A US SOLDIER in Afghanistan has killed at least 16 civilians and wounded five men, women and children.
Nato said it was investigating the ‘deeply regrettable incident’. However, the Afghan war has been one big incident or atrocity, with a massive slaughter from the air and from the ground by NATO.
Now, Afghans are being slaughtered at night by NATO troops driven over the edge by the imperialist slaughter.
No apology is acceptable for this and other crimes, since imperialist war is one big crime when the mighty imperialist powers slaughter their victims – the oppressed nations.
Even before they start firing, the military chiefs and governments involved know that they amount to a slaughter and a mass murder of the innocents by soldiers who become increasingly brutalised and unhinged by what they do.
This latest slaughter on top of US troops burning the Koran will drive the entire Afghan nation to take up arms to drive NATO forces out of the country.
Lt Gen Adrian Bradshaw, deputy commander of Nato-led forces, said he was unable to ‘explain the motivation behind such callous acts’. However, the source of them is clear, the very nature of imperialist war.
Previously, we had the Haditha massacre in Iraq when 24 unarmed Iraqi men, women and children were killed by a group of United States Marines on November 19, 2005 in Haditha city in the western Iraqi province of Al Anbar.
The dead were men, women and children and the culprits remain unpunished, as do their military and political superiors.
At the same time, at the notorious Abu Ghraib prison near Baghdad, Iraqi detainees were being tortured, beaten, sexually humiliated and murdered.
What happened there was planned from above. Even US medical professionals, military doctors, nurses and medics at Abu Ghraib were corrupted into committing gross violations of medical ethics. Doctors were involved in the torture from the start while the medical system collaborated with designing and implementing psychologically and physically coercive interrogations.
Army officials admitted that a physician and a psychiatrist helped design, approve and monitor interrogations at Abu Ghraib.
The atrocity of Abu Ghraib was planned scientifically to break down and psychologically destroy Iraqi prisoners.
British troops were doing the same in southern Iraq.
Baha Mousa, 26, a widower and father of two young children, died after enduring 93 separate injuries as a result of being kicked, punched and restrained by soldiers in Basra in September 2003.
In addition to the assaults and humiliation, which began almost immediately upon arrest, soldiers from the 1st Battalion Queen’s Lancashire Regiment subjected men to interrogation techniques that had been banned for 30 years.
It ws not a one-off. Previously in Kenya, thousands had been hanged and many tortured, even castrated, in the Hola Camp run by the British military in its struggle against the Kenya Land and Freedom Army in the late 1950s. Even bourgeois newspapers at the time exposed the fact that British conscripts were being brutalised and turned into torturers. There are a large number of other examples throughout the years.
Good advice for families whose sons are serving in Afghanistan is to get them home and out of the imperialist war at once.
Our advice to the trade unions is to oppose imperialist wars/massacres and to organise mass demonstrations to demand the withdrawal of all UK troops at once. The unions must draw attention to the fact that the enemy is at home, and is busily smashing up our Welfare State, and must be stopped at all costs.
