[Peace-discuss] Showdown in Brighton on British troops in Afghanistan?

[C. G. Estabrook]

I put this aside to answer and forgot about it.

If one follows Bob's implied exhortation to read the text, one discovers it
isn't a resolution at all.  The statement about Afghanistan is only one of eight
"suggested 'Contemporary Issues'" circulated by CLPD, the Campaign for Labour
Party Democracy (what the Brits might call a "ginger group"). Other issues
include public housing, healthcare, and opposition (sic) to proportional
representation.

The text says, "We urge you to adopt *one of these* for submission by your CLP 
[Constituency Labour Party] or affiliated organisation"!

Pilger's use of "timid" doesn't seem excessive, especially given the much more
important point of his piece, the criminal and fraudulent nature of the war.

Unlike most US journalists, he exposes political lying. He has a long and
distinguished record of not sucking up to politicians...


Robert Naiman wrote:
> Here is the full text of the resolution Pilger denounces as "timid."
> Perhaps he didn't bother to read past the first half of the first
> sentence. I gather that Mr. Pilger makes a practice of dismissing such
> efforts.
> 
> ------------
> ‘The Government should withdraw British troops from Afghanistan’
> 
> http://home.freeuk.com/clpd/contemp_issues.htm#Afghanistan
> 
> Supporting argument:
> 
> Despite intensive media coverage supporting the war in Afghanistan,
> the latest opinion polls indicate that a majority (58%) of the public
> believe that the war is unwinnable and 52% want the British troops
> withdrawn immediately (Independent, 28 July).
> 
> In August the number of British soldiers killed in Afghanistan reached
> 200. Hundreds have been seriously wounded. Thousands of Afghan
> civilians have been slaughtered, their homes and land destroyed. The
> use of drones is highly questionable and there are credible reports of
> the use of phosphorus in bombing raids.
> 
> General Sir David Richards has admitted that there is no hope of an
> end to this war for 40 years. Eight years on, and at a cost of many
> lives and billions of pounds, the resistance is growing, with
> short-term gains soon recovered. Military intervention in the region
> has now de-stabilised nuclear-armed Pakistan resulting in an
> escalation of the conflict.
> 
> In Afghanistan, life expectancy has fallen to 43.1 years, women have
> less freedom, death in childbirth is rising and only a third of girls
> are in education. Afghanistan is one of the poorest countries in the
> world. One in four of the world’s refugees are from Afghanistan. There
> is no justification for this brutal war.
> 
> Rather than keeping terror from the streets of Britain, the war is
> fuelling hatred and increasing the possibility of future attacks.
> Afghanistan must be guaranteed a future without the threat of war and
> foreign domination. Our Government should bring the British troops
> home immediately.
> 
> On Thu, Sep 17, 2009 at 10:37 PM, C. G. Estabrook <galliher at illinois.edu> wrote:
>> "The Afghan war is a fraud. It began as an American vendetta for domestic
>> consumption in the wake of the 11 September 2001 attacks, in which not a
>> single Afghan was involved. The Taliban, who are Afghans, had no quarrel
>> with the United States and were dealing secretly with the Clinton
>> administration over a strategic pipeline. They offered to apprehend Osama
>> Bin Laden and hand him over to a clerical court, but this was rejected.  The
>> establishment of a permanent US/Nato presence in a resource-rich, strategic
>> region is the principal reason for the war..."
>>
>> [It takes an Australo-Brit journalist, an outsider wherever he operates, to
>> say the simple truth that the pathetic toadies in the US ideological
>> institutions -- media and academia -- refuse even to mention.  --CGE]
>>
>>
>>        For Britons, The Party Game Is Over
>>        Sep 17, 2009 By John Pilger
>>
>> On the day Prime Minister Gordon Brown made his "major policy speech" on
>> Afghanistan, repeating his surreal claim that if the British army did not
>> fight Pashtun tribesmen over there, they would be over here, the stench of
>> burnt flesh hung over the banks of the Kunduz River. Nato fighter planes had
>> blown the poorest of the poor to bits. They were Afghan villagers who had
>> rushed to siphon off fuel from two stalled tankers. Many were children with
>> water buckets and cooking pots. "At least" 90 were killed, although Nato
>> prefers not to count its civilian enemy. "It was a scene from hell," said
>> Mohammed Daud, a witness. "Hands, legs and body parts were scattered
>> everywhere." No parade for them along a Wiltshire high street.
>>
>> I saw something similar in south-east Asia. An incendiary bomb had razed
>> most of a thatched village, and bits of charred people were hanging on
>> upended fishing nets. Those intact lay splayed and black, like large
>> spiders. I have never believed you need witness such a hell to comprehend
>> the crime. A standard-issue conscience is enough for all but the morally
>> corrupt and powerful.
>>
>> Fresh from another dysfunctional photo opportunity with troops in
>> Afghanistan "a contrivance far from the impoverished suffering of that
>> country"  Brown "authorized" the Rambo-style rescue of Stephen Farrell, a
>> journalist of British and Irish nationality, at the site of the Nato attack.
>> It was a stunt that went wrong. A British soldier was killed and Farrell's
>> guide, Sultan Munadi, an Afghan journalist, was abandoned and killed.
>> Munadi's family now fully appreciates the different worth of British and
>> Afghan lives.
>>
>> During the 1914-18 slaughter, Prime Minister Lloyd George confided: "If
>> people really knew [the truth], the war would be stopped tomorrow. But of
>> course they don't know and can't know." Have we not yet advanced over a
>> century's corpses to a point where the likes of Brown are denied their
>> mendacious subterfuge? The Afghan war is a fraud. It began as an American
>> vendetta for domestic consumption in the wake of the 11 September 2001
>> attacks, in which not a single Afghan was involved. The Taliban, who are
>> Afghans, had no quarrel with the United States and were dealing secretly
>> with the Clinton administration over a strategic pipeline. They offered to
>> apprehend Osama Bin Laden and hand him over to a clerical court, but this
>> was rejected.
>>
>> The establishment of a permanent US/Nato presence in a resource-rich,
>> strategic region is the principal reason for the war. The British are there
>> because that is what Washington wants. Preventing the Taliban from storming
>> our streets is reminiscent of President Lyndon B Johnson's plaint: "We have
>> to stop the communists over there [Vietnam] or we'll soon be fighting them
>> in California."
>>
>> There is one difference. By refusing to bring the troops home, Brown is
>> likely to provoke an atrocity by young British Muslims who view the war as a
>> western crusade; the recent Old Bailey trail made that clear. He has been
>> told as much by British intelligence and security services. Brown's own
>> security adviser has said as much publicly. As with Tony Blair and the bombs
>> of 7 July 2005, he will bear ultimate responsibility for bringing violence
>> and grief to his own people.
>>
>> More than MPs' fake expenses, it is this corrupting and trivializing of life
>> and death that mark a fitting end to the "modernized" Labour Party, the
>> party of criminal war. Do the delegates preparing for the party's annual
>> rituals in Brighton comprehend this? It says enough that most Labour MPs
>> never demanded a vote on Blair's bloodshed in Iraq and gave him a standing
>> ovation when he departed. One timid motion proposed by the "grass roots" at
>> Brighton might be allowed. This concludes that "a majority of the public
>> believe that the war [in Afghanistan] is unwinnable." There is no suggestion
>> that it is wrong, immoral and based on lies similar to those that led to the
>> extinction of a million Iraqis, "an episode more deadly than the Rwandan
>> genocide," according to one scholarly estimate.
>>
>> This is largely why the game of parliamentary politics is over for so many
>> Britons, especially the young. In 2005, a bent system allowed Blair to win
>> with fewer popular votes than the Tories in their electoral catastrophe of
>> 1997. New Labour's greatest achievement is the lowest turnouts since
>> universal voting began. Today, voters watch Brown give billions of public
>> money to casino banks while demanding nothing in return, having once hailed
>> their practices as an inspiration "for the whole economy." At the recent
>> meeting of G20 leaders in London, Brown distinguished himself by opposing,
>> and killing, a modest Franco-German proposal for a limit on bonuses and
>> penalties for companies that broke it. The gap between rich and poor in
>> Britain is now the widest since 1968.
>>
>> New Labour's causes and effect extend from the one in five young people
>> denied employment, education and hope to the £12m that Blair coins in a
>> year, "advising" the rich and lecturing to them at £157,000 a time. For the
>> more extreme among Blair's and Brown's mentors and courtiers, such as the
>> twice disgraced Peter Mandelson, this represents the most sought after
>> achievement of all: the positioning of Labour to the right of the Tories,
>> though it is probably correct to say the two main parties have converged,
>> now competing feverishly with each other to threaten cuts in public services
>> in order to pay for the bailing out of the banks and for the druglords of
>> Kabul. There is no mention of cutting the billions to be spent on replacing
>> Trident nuclear submarines designed for the defunct cold war.
>>
>> The game is over. Corporatism and a reinvigorated militarism have finally
>> appropriated parliamentary democracy, a historic shift. For those Afghan
>> villagers blown to pieces in our name, one craven motion at Labour's
>> conference is too late. At the very least, the party's "grass roots" might
>> ask themselves why.
>>
>> www.johnpilger.com