casualties are fast becoming a central feature of British politics and of the unravelling of Brown's premiership. The field, therefore, must not be left to the likes of Liam Fox and leader-writers in the Sun to set the parameters of the national debate.

The coalition built by the anti-war movement needs to make itself heard. The Stop the War demonstration called for October 24 deserves the widest possible support. It is to be the springboard for a varied and imaginative campaign to exploit the cracking of the Establishment consensus on the war and create the political pressure to get out.

The lead-up to the demonstration will see rallies and meetings in towns and cities across Britain, especially in areas of high military recruitment.

The trade unions are an important part of the broad anti-war coalition. They may be asked this month to support a motion on withdrawal from Afghanistan at the Labour Party conference. I hope they do. Leaving aside the inherent justice of the position, it is just one of the policy reversals that, however unlikely, are the only realistic way in which Labour can stem Cameron's Old Etonian tide.

And whatever the machinations in the Labour hierarchy, there's every reason to believe that many MPs can be pressured into coming out against the war. Renewing and extending the anti-war movement is important in a wider political sense too. It is a powerful antidote to the vicious and now murderous Islamophobia that is nestling like a virus in our body politic.

Its extreme and ugliest face is the British National Party. But it is able to harvest support only because the anti-Muslim sentiment is spread so widely by supposedly liberal intellectuals, journalists and opinion formers. That's one reason why no-one should believe that if Nick Griffin is invited on to the BBC Question Time programme he will be exposed by other ever-so-clever and urbane panellists.

In all likelihood, they will be surprised when he is able to string a sentence together and flummoxed when he gives a pernicious twist to what are staples for much of the media.

Of course, stopping fascism has always depended on the widest possible unity. But how effective can we hope that to be when we have, for example, a government minister in Jim Fitzpatrick who says he wants legislation which would prevent traditional Muslim weddings from taking place in community centres such as the London Muslim Centre in my own constituency?

Jobs are being mown down faster than predictions of green shoots of recovery. Homes are being repossessed and pay packets frozen.

From the countries hailed by the Bush-Blair gang as the "new Europe" in the east a chill wind of apologetics for the Hitler years is blowing in. The second world war and the Holocaust were apparently the fault of the Russian people, who lost 25 million dead, rather than the nazis who were hurled back by the Red Army.

The left sorely needs to popularise its arguments and to rebuild progressive culture and organisation. There are all too many fields in which this needs to happen. But, given the sharpening focus on Afghanistan, the anti-war movement this autumn can play a critical role.

from http://www.morningstaronline.co.uk/index.php/news/features/Blood-empire-and-peace-in-Afghanistan