The following notice has started to appear in the sleepy West Lothian towns surrounding the HQ:

NATO are having a secret meeting on Afghanistan on Friday in Craigiehall Barracks. A Polish website leaked the press release early and an Indymedia journalist spotted it and called for a demo there that morning. There is likely to be disruption on the road to Cramond and it will perhaps even be blocked by police or peace protestors. Apologies for that but at least we tried to warn you.

86 British service personnel have died in Afghanistan out of 743 NATO deaths and 7,171 wounded.
The Guardian estimates that between 20,000 and 49,600 people may have died of the immediate consequences of the invasion, with more dying each year since especially from indiscriminate and innaccurate airstikes. Nothing has been achieved for these deaths - heroin production has vastly increased, all of the country including Kabul is too dangerous for westerners to travel.

NATO troops are supposed to defend the North Atlantic signatories from invasion, not invade other regions to punish terrorist crimes. Our soldiers are victims of Tony Blairs blood-debt to George Bush, and are fighting an unwinnable war without an exit strategy.

If you wish to pay respect to the British fallen or protest the slaughter of Operation Enduring Freedom then please join the protest from about 9 am tommorow.

 http://scotland.indymedia.org/newswire/display/5055/index.php

Although many voices in the mainstream press and in our government would like us to believe that the situation in Afghanistan is improving, it doesn't take much to dig beneath this veneer of propaganda and edited rhetoric to find the much darker truth.

The US and Her Fundamentalist Stooges are the Main Human Rights Violators in Afghanistan

'the US made a game of values like democracy, human rights, women’s rights etc. thus disgracing our mournful nation.'

'The US administration plays a funny anti-Taliban game and pretends that a super power is unable to defeat a small, marginalized and medieval-minded gang which is actually her own product. But our people found by experience in the past few years that the US doesn’t want to defeat the Taliban and Al-Qaeda, because then they will have no excuse to stay in Afghanistan and work towards the realization of its economical, political and strategic interests in the region.'

-  https://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2007/12/387775.html

Taking Stock: Afghan Women and Girls Five Years On

'Five years down the road, the rhetoric of gender equality and the apparent interest in
women’s issues in Afghanistan among the international community and with donors is not
reflected in the realities of ordinary women. Programming has been marred by short-term
perspectives, inappropriate projects for the Afghan context, and ‘workshop fever’ oriented at
Afghan women leaders. The Ministry of Women’s Affairs operates at low capacity and with
minimal influence on government policy. Most critically, the practical needs of women and
girls remain unmet as basic services—such as access to clean water, education, healthcare
and livelihoods—remain at bay.'

- http://www.womankind.org.uk/takingstockdownloads.html

For more background watch independent journalist Carmela Baranowska’s film 'Taliban Country'
-  http://www.guerrillanews.com/videos/37/Taliban_Country

Resist Military Globalisation!

Five years after the Iraq war started: an international action weekend at NATO's headquarters in Brussels, Belgium.
22 March 2008: NATO Game Over-action
23-24 March 2008: Conference Military globalisation and nonviolent resistance in Europe

Organised by Bombspotting and War Resisters International

Europe serves as a staging ground for military interventions worldwide. The framework can differ: NATO, EU, US coalition of the willing, UN. The target as well: Iraq, Afghanistan, Lebanon, .... But the departure points not: military bases, airports and harbours in Europe. Europe hosts a large military intervention machinery.
Economic globalisation also has its military correlary. New York Times' columnist Thomas Friedman said: "The hidden hand of the market will never work without a hidden fist. McDonald's cannot flourish without McDonnell Douglas, the builder of the F-15. And the hidden fist that keeps the world safe for Silicon Valley 's technologies is called the United States Army, Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps." And this fist is not solely a US phenomenon as Europe builds its own intervention capacity through the EU or forms a partner with the US in NATO.
You pay for, and perhaps your work contributes to, military forces which can be rapidly deployed everywhere in the world. We make war under the labels of 'military humanitarian intervention' and 'war against terrorism'. Behind these PR labels the military intervention machineries protect economic interests and sustain the existing global order.

The 5th anniversary of the Iraq war is a good moment to make the resistance against military globalisation visible again. We don't need a machinery for global military intervention. We don't need military alliances that threaten the rest of the world. Enough. Security is too important to leave to the military.
In Heiligendamm a broad and international movement challenged the legitimacy of the G8-leaders and blocked the G8-summit. It is time to challenge the legitimacy of their military power tools as well.


NATO Game Over
Organised by Bombspotting - www.bombspotting.org NATO Game Over
Through NATO, Europe is involved in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. European states train military forces for the NATO Response Force and due to NATO the US still maintains bases in Europe used for military interventions worldwide. During the Iraq war US soldiers deployed from their bases in Europe to the Persian Gulf. In Afghanistan NATO has taken the lead in the military occupation and a lot of European states have soldiers in Afghanistan. Last but not least, NATO nuclear weapons are still deployed in Europe.

Peace activists from all over Europe will join in Brussels, Belgium on March 22 2008 for the first edition of 'NATO - Game Over'. We go to NATO's headquarters and close them. We will enter and inspect NATO for evidence of war preparations. 'NATO – Game Over' is not a ordinary demonstration, neither is it a game. It is a nonviolent and resolute attempt to close NATO. Up till today, every nonviolent direct action at or around NATO's headquarters was met with large numbers of police, miles of barbed wire, prohibitions,... a shameful waste of tax payers money. This will not stop us. Through nonviolent direct action we prevent wars and stop war crimes.

Preparations and action training take place on 20-21 March.


Conference Military globalisation and nonviolent resistance in Europe
War Resisters International and Bomspotting - www.bombspotting.org - www.wri-irg.org

5 years ago the Iraq war enlarged the public awareness of Europe's role in the military globalisation. In 2003 all over Europe nonviolent direct actions took place against the deployment of US and UK troops to Iraq. Meanwhile several military bases are met with a lot of local resistance. But till now there is little cooperation between these action groups. All these groups had local or national impact, but the political decisions are taken on an international level. To have an impact on these decisions cooperation over the borders is needed.

In this conference in Brussels we bring together the local resistance against bases and nonviolent direct action groups from several European countries to share knowledge on the military complex and to build partnerships and common strategies. We put together our knowledge on military bases, movements and deployments to create a common awareness of the military intervention machinery and how our local military base functions in it. We investigate how we together can be the sand in the machine: how can co-ordinated local actions and international actions raise our impact.

Interested? Contact international(at)bombspotting.org and get involved with your group!

great action!

the anti-war movement has a big job to do to get public awareness of the occupation of Afghanistan up as high as it is about Iraq.

you can get free Stop Bombing Afghanistan stickers off Voices - see  http://www.stopbombingafghanistan.org/

Post-invasion non-violent excess deaths in Occupied Afghanistan - a month on from the 6th anniversary of the war criminal US invasion and occupation on 7th October 2001 – now total an estimated 3.2 million. However comparisons with Occupied Iraq (1.5-2 million TOTAL post-invasion excess deaths, and 0.8-1.2 million or about 50% of these being VIOLENT deaths) suggest that the post-invasion violent excess deaths in Occupied Afghanistan could total 3 million.

The racist, war criminal US military state that they “don’t do body counts” of Indigenous victims but publicly-accessible UN demographic data allow us to estimate the carnage as outlined below.

Consult UNICEF (see:  http://www.unicef.org/infobycountry
/afghanistan_statistics.html ) and you will find the estimate that 370,000 under-5 year old infants die each year in Occupied Afghanistan. From an exhaustive country-by-country analysis of excess death (avoidable death, death that should not have happened) it can be determined that for impoverished, worst case Third world countries the under-5 infant deaths are about 0.7 of total non-violent excess deaths (see “Layperson’s “A Layperson’s Guide to counting Iraq deaths”:  http://mwcnews.net/content/view/5872/26/ ). Accordingly we can estimate that total post-invasion non-violent excess deaths in Occupied Afghanistan after 6.1 years of war total 370,000 x 6.1 / 0.7 = 3.2 million.

ASSUMING roughly 1 violent death for every non-violent avoidable death (as in US-occupied Occupied Iraq as detailed below) yields an estimate of post-invasion VIOLENT excess deaths in Occupied Afghanistan of about 3 million and accordingly a total of 3.0 million + 3.2 million = 6.2 million excess deaths - more than the number of Jews who died in the World War 2 Jewish Holocaust (6 million) or the number of Bengalis who died in the man-made, WW2 Bengali Holocaust, the WW2 Bengal Famine in British-ruled India (4 million victims; accompanied by horrendous civilian and military sexual abuse of starving women and girls; associated with a 1940s demographic deficit of over 10 million in Bengal; possibly due to a deliberate British “scorched earth policy” to prevent Japanese invasion of India; and rubbed out of British history books) (see “Jane Austen and the Black Hole of British History. Colonial rapacity, holocaust denial and the crisis in biological sustainability”:  http://janeaustenand.blogspot.com/ ).

Occupied Afghanistan is indeed the 21st century Auschwitz of the racist, war criminal US Alliance countries – the US, the UK, Australia, Canada, Japan and NATO countries such as France and Germany are complicit in these estimated over 6 million post-invasion violent and non-violent excess Afghan deaths.

Recent authoritative estimates of violence-related post-invasion excess deaths in occupied Iraq are of 1.2 million (from the expert UK ORB polling company) and 0.8 million (from the top US Bloomberg School of Public Health group at Johns Hopkins University who estimated 0.6 million violent deaths as of July 2006).

Authoritative estimates of non-violent post-invasion excess deaths in Occupied Iraq as of November 2007 are of 0.7 million (from the latest UN Population Division data) and of 0.8 million (calculated from United Nations Children’s Fund, UNICEF, data on post-invasion under-5 year old infant deaths; for impoverished Third World countries the under-5 infant deaths are about 0.7 of the total excess deaths, as described in “A Layperson’s Guide to counting Iraq deaths”:  http://mwcnews.net/content/view/5872/26/ ).

From this one can estimate total post-invasion violent and non-violent occupied Iraqi excess deaths and these clearly range from 0.7 million + 0.8 million = 1.5 million (minimum estimate) to 0.8 million + 1.2 million = 2.0 million (upper estimate) (see “Iraq; Genocide by all definition. Bush’s Iraq War. 2 million Iraqi excess deaths”:  http://mwcnews.net/content/view/17066/42/ ).

The excess death toll in the Bush I plus Bush II Wars in Occupied Iraq and Occupied Afghanistan alone (a Bush Asian Holocaust in which my own country Australia is intimately complicit) has thus now reached an upper estimate of 8.2 million – but this of course is NOT reported by racist, lying, holocaust-ignoring Australian or Western mainstream media or politicians.

However this estimate climbs steeply if we add the retrospectively Bush I- and Bush II-complicit excess deaths in Israel’s US-backed wars and occupations of Lebanon (1978-2007; 70,000) and of the Occupied Palestinian Territories (1967-2007; 0.31 million); the US Gulf War (1990-1991; 0.2 million); the US Sanctions War (1990-2003; 1.7 million); and the about 0.5 million who have died avoidably since 9/11 from opiate drug-related causes due to the UK-US restoration of the Taliban-destroyed Afghan opium industry from about 5% of world market share in 2001 to a current 93% (see UN Office on Drugs and Crime, UNODC, 2007 World Drug Report:  http://www.unodc.org/unodc/world_drug_report.html and “United State Terrorism. 8 million deaths & media holocaust denial”:  http://mwcnews.net/content/view/17139/42/ ) -. all of this yielding 2.8 million excess deaths, which plus 8.2 million excess deaths for post-invasion Occupied Iraq and Occupied Afghanistan yields an estimate of 11 million excess deaths associated with the Bush Asian Wars.

A major cause of the NON-violent deaths is gross Occupier violation of the Geneva Convention that demands unequivocally that an Occupier “to the fullest extent of the means available to it” supplies life-sustaining medical and food requisites to its conquered subjects (see Articles 55 and 56 of the Geneva Convention relative to the protection of civilian persons in time of war:  http://www.unhchr.ch/html/menu3/b/92.htm ). Consult WHO (see:  http://www.who.int/en/ ) and you will discover that the “annual total per capita medical expenditure” permitted in Occupied Iraq by the US Coalition is $135 (2004) as compared to $19 (Occupied Afghanistan), $2,560 (UK), $3,123 (Australia) and $6,096 (the US) (see:  http://mwcnews.net/content/view/17139/42/ ).

It gets worse. I am currently working with a fellow Australian academic on a book project about the wider global impact of the Iraq War. In short, 16 million people die avoidably each year (9.6 million of them under-5 year old infants) due to deprivation and deprivation-exacerbated disease (see “Body Count. Global avoidable mortality since 1950” (G.M. Polya, Melbourne, 2007:  http://globalbodycount.blogspot.com/ and  http://mwcnews.net/content/view/1375/247/ ). The accrual cost of the 21st century part of the Bush Wars has been estimated at $2.5 trillion by the US 2001 Economics Nobel Laureate Professor Joseph Stiglitz (Columbia) and his Harvard colleague Professor Linda Bilmes (see “Iraq: the hidden cost of the War”:  http://www.newstatesman.com/200703120024 and “The Cost of War”:  http://mwcnews.net/content/view/13099/26/ ). This horrendous distortion translates into huge avoidable infant deaths in the US alone (an estimated 160,000 such under-5 year old avoidable American infant deaths in 8 years of the Bush II Administration).

There has clearly also been a big distortion by the Bush War on Terror in relation to matters such as global militarization, foreign aid, Third World debt relief, increased oil prices, biofuel expansion, decreased global food, increased global food prices, and failure to address global warming – all of these areas contributing to16 million global avoidable deaths each year on Spaceship Earth with the First World in charge of the flight deck and Bush II at the controls.

With Racist Zionist-beholden Bush America and Racist Zionist-run Apartheid Israel threatening to devastate remote, peaceful, non-invading, non-occupying, non-threatening, non-nuclear armed, democratic Iran (population 70 million, half of them KIDS and three quarters Women and Children), perhaps the best advice about how the World can stop these proto-Nazi, racist war-mongers is that given by outstanding CONSERVATIVE American economist, writer, academic and “Father of Reaganomics” Dr Paul Craig Roberts (see:  http://www.counterpunch.org/roberts02122007.html ), QUOTE :

“Dump the Dollar! How the World can stop Bush … If the rest of the world would simply stop purchasing US Treasuries, and instead dump their surplus dollars into the foreign exchange market, the Bush Regime would be overwhelmed with economic crisis and unable to wage war ...The demise of the US dollar is only a question of time. It would save the world from war and devastation if the dollar is brought to its demise before the Bush Regime launches its planned attack on Iran.”



* Dr Gideon Polya published some 130 works in a 4 decade scientific career, most recently a huge pharmacological reference text "Biochemical Targets of Plant Bioactive Compounds" (CRC Press/Taylor & Francis, New York & London, 2003). He has just published “Body Count. Global avoidable mortality since 1950” (G.M. Polya, Melbourne, 2007:  http://mwcnews.net/content/view/1375/247/ and  http://globalbodycount.blogspot.com/ ).


Gideon Polya
Homepage:  http://www.countercurrents.org/polya081107.htm