SIXTEEN US troops were killed in Afghanistan in July, more than were killed in Iraq!
In fact, NATO casualties are mounting rapidly as the war with the Taleban intensifies. So far, 113 British troops have been killed and many hundreds have been very seriously wounded. It is expected that the British death toll will reach 200 by the end of 2008.
All the talk of the Taleban being beaten has suddenly been abandoned by UK military spokesmen, as British troops continue to be challenged in the fiercest fighting since the desperate battles with the Chinese Red Army in the Korean war in the early 1950s.
Now even the aid organisations are beginning to speak up about the desperate state of affairs in Afghanistan.
They are saying that they are becoming more and more unable to operate in parts of the country that were once deemed to be safe because of the intensification of the fighting.
A statement issued by 100 aid agencies spoke of a 50% increase in insurgent attacks compared to last year, and that the aid agencies themselves were increasingly coming under attack.
In their statement, the aid agencies criticised the rising number of civilian deaths, which they said were not only caused by insurgents but also by international forces’ air strikes which used massive firepower to try and relieve or rescue hard pressed US and UK troops.
The statement by The Agency Co-ordinating Body for Afghan Relief (Acbar), an umbrella group of non-governmental organisations, expressed its ‘grave concern about the deteriorating security situation in Afghanistan and the serious impact on civilians’.
Acbar said there had been 463 insurgent attacks in May and 569 in June.
June saw more attacks on NGOs than in any month since the Taleban’s overthrow in 2001 and some agencies have been forced to scale back operations, after 19 aid workers were killed.
The statement added that the growing number of air strikes by international military forces, up by about 40% on last year, had killed thousands of completely innocent civilians.
Afghanistan’s ambassador to the United Nations, Zahir Tanin, has even asserted that the bloodshed was connected to peace deals between Pakistan’s four-month-old government and Islamic militants in the north-western tribal areas, over the border.
He also referred to allegations that members of Pakistan’s powerful spy agency had colluded with militants in Afghanistan.
The New York Times has even reported that intercepted communications had provided evidence that Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence was involved in last month’s suicide attack on the Indian embassy in Kabul which killed more than 40 people.
This is the war that would-be President Obama and Prime Minister Brown are planning to send many thousands more US and UK servicemen into.
It is believed that US and UK military specialists are not satisfied with the current US policy of using drones and missiles to attack suspect houses and fortifications inside Pakistan which they believe that the Taleban is making use of.
They are already planning for the new US president to give the go-ahead to bomb Pakistani targets and engage in hot pursuit operations into Pakistan, that they believe will win them the war.
Similar hopes were entertained during the Vietnam war but they ended in disaster, with US troops fleeing Saigon, clinging to the rails of helicopters.
Hot pursuit operations into Pakistan, or a US organised coup to bring back a military government to Pakistan, will only create millions of more allies for the Taleban.
Workers in the west must not allow any expansion of the Afghan war. In fact they must organise trade union action, including strikes to stop it.
This year’s TUC conference must see emergency resolutions demanding that the TUC organise industrial action to stop the war in Afghanistan and to bring down the Brown government.