New Zealand soldiers die in Afghanistan

This video from the USA is called The Afghanistan War is broken, and we the people are just…broke. This war is sinking the U.S economy.

By John Braddock in New Zealand:

Three New Zealand soldiers killed in Afghanistan

1 September 2012

Three New Zealand soldiers were killed in Afghanistan on August 19 when their Humvee, the last in a convoy of four vehicles, was blown up by a roadside improvised explosive device (IED). They were Corporal Luke Tamatea, 31, a father of four, medic Lance Corporal Jacinda Baker, the first female NZ soldier killed in a combat role, and Richard Harris, aged 21.

The attack occurred just two weeks after the deaths of two other NZ soldiers in the same area of northern Bamiyan province. On August 4, Lance Corporals Pralli Durrer and Rory Malone were killed, and six soldiers seriously injured, when members of the NZ Provincial Reconstruction Team (PRT) were attacked by insurgents armed with anti-tank weapons, rifles and machine guns. The total death and injury toll for the month of August is the NZ military’s worst since November 1951, during the Korean War.

The 140-strong PRT was sent to Bamiyan in 2003 by the previous Labour government following the dispatch of the elite SAS combat unit. According to the government, the PRT is a “peacekeeping” unit carrying out “reconstruction” tasks, such as building schools and hospitals. In reality, the brutal neo-colonial war is aimed at transforming Afghanistan into a base for US economic and strategic dominance over the resource-rich regions of the Middle East and Central Asia. All aspects of the occupation are aimed at ending popular resistance and entrenching the corrupt US-backed regime of President Hamid Karzai.

Despite claims by successive governments and the media that Bamiyan is relatively quiescent and the local population welcomes the activities of the PRT unit, local Afghan officials recently issued contrary warnings. “These provinces are unsafe and we have big concerns about the future,” police chief Jumma Guldi Yaardam told the Guardian newspaper.

According to a report in the Herald on Sunday on August 26, the Taliban, which claimed responsibility for both attacks, has begun targeting NZ troops. Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid told Radio New Zealand: “New Zealand has not sent us workers or engineers. They have sent their soldiers to us. The soldiers don’t do the work of aid or assistance. The soldiers come for secret purposes and they carry guns. They have military equipment and they have entered our country illegitimately, illegally as an invading force.”

The attacks further expose the deteriorating military situation in the face of ongoing Afghan resistance. During August the US military death toll reached 2,000 for the nearly 11-year-old conflict. Nearly nine years elapsed before American forces reached their first 1,000 dead. The second 1,000 came just 27 months later.

The recent fatalities—which have brought the NZ death toll in Afghanistan to 10—triggered a shift in the position of the ruling elite. The PRT is now to be brought home in April, earlier than the original September 2013 date. Prime Minister John Key insisted that New Zealand was not “cutting and running”, but meeting the logistical requirements of an “orderly” withdrawal.

Most media commentary fell into line. The Dominion Post’s editorial of August 7, written after the first ambush, insisted that NZ should “stay the course” and resist the temptation to withdraw ahead of schedule. By August 22 however, the Dominion had turned 180 degrees, intoning that, “whatever the reason,” the government’s decision to advance the withdrawal was “a welcome signal”.

The NZ ruling elites seem intent on washing its hands of the criminal enterprise by declaring the Afghan war “unwinnable”. New Zealand Herald columnist Brian Rudman wrote: “New Zealanders are part of a front line in a war that all are agreed we can’t win.” Fellow Herald columnist Paul Thomas contemptuously declared: “whichever way you look at it, it’s hard to see why that godforsaken country is worth the life of a single young New Zealander, let alone 10.”

Such arguments seek to cover up the fact that from the beginning New Zealand has been a participant in the US-led invasion and campaign of terror against the impoverished Afghan people, tens of thousands of whom have been killed. New Zealand’s military involvement, including four tours of duty by the SAS, was calculated to rebuild defence ties with the US to ensure its backing for the NZ corporate elite’s own strategic interests especially in the Pacific. That has now been achieved with the new defence pacts recently signed with NATO and Washington.

On the night of August 21–22, 2010, New Zealand Special Air Service (NZSAS) commandos led an assault on two villages in the Tirgiran Valley in Baghlan province, Afghanistan. They were accompanied by Afghan special forces and two US Apache helicopter gunships. Six people were killed, including a three-year-old girl, fifteen others wounded and 12 houses destroyed: here.

A recent documentary presented further evidence of the criminal character of the New Zealand Defence Force’s activities in Afghanistan. The Valley aired on TV3 on August 14 and is also available on Fairfax Media’s Stuff.co.nz website. It describes in detail a tactic called “bait and hook”, used by the elite Special Air Service (NZSAS) to terrorise civilians and provoke battles, as well as the offensive and intelligence-gathering operations of the regular army’s so-called Provincial Reconstruction Team (NZPRT): here.

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