> Where exactly is it legal for British soldiers to commit infanticide? How much money was paid to the berieved father and which court decided that amount? How much money would Captain Josh Jones feel is acceptable from someone as compensation for murdering one of his younger relatives? When did Britain stop having a professional army governed by the rule of law and when did it replace it's soldiers with child-murderers and psychologically-damaged, intellectually challenged officers? Are the squaddies also allowed to murder children in the UK when they return - and if not, have they been told that?

I think these are a bit silly questions. You can probably answer them yourself. If they are rhetoric, it would probably just be easier to make your point. And the trouble with picking out single instances of a bigger picture is it distorts the overall picture. I'm sure if you were unbiased you could equally find examples of fantastic things the soldiers have done too.

As an example. Some old people starved to death in our local hospital because they couldn't reach the tray of food that was given to them. This is true, it was established at an inquiry. The staff just cleared the food away un-eaten. Equally the same hospital has also actually save some lives too.
So do we close the hospital because a few innocent people died?

>If they are rhetoric, it would probably just be easier to make your point.

Are they rhetorical questions? They would be if everyone agreed about the answers but the Times certainly doesn't.

>And the trouble with picking out single instances of a bigger picture is it distorts the overall picture. I'm sure if you were unbiased you could equally find examples of fantastic things the soldiers have done too.

In Afghanistan? No, I can't. Sure, I think it is fantastic in this incident that the British treated the mother after shooting her and killing her daughter. Not shooting her in the first place would have been more fantastic. Holding some sort of investigation would have been super. Disciplining the killer, or at least learning the lessons if this was a mistake would be awesome. Didn't happen though.

Maybe I am biased, but please show me how I am biased. What has the British invasion and occupation of Aghanistan produced so far of benefit to the Afghan people in your opinion? Democracy? Liberation of women? An end to violence? An end to corruption? An end to terrorism? The end of the opium trade? Development?
I am genuinely interested in why soldiers families say 'The protestors don't know all the good that the British army have done there' or 'He didn't die in vain', I think that is a natural response to rationalise the death or defigurement of a loved one. I honestly can't see what the hundreds of British deaths and tens of thousands of Afghani deaths have produced except more hatred.

I think you can't understand the bigger picture without looking at instances in detail. In this instance, the Times reports the killing of a child without any condemnation or journalistic investigation. I think that attitude is increasingly symptomatic of our attitudes to the war, you know it is happening but most people ignore it.

>So do we close the hospital because a few innocent people died?

Maybe, maybe not. You at least hold an investigation into why the people died and what lessons can be learned from happening again. You prosecute anyone who deliberately or negligently allowed people to starve to death. You don't just shrug and ignore it or accept that it is inevitable.

I disagree with Else's suggestion that British soldiers have done "fantastic things" in Afghanistan. I am at risk of having Godwin's Law invoked when I say that Hitler's employment creation was great; it did create lots of jobs, but it is also rude to sing the praises of a mass murderer. (And no, I am not saying the British army is as bad as Hitler).

The questions Danny raises are valid, but the assumptions derived for them are - in my view - incorrect. It is quite right to examine the propagandistic reasons posited for our presence in Afghanistan and to show how they are empty in practise (democracy, women's liberation, terrorism etc.). It is also worthwhile to understand how families of soldiers, and those of a militarised mindset generally will generate positive messages about "they didn't die in vain" even if the opposite turns out to be true.

I should state here that I am not-anti troops per se, although I am in two minds about it. On the one hand, I think troops can best be supported by withdrawing them from an unwinnable war - and one that is based in fact on pipelines and energy control rather than democracy and humanitarianism.

But on the other hand troops commit such atrocities - and some so ill-disposed to determining right from wrong for themselves - that I sometimes I wonder whether I'd prefer to support just the troops brave enough to refuse to fight. But what would we do, in their shoes, having led their lives? People join the army as a result of "three poverties". The first two are community and financial poverty, and the army promises to resolve both (check out the unashamedly glossy brochures for the Navy, which doesn't mention mental illness, disablement, and dying for corporatism). The third is a "poverty of ideas", which is created by uncritical exposure to militarism, patriotism and associated propaganda, and a starvation of intellectual counter-points to the same.

(The common dismissal of the above is that it is a middle-class analysis of a working-class situation. That may be true - but reverse class discrimination should not be used as a mechanism to avoid analysying how to stop people being killed - IMO. Class is always present in this debate in any case: the reason why politicians' sons and daughters are not being killed in Afghanistan and Iraq is that they can access better education, they have greater job choice and they can get better ones).

Where I disagree with Danny is his assertions that activists are to blame for the situation in Afghanistan. I mean no offence when I say this is nonsense. There are some parallels with Vietnam - superpowers engaging in a cruel and unnecessary war - but there are some differences too. Consider that Vietnam was at the height of the counter-culture and everyone was politiced. It was positively fashionable to be politicised then - unlike now where I would insist it is viewed as difficult in mainstream culture. There was a genuine inertia around bottom-up politics around Vietnam - and peoples disengagement now comes from the subconscious realisation that what they think genuinely does not matter to the system. Corporate control of the media is much more complete now than several decades ago, and that makes a substantial difference.

If we genuinely thought that marching on the streets like in 2003 would have any effect on our foreign policy whatsoever, it would happen again. That the energy has been sucked out of the anti-war movement is not due to laziness - and that conscription has not been reinstated in the US is no accident either. In fact - surely your blame would be better placed with the selfish middle-class who never do anything political and moan about immigrants? Activists these days must surely make up no more than a few percent of the population - so it is hardly fair to place the blame with them.

It is true though that there is definitely something wrong with us societally - the trash we consume on telly, the rubbish we accept for news, the issues we think are unacceptable to discuss, our attachment to nationalism, our uncritical acceptance of establishment and capitalist values, and our generally selfish and parochial outlook. My point is not that we should be all gloomy but recognise that Western culture has become much more selfish over the last thirty to forty years, and that the few activists we have now have a much harder job than the much greater number then. Let's do it, but let's not blame each other.

>Consider that Vietnam was at the height of the counter-culture and everyone was politiced. It was positively fashionable to be politicised then - unlike now where I would insist it is viewed as difficult in mainstream culture...If we genuinely thought that marching on the streets like in 2003 would have any effect on our foreign policy whatsoever, it would happen again...Activists these days must surely make up no more than a few percent of the population - so it is hardly fair to place the blame with them.

There was initially very little opposition to Vietnam, especially among the young, and even when that war ended opposition was probably smaller than we had by 2002. They started small and grew, we started big and shrank.

It is normally only one percent of the population who take part in successful revolutions (the Iranian Islamic revolution was unusual in getting 6% participation). If we really make up a few percentage of the population then it is even more shameful that we haven't toppled the state let alone end the war.

There were actions that might have helped stop the war but weren't tried because they may be used to turn the majority off protesting. The false assumption being that the majority wouldn't let their wish for peace be ignored.

>In fact - surely your blame would be better placed with the selfish middle-class who never do anything political and moan about immigrants?

No, I already blame them for being selfish and for being middle-class and for never doing anything political and for moaning about immigrants. It would be wrong for me to also blame them for failing to stop the war. They never claimed that they could. I didn't expect them to try.

>My point is not that we should be all gloomy but recognise that Western culture has become much more selfish over the last thirty to forty years, and that the few activists we have now have a much harder job than the much greater number then. Let's do it, but let's not blame each other.

Like I said, I think you may have an inflated idea of the number of anti-Vietnam protestors. I think to criticise soldiers behaviour in Afghanistan I have to admit to them that me and every other peace protestor failed to stop that stupid war before it happened. I think it is vital to admit and learn from that failure (those failures) to progress peace.