THE imperialist invasion of Afghanistan is coming apart at the seams.
In fact, the UK troops themselves are now rejecting it, as a legitimate operation, while the Afghan leader Mullah Omar has publicly stated that the war has been won by the Afghan people, and that it is just a matter of time before the imperialists quit Afghanistan, in a similar manner to the way that US forces quit Vietnam.
The puppet president Karzai has also got the same message.
While his relatives are busily purchasing properties all over the world, in readiness for their own retreat from Afghanistan, Karzai is in constant negotiations with the different factions of the Taleban, hoping to be able to make some sort of deal with them.
Even in the ‘stronghold’ of imperialism, the US, more than one high official is calling for the war to be given up as lost and for the country to be partitioned between the Pashtuns and the peoples of the north.
However, it is far too late even to attempt to impose this partitionist solution onto Afghanistan.
Amongst the UK’s troops many consider that the lives of their mates have been thrown away for nothing, and these sentiments are leading to a contempt for doing their duty.
Two recent instances stand out as the proof of this position.
First of all there is the celebrated case of the 59 lost one-thousand-round-a-minute machine guns, some of which the US army found in the possession of the Taleban.
The missing machine guns were not reported by the British command for a year after they went missing, and only then after some of them fell out of the hands of the Taleban, into the hands of US troops.
The officer corps only informed Defence Secretary Fox this week of this sale of the century, with 59 of these ultra-modern weapons going missing without anybody noticing it.
Investigation has shown that the machine guns were flown from the UK to Camp Bastion last October and were then transported overland to Kandahar, disappearing before they arrived at Kandahar, but with nobody any the wiser as to the loss.
This could well have been a nice little earner, and how many other examples of the enterprise culture are taking place, nobody knows or is willing to say.
Then there is the question of the heroin trade.
Military police in Britain are investigating reports that British and Canadian troops are smuggling heroin out of Afghanistan.
Published reports in Canada say Canadian Forces military police are looking into the accusations.
The investigation is focused on airports at Camp Bastion and Kandahar, where British and Canadian soldiers allegedly helped ship heroin from the war-torn country to airports abroad.
British troops at airports in Camp Bastion and Kandahar are under investigation and security has been tightened with additional sniffer dogs brought in as part of the crackdown.
If any British troops are found to have smuggled illegal narcotics they will ‘feel the full weight of the law’.
We would say that the full force of the law should be used on those that sent them to Afghanistan in the first place.
General Sir David Richards, the new head of Britain’s Armed Forces fears that the government is losing public support for the war in Afghanistan.
The truth is that the public has never supported this imperialist war, and supports the immediate withdrawal of all NATO troops. What is required is mass action, both political and industrial to force their withdrawal.
