|
|
|
Afghanistan: Harper Re-Runs a Horror Story By Gary Morton -September 2006
* Stephen Harper is not at all moved by the latest combat casualties in Canada’s failed Afghan war. He believes in the War on Terror and that we must soldier on in war, sending in more tanks, troops and eventually F-18 warplanes.. But perhaps the War on Terror is a lie. The battle is the same one that has always been fought, between those of us that want peace and those that love lawlessness and war.
This year Canada has joined the Soviet Union of the 1980s in suffering the pain of tragic losses in Afghanistan. The Soviet occupation led to headshaking, shame and pain at home until finally Mikhail Gorbachev spoke out against the war. A pull out occurred after the Geneva accords were negotiated. Some years later the puppet regime in Kabul fell. The Soviets were there nearly ten years and in Canada’s repeat of history General Rick Hillier suggests that our troops could be in Afghanistan for ten years. Like Hillier the CIA had a derogatory name for Afghan guerillas. They called them ragheads, while Hillier calls them scumbags. Initially Soviet casualties weren’t that high. It was when they tried to establish control outside of Kabul that the body bags hit the winding road home. In 1984 the Soviets lost 2,343 soldiers. Canada appears to be facing the same fate and the high casualty rate this week is not surprising. The Soviet attempt to help the Afghans by installing a socialist government led to the deaths of one million people. We have to wonder how many deaths will follow from our installation of Hamid Karzai’s warlord democracy. Karzai's government is already corrupt with warlords running the drug trade outside of Kabul. A large segment of the population is homeless, starving, without electricity. The infant mortality rate is the highest in the world and children are being sold into slavery. A small and corrupt Western sponsored elite in Kabul controls nearly all of the wealth. Karzai as a former CIA agent and oil company advisor is working to secure Afghanistan for oil pipelines running through from the landlocked Caspian Basin. Oil and gas in large quantities has also been reportedly discovered in remote Afghanistan. In the Soviet occupation there was little aid for the common people and the Western invasion follows that pattern. Aid has been weak to nearly no existent and funneled through Western contractors, leaving the Afghans to return to their roots as producers of opium. In 2006 a humanitarian crisis has gripped the south of Afghanistan and the extreme poverty has increased support for the Taliban as the lack of food is blamed on Western warfare on the Taliban and attempts to eradicate opium poppies that instead destroyed valuable crops. The war on poppies should be ended due to the human misery it creates. People are starving in makeshift camps, children die every day. The root strength of the Taliban is said to be poverty. British officer Captain Leo Docherty, a former aide-de-camp to the commander of British forces in Helmand Province admitted troops are destroying Afghan homes and villages and said the troops had been "sucked into a problem unsolvable by military means" as a result of pressure form the Afghan governor and they are now caught in the middle of a civil war. “All those people whose homes have been destroyed and sons killed are going to turn against the British,” he said. Docherty noted that no development or aid is provided. The Soviet military strategy followed exactly the same blueprint as our US/NATO occupation. It goes like this. Troops take Kabul but are unable to maintain control of millions of armed Pashtun tribes people outside of it. Nearly all of the countryside is beyond government reach. To counter this missions are carried out to combat Taliban/tribal forces. Fighting takes place in mountainous areas and extreme weather where heavy equipment is vulnerable and slow. Helicopter gun ships are used extensively as are fighter planes, bombers and Special Forces. The Soviets went so far as to conduct a scorched earth campaign. They decimated villages, houses, farms. Reports from Taliban commanders are to the effect that NATO is now acting in a similar way. Daily reports in the West are of one hundred Taliban or sixty Taliban killed, yet the deaths are military reports that can’t be confirmed by embedded reporters. The Taliban say few of them are dying but that NATO is bombing civilian villages and farmland. The pilots are so reckless that two days ago American warthogs flew in out of the blue and strafed Canadians, killing one and wounding thirty others. Common sense tells us that these planes are bombing indiscriminately and killing civilians in what amounts to war crimes. During the Soviet occupation the international community condemned the killing of civilians, yet in the world of 2006 our media hides the deaths by labeling nearly all the dead as Taliban fighters and never confirming anything. The Soviet adventure grew into a stalemate and the same battles were fought over and again, and this too is the pattern Canadian forces are facing. Denial exists on the field of the capability of the Afghan fighters. A British plane, a nimrod went down September 3rd killing 12 soldiers. The Taliban claim they shot it down with a stinger missile, yet news reports and military men tell us that it crashed and that the Taliban have no advanced weapons. An obvious lie since the Afghans have had stinger missiles since the CIA supplied them during the Soviet occupation. We are told that NATO is winning when the truth is that the neo-Taliban have regained control of half of the country and are still advancing. The common thread is that of a war sustained by lies. The Soviets agonized over the war yet it took a long time for the leadership to speak out against it. Here in Canada we face the same difficulty. The public is opposed; the politicians and the media spew lies. Support the troops, don’t question the mission or dare say that there is no military solution in Afghanistan – we hear this from Liberals and Conservatives alike. Though we can reap no glory, but only pain, Prime Minister Stephen Harper does not intend to withdraw. If front runner Michael Ignatieff comes in as the new Liberal leader Canadians will have two war lovers at the helm and no one to vote for when it comes to a Prime Minister that will respect our belief in peace. Instead we’ll get more of this re-run of an old 1980s horror movie, and this time the popcorn will fly out of our hands because we have joined Afghan civilians in swallowing the misery and misfortune of ill-planned occupations. ------------------------------------- For a detailed look at the horrors of Afghanistan read |
