Wasted Lives
Mission abandoned The US and British governments have failed to accomplish their central war aims in Afghanistan, says Eamonn McCann
B
ritish troops can leave Afghanistan and come home with their heads held high: “Mission accomplished,” David Cameron told them in midDecember. Many will have wondered: what mission was that? Back in 2001, Tony Blair gave two reasons for sending British soldiers to the other side of the world. First, to back up George W. Bush in crushing the Taliban once and for all. And second, to eradicate the production of poppies. Drawing the two issues together, Blair declared: “The arms the Taliban are buying today are paid for by the lives of young British people buying their drugs on British streets. This is another aspect of the regime which we should seek to destroy.” Today, the Taliban are as strong as at any point since they were ousted from Kabul in November 2001. The main perspective now of the US and the Afghan government of Hamid Karzai is to try to identify Taliban leaders with whom they might negotiate a settlement. Nothing accomplished on that front, then. Meanwhile, last year was a bumper poppy harvest. September alone yielded 6,060 tons – more than the combined production of the rest of the world, according to the UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC). A plan introduced in 2010 to cut down production by paying farmers not to plant poppies backfired when thousands of farmers
who had never grown poppies began sowing the plants so as to be paid to stop. Since then, cultivation has been spreading to new parts of the country. This year, according to the UNODC, Afghans have planted poppies in 516,450 acres across 17 provinces, up from last year’s 380,540 acres in 15 provinces. In the meantime, 446 British soldiers have met their deaths – a higher figure than in Iraq or the Falklands – most commonly from improvised explosive devices buried along the dusty roads of Helmand province. They have been killed at four times the rate of US troops, a statistical disparity which nobody at Westminster seems anxious to explain. A snapshot of non-lethal casualties showed that between April 2012 and March 2013, 29 British soldiers had limbs amputated. Twelve of these were classified as “significant multiple amputees.” The average age of those who died was 22. Thirty-one were teenagers, 200 in their 20s. Of the Afghan veterans who had made it home more or less in one piece, the most common cause of death in 2012 was suicide. One reason for the relatively high British casualty rate – in the absence of evidence, this can only be speculative – could be the ignorance and stupidity of British politicians and their carelessness about the lives of the young people they were sending into
The main perspective now of the US and the Afghan government of Hamid Karzai is to try to identify Taliban leaders with whom they might negotiate a settlement
February 2014 | ColdType 3