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Afghanistan:
The War that Won't Go Away
By Anti-War
Anti-War, Al-Jazeerah, ccun.org, May 17, 2010
The war in Afghanistan hardly featured in the election and the new Conservative-Lib Dem coalition government will want to continue avoiding the issue, except to insist nonsensically that withdrawing the troops would bring the Taliban to Britain's streets.
In this they will be joined by the Labour opposition, but there is a dilemma facing all three parties: the majority of people in Britain do not agree with them and want the troops withdrawn within a year - one recent poll showing that 77 percent want an end to the war now.
Most people question the purpose of the war. Few believe it is really making Britain safer, and the suggestion that it is improving human rights or women's rights is clearly refuted by the reality of deteriorating conditions in Afghanistan.
We have seen in the past year how the war can suddenly push itself to the top of the news agenda, as it did last Summer when a US-led offensive in Helmand province brought a sharp increase in British casualties, and for weeks soldiers' funerals at Wootton Bassett were featured prominently in the media.
With an assault on Kandahar -- Afghanistan's second biggest city -- apparently imminent, we may be about to see this futile and unwinnable war moving again to the centre of the political stage.
As we face severe cuts in public expenditure due to the economic crisis, the call for the troops to come home will be strengthened by the argument that cuts should not come from services like health and education, but from scrapping Trident nuclear missiles (projected cost £100 billion) and ending the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan (currently costing many billions every year).
Last December, David Cameron told The Sun newspaper, "I will never cut and run from Afghanistan", meaning he would rather send soldiers to kill and die in a war which has no purpose other than to save the face of the warmongers who took us into it in the first place.
Now David Cameron is prime minister, it is the task of the anti-war movement to help end the pointless waste of Afghan and British lives, by maximising the pressure on him to cut and run, not just from Afghanistan, but from Britain's continual subservience to American war policies.
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