LABOUR’S Defence Secretary Des Browne admitted yesterday that the Taleban resistance movement in Afghanistan is making NATO’s attempt to control the country ‘harder than we expected’ and has created a crisis for the imperialist military alliance.
Speaking to the Royal United Services Institute in London he said: ‘The Taleban’s tenacity in the face of massive losses has been a surprise, absorbing more of our effort than we predicted it would.’
Although he tried to dress up the imperialist attempt to subjugate Afghanistan with the usual propaganda, describing it as ‘a noble cause’, he was forced to say that ‘success won’t be what we understand by security and prosperity and proper governance’.
So it is clear that the continuing NATO occupation and killings is not about these things!
Browne said ‘the majority of those involved in recent fighting’ are ‘ordinary Afghan tribesmen’, who were led by ‘a hard core who are implacable, irreconcilable and determined to fight to keep their impunity in the South, and possibly to reclaim the whole country’.
This signifies that the Taleban is determined to drive out the foreign imperialist invaders and restore the independence of the country. That is what has rattled Blair’s Defence Secretary and the architect of the war, US President George Bush.
Browne made his speech only a day after NATO’s largest operation in Afghanistan came to an end. Operation Medusa, around Kandahar, involved thousands of Canadian-led troops, during which five Canadians and 14 British soldiers were killed.
On the day before Browne’s speech, 18 people were killed in bomb attacks in the country, including four Canadian soldiers in the southern Pashmul province and three policemen in Kabul.
So no part of the country is safe for the imperialists – Kabul, in the south, and in central and eastern Afghanistan.
Under these conditions, Browne could not hide the huge crisis this has provoked within the NATO imperialist alliance. Member states are not sending the thousands of troops military chiefs are demanding.
Browne said: ‘As has been widely reported, NATO have estimated they need 2,500 more troops – 1,000 of whom are combat troops. We are still in the middle of the process of finding them.’
He mentioned that Poland is to send troops (in four months’ time) and the Canadians are increasing their forces, but others are merely ‘considering whether they can do more’.
Browne added: ‘I know that some of our partners feel, with some justice, that they have done their bit, and many are now focused on other tasks elsewhere in the world.’
Here he is alluding to the fact that the US is preparing to pull out most of its forces because Bush is considering new imperialist wars against countries like Iran and Syria, and has got his hands full in oil-rich Iraq.
There, more than 200 bodies have turned up on the streets of Baghdad in the past few days and 1,535 people were killed in the capital in August. Alongside this the death-toll of US and British troops is mounting every week in Iraq.
Browne’s speech signals that the British working class must act now to stop NATO’s slaughter of Afghan villagers and allow the people of Afghanistan to decide their own future. This cannot happen at gunpoint, under an imperialist military occupation.
Workers must demand their trade unions call mass strike action to bring down the Blair government to back the demand for the withdrawal of British troops from Afghanistan and Iraq.
The organisation of such a general strike will have the support of millions of workers and middle-class people who hate this Labour government, because of its wars, and the privatisation and destruction of the NHS, education and council housing.
The Blair regime is already a lame-duck government. Now is the time to put it out and replace it with a workers’ government that will stop the imperialist-organised bloodbath in Afghanistan and Iraq by withdrawing British troops immediately.
