COLONEL Gordon Messenger, in charge of the future deployment of British troops in the Helmand region of Afghanistan, was putting a brave face on the posting yesterday.
He said that troops would not ‘hunker down’ and wait for suicide attacks but would tackle the threat of suicide bombers by interacting with the local people.
The reality is that the 4,000 British troops going to Afghanistan are being chased out of southern Iraq, and have been confined to their barracks there for some time because they are intensely unpopular.
Southern Iraq is anti-Saddam and the people who are running the area were placed into position by Britain and were supposed to be friends. Yet far from winning hearts and minds, 100 British soldiers have been killed and many hundreds have been wounded.
This is why 4,000 British troops are being transferred to Afghanistan.
In Iraq, British troops were forced to stop ‘interacting with the people’ because of the heavy casualties that they were taking.
The truth is that in Afghanistan it will be worse.
The colonel also said that the British troops would combat the Afghan drugs trade. Afghanistan supplies most of western Europe with heroin.
The issue here is that the Taleban government, overthrown by Bush and Blair, banned the drugs trade as even the United Nations has admitted.
It was the warlords who returned to the country with the US and UK forces who restarted it and are now making millions flooding western Europe with drugs, and have been allowed to do so by the US and UK.
Faced with attacks from the Taleban, the British forces will not take the risk of alienating the warlords, many of whom are now part of the Afghan army and government. They will be left to enjoy their ill-gotten gains.
Helmand province where the British troops are to be sent, not only has a common and open border with Iran and Baluchistan, it has also become the scene of heavy fighting with Taleban forces who are now being reinforced, according to the local government and police, by Al-Qaeda forces who are being sent from Iraq to fight the British army.
A feature of the fighting in Afghanistan is that the lessons of the Iraq war are being used to the advantage of the Taleban army.
There is a growing use of IEDs (improvised explosive devices), shaped explosives and suicide bombers that have caused so many casualties to the US and UK forces in Iraq.
The local puppet forces say that they have captured people who ‘under interrogation’ have admitted that they received their training in Fallujah and Ramadi insurgent strongholds in Iraq.
This week has seen the biggest battle in the Helmand province for a number of years. The province’s deputy governor has reported that he and 100 soldiers were surrounded by 200 Taleban after he had come to the assistance of a police unit.
Haji Mullah Mir said that he and the surrounded troops only managed to break through the Taleban after 200 more soldiers arrived to help them.
A US military spokesman in Kabul said US aircraft, including A-10 tank busting attack planes equipped with huge rapid firing machine guns, had joined in the fighting. Despite the massive US firepower, Mir said his troops were forced to retreat.
Over the next three years the number of UK soldiers in Afghanistan is expected to rise to 5,700.
It is a case of out of the frying pan of Iraq into the fires of Helmand province. There is not the slightest doubt that British troops should refuse to go to Helmand to do Bush and Blair’s dirty work, and that if they refuse they will be supported by the whole of the working class.