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Tragic legacy of imperialism
JEREMY CORBYN explains why a military solution in Afghanistan is simply not tenable.
THE House of Commons order paper contains a motion condemning the death penalty of Sayed Pervez Kambaksh in Afghanistan, a journalism student who was accused of blasphemy after downloading and distributing to fellow students a report on women's rights.
The death penalty for Sayed has been proposed by an Afghanistan Member of Parliament and endorsed by President Karzai.
In the fevered atmosphere surrounding this atrocity, a senior prosecutor has been warned that he would be punished if he protested against this death sentence and, in the democracy of Afghanistan, a female member of parliament has been suspended for criticising her male colleagues for supporting this proposed execution.
While it is essential to support a campaign to save this poor student's life and to make the British goverment put all possible pressure on Karzai, it does beg the question of Britain's influence in Afghanistan.
President Karzai has vetoed the appointment of Paddy Ashdown as the UN representative, which is a strange turn of events since it's unclear if governments normally have the power to decide who the UN representative should be.
Gordon Brown is often keen to say that Afghanistan is going well and that what he terms "success" is happening before our very eyes.
The reality of the conflict in Afghanistan is very different. Occasionally, the disputes between NATO forces and the US surface, with constant accusations that each member country is not sending enough troops there.
It is over six years since NATO forces were deployed to Afghanistan in order to root out the Taliban. Last year alone, the US undertook 3,572 air attacks and the Taliban is a permanent presence in 54 per cent of the entire country. Last year, 6,500 people died and the British troops are now suffering almost as many casualties as a much larger contingent suffered in Iraq.
The strategy seems to be a mix of unconditional support for President Karzai, despite the authoritarian tendencies of his government and the presence of warlords at the highest table, and a commitment to the 30-year struggle which some MoD folk frequently talk about.
On the other hand, occasionally, when pressed, ministers do concede that they will have to search for a political solution and that a military solution is simply not tenable. Indeed, Des Browne said as much during last year's Labour Party conference.
The effects of the NATO presence in Afghanistan are increasing air attacks, loss of life and a growing unity between Pashtun forces on both sides of the Afghanistan-Pakistan border.
The US seems to have difficulty in recognising where the border lies and frequently sends unmanned zones over into Pakistan to identify targets on which rocket attacks can be launched.
The killings in Pakistan last week by US forces seem to have evoked only a muted response from the government of President Musharraf and, for Pashtun people, they have merely confirmed that they, as a whole, have become the enemy of the US.
The history of Afghanistan is tragic, from the many attempts by the British in the 19th century to make it an extension of the Indian empire to the 20th century wars that have gone on continually since the 1970s.
The Soviet Union committed a massive force of 200,000 troops who, after an initial success, became pinned down and eventually forced to retreat.
The United States, following the cold war, funded the mojahedin and therefore the Taliban, providing them with huge quantities of arms. These arms were then used to fight out a bloody and brutal civil war, which was finally won by the Taliban.
After September 11 2001, the US launched its attack on Afghanistan and, again, had enormous initial military success. Six years later, it's looking as if Western forces are, once again, bogged down in a war that appears unwinnable.
Clearly, the influence of the occupying forces is limited, as the northern warlords appear to be unaffected by the Western presence and drug production is at an all-time record high.
There are those who believe that the strategies followed by the West in Iraq and Afghanistan are somehow different. It would seem that this was simply not the case, as the Afghan war led to the Iraq war and, in turn, the attention is now turning back to Afghanistan.
It is essential that there be as much opposition to this colonial adventure as there is to the Iraqi one.
The threat to the life of Sayed Pervez Kambaksh is tragic and awful, but perhaps it serves as a salutary reminder to the rest of the world of the realities of the government that the British troops are being asked to fight in Afghanistan for.
Council house 'debate' makes a mockery of Labour
OUR new Housing Minister Caroline Flint made an extraordinary suggestion in an interview in the Guardian on Monday.
She seemed to say that council tenants who are not in work or actively seeking employment should not qualify for social housing.
Apparently, the details of her proposals were set out in a Fabian speech in which she claims to be starting a debate.
The background to these proposals was John Hill's report last year in which he was critical of the social conditions on many housing estates and seemed to think that the solution to this was, via social engineering, to create mixed tenures.
I find the very fact that a Labour minister should be even thinking these things deeply depressing.
The majority of people in this country cannot afford to buy a home unless they have inherited wealth. In inner urban areas, those who cannot afford to buy can rise to more than 75 per cent of the population.
There is, therefore, a massive shortage of homes for rent by local authorities or housing associations. The government, while it has done a lot to improve the physical conditions on estates, has not invested enough in new build.
For example, last year, only 12 per cent of all new building was for protected rented property.
It is deeply offensive to people who have spent their lives in housing association property, or those who have campaigned for the public sector to provide housing, to be told by a minister that council housing is to become dependent on the ability to get a job.
This kind of thinking should have disappeared with Nicholas Ridley and the Tories and should not be part of the lexicon of the Labour Party.
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