NINE UK soldiers have lost their lives in Afghanistan in nine days, making 178 UK troops killed since 2001.
The official propaganda line is that this is a war that must be fought to the end.
In Vietnam, US troops were told that if they did not win the war in Vietnam, and gave up, the rest of south east Asia would fall like dominoes to the Communists, and they would end up fighting the ‘reds’ along the line of the Appalachian Mountains! It was again a war that had to be won.
Vietnam fell to the National Liberation Front, yet no other dominoes fell. Communism did not spread throughout south east Asia, no-mind the Appalachians.
Today, we are being told an even cruder version of the same tall story. It is that if ‘we’ do not fight the Taleban in Helmand province we will be fighting them or their supporters in the streets of the cities of the UK.
This is not the reason why ‘we’ are fighting in Afghanistan.
Afghanistan is a special country as far as the British military are concerned because it was there that the British empire came to grief. British armies were defeated twice in the 19th century, with only one man returning from the second campaign.
Churchill described it as a place where the people of every valley fought their neighbours, until a foreigner intervened, and then they all united until they had expelled their foreign foe.
Since Britain knows the score about Afghanistan, and its Defence Ministers are already talking about a war without end, with casualties being taken on a daily basis, why is the British ruling class risking all to stay there?
The answer is the gas and oil pipelines that are scheduled to criss-cross Afghanistan from the oil and gas fields of central Asia, plus the country’s strategic position adjacent to Iran, Pakistan and China.
Very young British solders are dying on their first day of action after a few months of training, and thousands of Afghan men, women and children are dying because of the strategic requirements of UK imperialism and its ruling class.
Since they cannot survive without the oil and gas of the Middle East, they view this prize to be worth the lives of tens of thousands of British youth.
It is also more than obvious that every time a US drone or a British artillery shell or plane wipes out an Afghan family, and thousands of families have been wiped out, those who demand an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth are driven to exact revenge all over the Middle East and in the UK if they can.
However, British imperialism is not the power that it was in the first half of the last century.
Today it is gripped by a huge capitalist crisis and can finance neither the Welfare State at home nor the imperialist war in Afghanistan.
The imperialist war in Afghanistan is going to send a stream of poison back into Britain.
The cry has already gone up from the bourgeoisie that there must be 20 per cent budget cuts in every government department if British capitalism is to avoid a Zimbabwe-style collapse.
The £25 bn required for the Trident nuclear programme is not even counted in the defence budget.
The cry will go up from the military chiefs for more and more cash to fight the war in Afghanistan, and military spending will be increased to establish a bigger fighting force, while at the same time health, education and the benefit system are to be slashed to shreds.
Political generals will blame the politicians for their defeats, and will demand action against workers at home in order to refinance the Afghan bloodbath.
Defeats in Afghanistan are going to help drive forward the socialist revolution in Britain. This will be a massive victory for both the Afghan people and the British workers.