World Afghanistan Newswire Archive

Friday Drivetime - BCfm’s weekly politics show
At five: discussing the big stories in Bristol, Britain and around the world
After six: straight talking and investigative reports with Martin Summers and Marina Morris

www.smashedo.org.uk/target-barclays.htm

The following article discusses the current approach of the British Government in dealing with terror suspects.

Bristol Against The Arms Trade Present – Down the Drones Conference – Sunday April 1st 2012

Monday 2nd April is the 27th annual Bristol drone conference, but this years gonna be different. Bristol Against Arms Trade have teamed up with Bristol Stop the War and Bristol Palestine Solidarity Campaign, with the aim of making so much noise the conference will be a flop.

Anne Perry''s book Shoulder The Sky and others of her over 60 books are understated litanies of the suffering of World War I, written without preaching or opining. They serve as a mirror for the atrocities of present wars. Perry lives on the Eastern coast of Scotland.

Imagine Britain had been invaded and occupied by armed forces from another region of the world with China, for example, as a significant 'partner' in the 'coalition'. Imagine tens of thousands of Britons had been killed, and millions had fled as refugees. This is how the Chinese state broadcaster might report the invasion ten years hence:

'It's ten years this week since Chinese forces first became involved in Britain, and more than five years since they assumed responsibility for south-east England. So what's been achieved in that time?'

The real shocking issue is the persistent denial of the genocide of Afghan people.

The attack on the British Council in Kabul on 19th August, resulting in twelve deaths and many injuries, further underlined how unwelcome the occupiers are, in a country in which they should never have been in the first place. Further tragedies, heaped on tragedies, also illustrated how out of touch those both on the ground in country - and those in high places abroad are. The day of the attack was both the Sabbath (Friday) and national holiday marking the 92nd anniversary of Afghanistan's independence from Britain in 1919 and of course, the 19th: 19 -1919.

Broadcast at 6pm Friday 4th March 2011.
This week's discussion was about the deepening military conflicts in Afghanistan, Pakistan. The new military government in Egypt and nascent civil war in Libya.

2010 was the bloodiest year of the now nine-year conflict in Afghanistan and the tribal border regions of Pakistan. Under the command of General David Petraeus, a massively expanded US and NATO force is waging a campaign of extermination against various ethnic Pashtun and Taliban-linked insurgent movements that have not accepted the foreign invasion of their country.

A war in its tenth year in which NATO’s casualties mount by the day is not sufficient for an increasingly ambitious and expansionist, indeed global, NATO. While attacks on its forces increase steadily and its troop strength reaches record levels – and with at least 170 of its oil tankers destroyed in Pakistan since the killing of Pakistani troops on September 30 – the military bloc is planning new wars on the scale of the one in Afghanistan.

In slightly over a month, on October 7, the U.S.-led war in Afghanistan will enter its tenth year.

The conflict represents the longest continuous combat operations in the history of the United States and Afghanistan alike. With the North Atlantic Treaty Organization for the only time in its existence activating its Article 5 mutual military assistance clause in September 2001 and thus entering the Afghan fray, European nations that had not been at war since the Second World War are now engaged in an endless combat mission.

There are 150,000 foreign troops in Afghanistan, 120,000 of them under the command of NATO's International Security Assistance Force (ISAF). Military personnel from over a quarter of the 192 members of the United Nations. They include soldiers from almost every European country, several Asia-Pacific states, and nations in the Americas and the Middle East.

The public release of the 92,000 secret documents on the Afghanistan war by WikiLeaks, together with the reaction of the media and the official establishment, has immense political implications for the antiwar struggle in the US and internationally.

Eight months after the Obama administration announced a “surge” of 30,000 additional troops to Afghanistan to crush the Taliban-led insurgency, the rate of US and allied casualties has soared to the highest level of the nearly nine-year war and is beginning to match the bloodiest stages of the occupation of Iraq.

The Trail of Tears for Afghanistan peace walk from London to Colchester took place from Sunday, 27th June to Thursday, 1st July 2010. It was meant as an act of solidarity with British war resister Joe Glenton and others like him, and as a remembrance of the countless victims on all sides of the bloody (almost) nine-year war in Afghanistan, now spreading to Pakistan.

The 2001 bombing and invasion of Afghanistan has been presented to World public opinion as a "Just War", a war directed against the Taliban and Al Qaeda, a war to eliminate "Islamic terrorism" and instate Western style democracy. The economic dimensions of the "Global War on Terrorism" are rarely mentioned.

Afghanistan has, whether by convenience, design or some combination of the two, been transformed into a vast training ground for the consolidation of a fifty-nation military structure that has already been extended into Central Asia, the Caucasus, Eastern Europe, the Horn of Africa, the Indian Ocean and the Middle East.

It is also a testing range for new 21st century weapons and combat systems intended for future use around the world.

National gathering to demand troops are withdrawn from Afghanistan. Co-ordinated by Stop The War Coalition

If McChrystal gains the additional 60,000 American troops he's requested and NATO provides several thousand more, combined Western military forces in Afghanistan could number some 180,000. With control of former Soviet airbases in the nation in addition to air fields in Central Asia, Iraq, the South Caucasus, Turkey and the Black Sea nations of Bulgaria and Romania, Washington and its allies could be poised for military operations against Iran far more ambitious than any discussed or rumored before.

The expansion of the South Asian war into Pakistan also allows the West to employ that nation for future attacks against Iran.