Four separate polls undertaken throughout July by the BBC/ Guardian, ITN, The Times and the Independent consistently showed that the majority of Britons want immediate or rapid withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan. Yet the sources largely downplayed their findings.
The ICM study, conducted 11 July for the Guardian, found that 42% of people want Britain to pull out now and 14 % by the end of the year – putting 56% of Britons in favour of withdrawal.
The Guardian, however,…
This month, lance corporal Joe Glenton of the Royal Logistic Corps faces court martial for refusing to return to combat in Afghanistan. Glenton joined the army in 2004, and in 2007 went absent without leave after serving his first tour in Afghanistan. He is thought to be the first British soldier to openly resist government policy.
In a speech on 23 July organised by the Stop The War Coalition, lance corporal Glenton described his experience on the ground in the Middle East.
…“I don’t think the public are up for it any more. Everything has changed. We as a nation don’t want to send out soldiers anywhere” – former foreign office minister Kim Howells
Though the British government has run a highly successful propaganda campaign, significantly boosting support for the war amongst the British public, the recent media furore over British casualties has been causing concern in Washington.
Some anxiety
A senior US official told the Financial…
The Afghan presidential election on 20 July – the results of which may not be known until mid-September – has already received a fair amount of critical coverage in the British press.
The Times reported that a third or more of those registered to vote (including one “Britney Jamilia Spears” of Kandahar) probably didn’t exist, and that the run-up to the polls had “been characterised by horse-trading between the candidates and an array of warlords and power-brokers who promise[d] to…
Recent media coverage of the deaths of British soldiers in Afghanistan obscures an uncomfortable reality: that US/NATO forces are responsible for much – perhaps most – of the killing in Afghanistan today.
On 9-10 July, eight British soldiers were killed in Afghanistan. In their front-page headline the next day, the Guardian branded it “The bloodiest day”, while the Sunday Telegraph called it “the bloodiest 24 hours in Afghanistan.”
Only, of course, it wasn’t.
…
RAF pilots in Afghanistan are firing an increasing number of brutal “enhanced blast” thermobaric weapons, the Ministry of Defence admitted in May. Since the modified Hellfire AGM-114N weapons were bought from the US in May 2008, over 40 are known to have been fired. 20 were fired in 2008 (in seven months), while over 20 had been fired up to May this year (in five months).
Thermobaric weapons, known earlier as “fuel-air explosives”, cast a fine mist of fuel throughout a wide area,…
Opinion polls in Afghanistan and Pakistan in the last few months have reinforced the message that the people of the region want a negotiated solution to the conflicts currently raging. Such a solution is more attainable, given recent progress in the Afghan national reconciliation process. In Afghanistan, the International Republican Institute (IRI) carried out a poll in mid-May, published in June, that showed 68% of Afghans think “the government should hold talks and reconcile with the…
Hamid Karzai has selected Mohammad Qasim Fahim – “one of the most notorious warlords in [Afghanistan], with the blood of many Afghans on his hands from the civil war” (according to Human Rights Watch) – as one of his two vice-presidential candidates in the August elections.
Human Rights Watch identified Fahim as a key commander in the February 1993 Afshar massacre, when about 800 members of the Shia Hazara minority were killed in Kabul. An international official in Kabul has…
On 3 May, more than 100 Afghan civilians were killed during airstrikes on the villages of Gerani, Gangabad and Koujaha in Farah province, western Afghanistan.
The US/NATO have confirmed that they use white phosphorus in Afghanistan, but when accused of particular white phosphorus attacks, they suggest (without providing any evidence) that the Taliban may have fired the rounds.
Meanwhile, on 19 May, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees reported that 1.5m Pakistanis had been…
British commentators have been greatly impressed by Obama’s “new” strategy for the wars in Afghanistan/Pakistan (unveiled on 27 March, after PN2508 went to press), with the Independent’s leader writer claiming that it represented a “[complete] U-turn… shift[ing] the focus on to civilian projects and training”. “Fears in some quarters that the US planned an Iraq-style military ‘surge’, to be preceded by demands for many more combat troops from supposedly lily-livered European allies, were…
Western attention has focused once again on the plight of women in Afghanistan, as the result of the Shia Family Law, passed by Afghan president Hamid Karzai in March. The law, which gives Shia husbands enormous legal powers over their wives, provoked 300 women to mount an almost-unprecedented demonstration outside a madrassa run by one of Afghanistan’s most powerful Shia clerics, Mohamad Asif Mohseni, on 15 April.
Another view
Nelofer Pazira, Afghan-Canadian film-maker…
In 2008, a small group of women in Kandahar, Afghanistan, decided to gather in a public square to pray for peace with justice in Afghanistan on International Women's Day. They expected only a few women to show up, but more than 1500 women gathered in Kandahar that day. This year on Women's Day thousands of women across Afghanistan demonstrated for peace and women's justice wearing sky-blue scarves to highlight unity and solidarity across generations, languages, geographic locations, ethnic…
Obama’s Guantanamo
On coming into office, US president Barack Obama promised to shut down the US prison camp for suspected terrorists on Guantanamo within a year and to fight terrorism “in a manner that is consistent with our values and our ideals”. As our last issue went to press, Obama quietly indicated that he will continue to deny the right to trial to hundreds of terror suspects held at Bagram air base in Afghanistan, a place human rights lawyers call “Obama’s Guantanamo”. Bagram…
US president Barack Obama came to power promising both to talk to his enemies and to “finish the job” in Afghanistan (a phrase he used while visiting Kabul in July 2008). We are now seeing how these contradictory pledges are shaping US policy: “talking to enemies” has been revealed to be little more than propaganda; “finishing off the enemy” – through military escalation – is the core policy. The escalation is not only in Afghanistan, but across the border into Pakistan, and not only in the…
It is now over seven years since US and British forces invaded Afghanistan. For much of this time there has been little news about the country, with the attention of the US and anti-war activists focused on Iraq. This is now changing however, and Obama has followed up his campaign pledges by committing an extra 17,000 US troops to Afghanistan. Britain enthusiastically supported this move, and is likely to increase the 9,000 UK troops already there.
In this context then, increasing our…
