How many female MPs were there under your chums the Taliban/Al Qaeda? How many female teachers? How many girls attending school? How many female doctors? How many female patients? And how many would there be if they returned to power after a unilateral withdrawal of NATO forces?

Why are we in Afghanistan?

Definately not for feminist issues.

Why do you think, Muppet?

And don't give me that terrorist , defending Britain bollocks.

Got to be be alot of money at stake?

I would recommend attending this event if you can, there are two interesting speakers plus Lindsey German, and it is the most important issue in the UK today, the fact we are at war. I'd watch this documentary first though if you haven't,  http://rethinkafghanistan.com/
or at least this part of it on Afghan women since our invasion
 http://www.youtube.com/v/R7jAT0FAGBc

It's by Robert Greenwald, the guy who directed Outfoxed and Iraq for Sale - The War Profiteers. Actually, he deserves his own article for his article in the Huffington Post in which he gives the middle finger to CACI's lawyers (war profiteers who are employed with generous and sensitive government contracts in the UK)
 http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-greenwald/can-obama-avoid-another-a_b_236299.html

It is depressing that since 'Iraq for Sale' came out there have been no public screenings of it outside of the US and Canada. It exposes the war profiteers debauchery at a time when half the soldiers in Afghanistan are private contractors / mercenaries immune from any law. I'll get a copy and get a pub in Edinburgh to play it as long as people turn up.

 http://iraqforsale.org/

His company distribute activist films, and are soliciting submisions, maybe someone the Camcorder Guerillas would be interested in teaming up with.
 http://bravenewfilms.org/dosomething/videoactivist.php

UK-US Iraqi Holocaust And Iraqi Genocide - 3.9 Million Deaths

by Gideon Polya, Countercurrents, 2 October, 2007


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/ ).