Anti Afghan war opposition in Britain

This video from the USA is called Rethink Afghanistan: Join the Movement to Stop this War.

From British daily The Morning Star:

NATO conference delegates joined anti-war protesters on Edinburgh’s streets on Saturday as they took their message to the doorstep of the organisation’s chiefs.

Up to 1,000 demonstrators against the war on Afghanistan marched through the city centre where the annual NATO parliamentary assembly is currently taking place.

Also from the Morning Star:

War mum demands pullout

Sunday 15 November 2009

Adrian Roberts

The mother of a soldier who was killed in Afghanistan demanded on Sunday that Prime Minister Gordon Brown bring the troops home. Sergeant Michael Lockett, from 2nd Battalion The Mercian Regiment, died while on a patrol in the Gereshk district of Helmand province on September 21. He had received one of the nation’s highest awards for gallantry and was investigating and confirming the discovery of an improvised explosive device when it exploded, killing him.

His mother April Lockett said the war in Afghanistan would not make a difference and was putting soldiers’ lives at risk unnecessarily. She told the Sunday Mail: “I just feel now that these lads are now sitting ducks, cannon fodder. They are just going out there to get shot at. “It is time for Gordon Brown to bring those soldiers home.” His mother said she was struggling to cope with the loss of her “golden boy,” who was from Monifieth in Angus.

“The grief is still as raw as the day I was told he was dead. People say it gets better with time, but it doesn’t,” she added.

A landmark report by Oxfam this week will also expose the real human cost of the war. The powerful dossier by the aid agency reveals how women and children in Afghanistan are bearing the brunt of the ongoing conflict, undermining the international community’s claims that they are the very people being helped by the West’s occupation. Its contents will add to mounting concerns among the public – and in some quarters of the military and the House of Commons – that the US and Britain are fighting an ill-conceived and ill-judged war. The conflict has left as many as 32,000 Afghans dead and 235,000 displaced.

Stop the War Coalition official Robin Beste asked on Sunday: “Why is it that 57 per cent of the British people know this war is unwinnable and Gordon Brown doesn’t? “The only conclusion must be that he is placing his own reputation above the needs of the country, for fear of having to admit the futility of all the lives lost and devastation caused by his war policies.

The institutions that scream the most how we must respect our fallen soldiers through poppies and Remembrance Day are the same ones that are most keen to have a new bunch of wars to create a new generation of dead soldiers to remember: here.

British imperialism being cut down to size by the crisis: here.

USA: Alexis Hutchinson, an Army Specialist, is being told either go to Afghanistan or be court martialed, even though she was told she’d be granted extra time to find care for her 11-month-old son: here.

Dahr Jamail, author of The Will to Resist: Soldiers Who Refuse to Fight in Iraq and Afghanistan, reports on a cruel case of Army callousness. The Army wants to court-martial a single mother who missed deployment because she couldn’t find care for her infant son: here.

This week begins with a significant new straw in the political wind for President Obama to consider. The California Democratic Party has just sent him a formal and clear message: Stop making war in Afghanistan: here.

The US government has been accused of attempting a cynical whitewash over its Bagram airbase “black” detention facility in Afghanistan.

The increasingly public dissension within the Obama administration over the proposed escalation in Afghanistan reflects the reality that US imperialism has no good options in the war that it launched more than eight years ago: here.

In a shift, German Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle and Defense Minister Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg have been speaking frankly about devising a plan to get German troops out of Afghanistan: here.

Jobless, displaced and bitter—life inside the West’s occupation of Afghanistan: here.

Related articles

• Afghan war anniv. rally to hit London (rinf.com)
• Australia in Afghanistan: The ‘bittersweet’ ending to our longest war (abc.net.au)
• British soldier killed in Afghanistan (theguardian.com)
• US ‘Subsidizing’ Afghan Companies With Ties to Terrorism (goldenageofgaia.com)
• Sell, Give Away and Destroy: the Dismantling of America’s Presence in Afghanistan (world.time.com)
• Watch Highly Disturbing Footage of Detainee Abuses in Afghanistan (rollingstone.com)
• Australian troops to stay in Afghanistan beyond 2014 (eutimes.net)
• US Soldiers Participate in Torture of Afghan Detainees (antiwar.com)