MICHAEL CHESSUM, President of UCLU Stop the War: “Stop the killing and stop the lies. Bring the troops home now”

Afghanistan is supposed to be Britain’s good war. When invasion became official policy, the plight of the Afghan people, suffering under the brutal Taliban regime, became front-page news. Eight years on, almost every conceivable indicator shows that the invasion has been a disaster for the Afghan people: life expectancy in the country has dipped to 44, and it  now   has   the  second   worst   rate   of infant mortality in the world.

Started under the preposterous title of ‘Operation Enduring Freedom’, the war in Afghanistan was at the core of the War on Terror. It was, to begin with, a war of vengeance, committed without UN sanction on the back of the 9/11 atrocities.

We were told that the war would liberate women, but eight years on, fewer than 10% of women can read, less than a third of them go to school; the NATO-backed Karzai government recently tried to pass a law legalising marital rape. NATO forces spend time and blood defending one of the most corrupt governments in the world. It is a government which has allowed the narcotic industry to boom, and which commits electoral fraud on an epic scale.

The idea that Britain went to war to defend the Afghan people is just one example of the ever-changing list of reasons that we are supposed to believe. NATO’s own war crimes are rarely reported to us, but they are happening. In the village of Granai in Farah province on 4th May, as many as 140 civilians were killed by a US air strike. Such reports are surely the tip of the iceberg.

Another excuse is that keeping troops in Afghanistan makes Britain safer. But “Islamic extremists” do not bomb the west for fun; terrorism is a tactic, not an ideology or cultural trait. It is our continued occupation of other countries that makes us a target. Perhaps some abhor “our way of life,” but they also presumably abhor the “way of life” in France or Sweden, and they are not targeted.

Keeping troops in Afghanistan perpetuates racism and intolerance at home. In the minds of many, Muslims have turned into a homogeneous blob of terror and extremism. This is not because they are, but because our political establishment, the leaders of the war on terror, refuse to deal with people as people – and refuse to accept that it is the war which pushes thousands to join the Taliban and al-Qaeda, not some violent cultural impulse. The web of racism and Islamophobia that Britain now faces is inevitably aided by the war abroad.

The official reasons for the war have been utterly discredited: it has not made Afghanistan a democracy, it has not improved conditions for women, it has not made us safer. It has caused thousands upon thousands of deaths: tens of thousands of Afghan civilians have been killed, many directly by NATO, and 1,407 coalition troops have died so far. All reports and estimates show that the death rate is rising on all sides. We are often confronted with the idea that it is our responsibility to stay to help those in need, despite that the NATO occupation of Afghanistan is manifestly doing the opposite.

The people who really call the shots in Afghanistan are the very same political elite that funded the Taliban in the first place, and who are now playing geopolitics with Afghan and NATO lives. Now they say that we must increase our numbers in order to safeguard the credibility of their violent campaigns. What began as vengeance has become vanity. If you support ongoing war, be aware that that is the force that you are supporting; and it is their war that you will get.

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HASEEB AMMAR, SOAS MSc Development Studies student: “Seeing the campaign out is our duty to the Afghan people.”

No-one on earth would like foreign troops to stay on their soil. The resistance movements against invaders throughout history are the best embodiment of this fact. However, Afghanistan’s present situation looks to be different.

The presence of foreign troops, in particular from the US and the UK, seems essential to nation-building, capacity building and the stability of Afghanistan which in turn affects the stability of the whole region.

First of all, the Afghan Army (only 90,000 soldiers) and the Police (only 82,000 policemen) do not have the ability to defend the country against its enemies, i.e. Taliban and al-Qaida, or to boost their control over Afghanistan’s vast territory. They lack equipment, soldiers and training. The withdrawal of foreign troops could result in another catastrophic civil war similar to – or even worse than – the one that we witnessed in the 1990s.

Afghanistan is a multiethnic country, where it is difficult to find a national identity. It is a country of minorities, which has never gone under the process of building a modern democratic state like some other similar countries.  For instance, it can’t be compared to Switzerland or Belgium, where minorities’ political awareness is mature and modern states exist.

Concerns are high that with the absence of a strong Afghan state, Afghanistan is prone to a civil war, an ethnic conflict which could be coupled with the interference of neighbouring countries that are attached ethnically or ideologically with Afghanistan’s different minorities and ethnicities. Not to mention that with the withdrawal of foreign troops, Afghanistan could become again a safe haven for terrorist groups.

During the 1990s civil war – before Taliban came to power with Pakistan’s strong support – it was obvious to anyone who observed the situation in Afghanistan that belligerent parties were fighting a proxy war that was fuelled by the support of neighbouring countries. Add to that the fact that the war was sustained and prolonged partly because of the lucrative economy of drugs.

Having said that, it is equally important to stress that by hesitating in empowering the Afghan police and Army, by delaying increasing the Afghan state’s capacity, while continuing indiscriminate aerial bombardments and ignoring Afghan traditions and customs as well as searching houses and making arrests, the risk of triggering Afghan anger and making them more hostile to foreigners and foreign troops is very high.

The current situation in Afghanistan is not a direct result of the foreign troops’ presence in this country as much as it is a result of NATO’s failure over the past eight years to do more about nation-building and reconstruction and neither sending sufficient troops or spending enough money, unlike Iraq.

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