Troops out of Afghanistan

By Pip Hinman

The June 22 Essential Poll shows a majority of Australians (61 per cent) support withdrawing troops from Afghanistan and represents a turning point in opinion on this war.

The same poll revealed that only seven per cent thought more troops should be sent over – Tony Abbott’s position.

The same day the Essential Poll was released, I received a call from a distressed father whose son was currently serving in Afghanistan.

He wanted to know when the next anti-war rally was on so that he could join it.

He said he thought the war useless, and he didn’t believe the government hype about needing to be there to “defend” this country from terrorists.

Sixteen deaths of Australian soldiers – five of those over the last few weeks – is forcing a belated rethink about Australia’s involvement in the nine year old war and occupation of Afghanistan.

Australia entered this war as part of a coalition of countries, led by the US, as pay-back for the terror attacks on the Twin Towers in which 2995 people, including the terrorists, were killed.

After nine years of war in Afghanistan, 1874 US-NATO troops have been killed according to iCasualties.org.

Sadly no-one has kept count of the number of Afghan people who have died in this war. 2009 was the most deadly year since 2001 with some 1050 children killed according to Afghanistan Rights Monitor, a Kabul-based human rights group. 2010 is shaping up to be worse.

New PM Julia Gillard was quick to let the White House know that, under her watch, the Australia-US alliance would remain as strong as ever. She and defence minister John Faulkner keep repeating the tired line that Australian troops have to remain in Afghanistan to “fight terrorism” and help bring development and liberal democracy, especially women’s rights, to that war-torn country.

Afghanistan remains one of the poorest countries in the world. Human Rights Monitor reports that more than one in five Afghan children dies before the age of five. Seventy per cent of people lack clean drinking water. No child growing up today in Afghanistan has known peace. A UNICEF-supported study found that a majority of children under 16 years in Kabul suffer from psychological trauma.

Women remain oppressed. The regime of Hamid Karzai was exposed for rigging the presidential elections last year. In November 2009, Transparency International ranked Afghanistan as the second most corrupt of 180 countries it surveyed.

In reality, the bloody decade-long war has become a major reason motivating some angry and desperate youth from all parts of the world to embark on acts of terror against the US and its allies because of the occupation of Afghanistan.

To quell growing public discontent, Faulkner has also recently announced Australian troops would begin to be withdrawn in two to four years. The job now, he said, was to “transition the main security responsibility to the Afghan National Army in Oruzgan province”.

While this leaves the time frame for withdrawal elastic, it also makes withdrawal contingent on having created an Afghan force capable of ruling in Oruzgan province in the occupiers’ absence. But even this may prove elusive. The occupation forces, numbering around 100,000, have been struggling to prop up a corrupt Afghan puppet state since 2001.

Young soldiers continue to die for no good reason.

Afghan leaders such as MP Malalai Joya are asking for the West to get its occupying troops out: she says that the Afghan people will deal with the fundamentalists – politically.

We need to heed her call. Australia should get its troops out now.

Pip Hinman, is an anti-war activist, and the Socialist Alliance candidate for Grayndler.