Calling time on Afghanistan

Letter to Hull Daily Mail

We held a stall in Hull on Saturday where our petition called for all the UK troops in Afghanistan to be brought home.

For 8 years we have been fighting Afghans, first longer than the Great War and now longer than the Second World War. The costs are huge and recently estimated at £12 billion.

Many people signed our petition including mothers and other relatives of soldiers serving out there. There are military families against the war in Hull and they know about huge levels of corruption in the government, the staggering amount of heroin produced there, and its history where empires have fought over it, whether the British Empire, or the Russians, or now American-led NATO - and usually they have lost.

The proper principle that should be at work here is not the decision of powerful, militaristic countries to conquer others and remake them in their own image, or take advantage of oil reserves or territory, but the principle of self-determination where a people find their own way.

Of course the real cost is in lives, British soldiers on the one hand and Afghan militants on the other and then their civilians too in far greater numbers.

Soldiers and armies have to follow orders. We don't. We have every right and duty to question what our country gets involved in and when it sends our forces into harm's way and that includes knowing when to call time.

Martin Deane
Secretary

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Saving the Bankers With a Make-Believe War

By Peter Chamberlin

July 26, 2009 ""Information Clearing House" -- Pakistanis and Americans have a common problem, which is also shared by every other country on the planet–corruption in high places. The world is made to fret over the impending loss of the entire capitalist system by the overlords of the Western media, even though, the only loss for the common man will be the chains that bind him. We are all supposed to be grieving deeply for the collapse of the money system which has made so many people rich, people whom the media tells us we all want to be just like.

http://informationclearinghouse.info/article23143.htm