' ' ' Conscientious Dissent

Afghanistan occupation quagmire enters ninth year

2009-09-30T08:53:00.001+10:00

By Hamish Chitts

October 7 marks eight years since the US-led coalition of imperialist powers and their client states invaded Afghanistan. Using the shock of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on New York and Washington as a smokescreen, the invasion of Afghanistan was the first major step in the US rulers’ “Global War on Terror” — the official name of a sustained campaign of Pentagon and CIA operations aimed at crushing all opposition in the Third World to US political and economic dominance.

While most people in the US were mourning the deaths of the thousands of victims of al Qaeda’s attacks, the central figures in the Bush administration was plotting how to exploit 9/11 to rally support for an invasion of Iraq. While then-president George Bush, vice-president Dick Cheney and defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld wanted to launch an immediate US attack on oil-rich Iraq, then-secretary of state Colin Powell persuaded Bush that “public opinion has to be prepared before a move against Iraq is possible”. Instead, it was agreed to first authorise a war against the Taliban regime in Afghanistan, which was providing sanctuary to al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden.

The collapse of the Taliban regime after a short US Air Force bombing campaign seemed to demonstrate the invincibility of US military power. However, as Washington Post assistant managing editor Bob Woodward revealed in his 2002 book Bush at War, it was due largely to the CIA’s bribing of local Afghan warlords to turn against the Taliban regime. According to Woodward, six CIA paramilitary teams distributed US$70 million to the traditionally mercenary Afghan warlords during the last three months of 2001. With local warlords turning their militias against them, the Taliban leaders and their militia fled to the mountains of eastern Afghanistan. With the “victory” in Afghanistan, the Bush administration turned to the real objective of the War on Terror — a “regime-change” invasion of Iraq, aimed at establishing US control over its large and cheaply extractable oil resources.

Eight years later, Afghanistan has become a military quagmire for the US-led occupation forces, with a resurgent Taliban-led armed resistance movement inflicting increasing casualties on the occupation forces, which now number 62,000 US and 34,000 allied foreign troops, including 1550 Australian troops. By the end of September, the occupation forces had suffered 1415 deaths since their invasion of Afghanistan, 77% of them since the end of 2005. Last year, there were 294 coalition military fatalities in Afghanistan; in the first nine months of this year there were 370.

Fraudulent elections

On August 20, a presidential election was conducted in Afghanistan. So far, due to widespread fraud, officials in Afghanistan have been unable to declare a result. In the lead up to the election, Australia, the US and UK all increased their troop numbers supposedly to ensure a “safe” and “fair” election. According to the September 21 Washington Post “only 39 percent of registered voters turned out, compared to 70 percent in the 2004 Afghan elections”. This 39% figure is based on a count of the number of ballots that were supposedly cast — 5.7 million. But this number gets even smaller as, day-by-day, more revelations surface of ballot box stuffing, individuals voting multiple times and many other incidents of electoral fraud across Afghanistan. The Press TV website reported on September 21 that election observers from the European Union “said that around one and a half million votes in favor of incumbent President Hamed Karzai could be fraudulent” and “that 300,0000 of the votes cast in favor of Abdullah Abdullah (main opposition candidate) are also suspicious”. The EU observer mission also said that another 100,000 suspicious votes were cast for other candidates.

Ghaith Abdul-Ahad, reporting for the London Guardian daily on September 18, met an election official from the district of Ahmad Aba in Paktiya who showed him “a series of photographs taken inside a brown cardboard voting booth in a village in Paktiya province of Afghanistan. One shows a man marking a big pile of ballot papers in the name of Hamid Karzai. Another shows a pile of election ID cards spread in front of an unidentified man wearing black shoes. ‘This man brought 120 cards and he used each of them to vote three times’, said the official.” He told Abdul-Ahad that he had taken the photographs to hand to his superiors but as election day unfolded he realised that his superiors were themselves taking part in the fraud. “I thought I would give the pictures to the election committee. But they were all working for Karzai.” The same official also said: “Everyone was cheating in my polling station. Only 10% voted, but they registered 100% turnout. One man brought five books of ballots, each containing 100 votes, and stuffed them in the boxes after the elections were over.”

A preliminary tally has put Karzai in the lead with 54% of the total vote — 3.1 million of the 5.7 million votes cast. Abdullah has 27.7% of the total vote. But with nearly 2 million of those ballots labelled suspect by observers and countless reported incidents of electoral fraud, the UN-backed Election Complaints Commission says it cannot announce a winning candidate until it has investigated all the complaints.

With US, EU and UN officials openly arguing with each other over how this electoral impasse should be resolved, even Afghans supportive of the occupation are turning against foreign interference in Afghan affairs. Ghulam Abbas, a shop assistant at a menswear store in central Kabul, told the Washington Post that he did “not understand how an election monitored by tens of thousands of international troops and observers could have been bungled so badly … In every other country, the results are known in three days, five days, at least a month. It shows the weakness of our government that they still can’t show a final result. And we don’t know the reason. Was it too much fraud? Or something else?”

Majority opposition

While the US-led occupation is being resisted by more and more people in Afghanistan, support for the occupation is also declining in the countries whose working people are being asked to fight, kill and die for it. CNN reported on September 15 that a CNN/Opinion Research Corp. survey released that day “indicates that 39 percent of Americans favor the war in Afghanistan, with 58 percent opposed to the mission. The 39 percent figure is down from 53 percent in April, and marks the lowest level of support since the start of the U.S. military mission in Afghanistan”.

In Australia the corporate media and government haven’t conducted any opinion polls on the occupation of Afghanistan since an Age/Nielsen poll in March, which showed 65% were opposed to PM Kevin Rudd’s decision to send more troops and 51% opposed Australian involvement outright. A BBC poll last November found 68% of Britons opposed the war and the September 10 Channel 4 News reported a survey by Britain’s National Army Museum that found only 25% of voters supported the war.

According to the Pew Global Attitudes Project, majority opposition to the occupation of Afghanistan is the overwhelming sentiment around the world, including in countries involved in the occupation. On August 31, the Washington-based Pew Research Center reported that 54% of Germans oppose it, as did 58% of Italians, 64% of French voters, 74% of Dutch voters, 52% of Canadians, 52% of Portuguese, 54% of Spaniards, 68% of Poles, 61% of Slovaks, 71% of Romanians and 72% of Bulgarians. There is majority opposition in nearly all countries not involved in the occupation, the exception being the racist, apartheid state of Israel, where 59% support the occupation of Afghanistan.

In the face of this global opposition to their occupation of Afghanistan, how have the US rulers and their allies responded? Washington and London have decided to send more troops and are pressuring other governments to do the same. This troop escalation will be additional to the major troop “surge” earlier this year by most occupying nations, including Australia. That surge was supposed to bring decisive victories for the occupation forces and “stabilise” the country for the August election. It did not and now the military top brass are saying another surge is needed to stop the first surge from failing.

General Stanley McChrystal, the top US commander in Afghanistan, was reported in the September 22 Australian as saying, “Failure to gain the initiative and reverse insurgent momentum in the near-term, while Afghan security capacity matures, risks an outcome where defeating the insurgency is no longer possible”. The number of US forces in Afghanistan is already slated to reach 68,000 by the end of this year, twice as many as were deployed there last year. According to the September 20 New York Times, McChrystal wants at least 45,000 more US troops deployed to Afghanistan.

In previous issues of Direct Action, comparisons have been made between the US-led wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and the failed surge-after-surge strategy employed during the 1961-75 Vietnam War by the US and its allies. Now, in another echo of the failed Vietnam War strategy, McChrystal is saying that the increased troop numbers are needed to change tactics. “We must do things dramatically differently — even uncomfortably differently — to change how we operate, and also how we think. Our strategy cannot be focused on seizing terrain or destroying insurgent forces; our objective must be the population”, he wrote in a leaked 66-page report. McChrystal is proposing concentrating on more, smaller-sized counter-insurgency groups operating in conjunction with “hearts and minds” reconstruction operations — the same tactics used in Vietnam!

It seems that the rewriting of the history of Vietnam War in the US has gone so far that US generals believe they won it and that application of the same tactics will work against the anti-occupation resistance fighters in Afghanistan. The failure of the occupiers to bring even a shadow of formal democracy to Afghanistan has lost them support among those originally favourable to the occupation. The Integrated Civilian-Military Campaign Plan for Afghanistan, signed by McChrystal and US ambassador Karl Eikenberry on August 10, noted that while most Afghans reject the reactionary “Taliban ideology”, “Key groups [of Afghans] have become nostalgic for the security and justice Taliban rule provided”, as compared to the arbitrary and corrupt rule of Karzai’s drug-running warlord-backed regime.

If most people in Afghanistan are against the occupation, if most people in the countries with occupying troops are against the occupation and if most people in the rest of the world are against the occupation, how can Kevin Rudd or Barack Obama say this war is being fought for “democracy”? Just as the people of Vietnam defeated foreign invasion and occupation so too will the people of Afghanistan. The question is how long and how many people will die before this happens? Workers and soldiers in occupier countries like Australia need to take a stand and work together to make sure the end of the occupation of Afghanistan happens sooner rather than later. We are the anti-war majority! Bring all the troops home now!

From Direct Action, Sydney, Australia

[Hamish Chitts is a member of the Revolutionary Socialist Party and one of the founders of Stand Fast — a group of veterans and military service people against the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. For information about Stand Fast visit the Stand Fast website or phone 0401 586 923.]

Support the troops - bring them home now!

2009-08-10T15:21:00.005+10:00

By Hamish Chitts

[The following article is based on a speech given on behalf of the war veterans group Stand Fast at a public meeting in Rockhampton on July 10 as part of the Peace Convergence protests against the bi-annual joint Australian and US Talisman Sabre war rehearsals that occur in and around environmentally and culturally sensitive Shoalwater Bay. Talisman Sabre ’09 occurred between July 6-26 and involved 30,000 Australian and US troops. — Ed.]

Stand Fast is a group of veterans and former military personnel who oppose the current wars of occupation in Iraq and Afghanistan. Our members include veterans from World War II, Korea, Vietnam, the first Gulf War, East Timor and the current occupation of Iraq. We who have borne arms denounce these wars because they are about money, power and fear.

Stand Fast seeks to add weight to the antiwar movement in Australia through organising veterans to speak out against the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and by debunking the myth that “If you’re against the war, you’re against the troops”. We are also encouraging current serving members of the Australian Defence Force to inform themselves about what is really happening in Iraq and Afghanistan. We will provide advice and support for those who may question serving in either of these wars.

During the Vietnam War, an antiwar movement grew within the US military and by 1970, the US Army had 65,643 deserters — roughly the equivalent of four infantry divisions. In an article published in the June 7, 1971 Armed Forces Journal, Marine Colonel Robert D. Heinl Jr., a veteran combat commander with over 27 years experience in the Marines and the author of Soldiers Of The Sea, a definitive history of the Marine Corps, wrote: “By every conceivable indicator, our army that remains in Vietnam is in a state approaching collapse, with individual units avoiding or having refused combat, murdering their officers and non-commissioned officers, drug-ridden, and dispirited where not near mutinous. Elsewhere than Vietnam, the situation is nearly as serious … Sedition, coupled with disaffection from within the ranks, and externally fomented with an audacity and intensity previously inconceivable, infest the Armed Services ...”

In 1972, there was fear among some US generals that the majority of their armed forces would mutiny and take control if the Vietnam War did not end soon. Of course, we should recognise that ultimately it was the determined resistance and courage of the Vietnamese people that ended the war there.

Stand Fast also draws inspiration from the US-based group Iraq Veterans Against the War. Through IVAW, many have heard public testimony of the horrors of Iraq and Afghanistan across the US. Hundreds of IVAW members travel to schools, universities and demonstrations to speak out against these wars. Their testimony is having a strong pull on people in the US to protest against these wars, and their organisation is growing amongst the US armed forces. In the past few years, tens of thousands of US soldiers have resisted the occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan in a number of different ways — by going AWOL, seeking conscientious objector status and/or a discharge, asserting the right to speak out against injustice from within the military, and for a relative few, publicly refusing to fight.

While there are those who would like to dismiss war resisters as “cowards”, the reality is that it takes exceptional courage to resist unjust, illegal and/or immoral orders. For many resisters, it was their first-hand experiences as occupation troops that compelled them to take a stand. For others, “doing the right thing” and acting out of conscience began to outweigh their military training of blind obedience.

When an Australian soldier dies everyone is made aware of it, but there are Australian casualties occurring everyday in Iraq and Afghanistan that no one sees or hears about. Through my own experiences as a former infantry soldier and through those of my mates, I can tell you no-one who sees active service comes back the same. Recent figures from the US have shown that troops coming back from Iraq and Afghanistan are suffering three times more Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder than their counterparts did on return from Vietnam.

Military personnel are risking their minds as well as their bodies. But for what? For what are Iraqi and Afghan civilians paying with their bodies and their minds? It is being done for oil, in the interests of multinational corporations and it is being done for strategic real estate for the US military. Most people recognise this about Iraq, but not everyone knows that the same reasons have brought about the occupation of Afghanistan. In 1998, Californian company Unocal withdrew from negotiations with the Taliban government after failing for several years to be allowed to build a gas pipeline from gasfields in Turkmenistan through western Afghanistan to Pakistan and the Indian Ocean.

One of the negotiators for Unocal was a fellow named Zalmay Khalilzad. As a special adviser to Bush, Khalilzad was involved in planning the US invasion of Afghanistan, and afterwards it was named US ambassador to the puppet regime installed by the occupation forces. That regime, headed by Hamid Karzai, is comprised of warlord thugs and opium barons who are no better to the people of Afghanistan than the Taliban thugs they replaced. But the pipeline project is back on track.

Apologists for these invasions try to frame them as some form of self-defence, as if the thousands of Iraqi and Afghan civilians who have been slaughtered by these invasions had the capability or even the desire to attack countries like Australia or the US. Anyone who has any illusions that these wars are about stopping terrorists should look at the current deals being done between the Karzai government, the Taliban and Gulbuddin Hekmatyar. Hekmatyar, who is on America’s “most wanted” terrorist list, is the leader of Hezb-i-Islami, which has been fighting NATO troops alongside the Taliban.

Karzai has said that he would bring members of the Taliban and Hezb-i-Islami into peace negotiations (including offers of government positions and regional governorships) and include them in a tribal council. The US has voiced its opposition to this but, in what is becoming the defining character of the Obama administration, it says one thing and does another. The US administration has agreed to fund an Afghan government department to conduct negotiations with Hezb-i-Islami and the Taliban. It has agreed to kick in nearly US$69 million to offer sweeteners to win over the Taliban and other resistance forces.

Kevin Rudd has called Afghanistan a “good” war. It is not. It is no better than the war in Iraq and it is being fought for the same reasons. Many people thought Rudd and his party were antiwar. When they voted they hoped to end Australian involvement in these occupations. Many are still sitting at home hoping, but after two years and an increase in Australian involvement, it is clear this hope is an illusion. There are still almost 1000 ADF soldiers and sailors in the Iraq war zone, allegedly to assist operations in Afghanistan.

The majority of people in this country oppose the occupation of Iraq. The majority of people in this country oppose the occupation of Afghanistan. We can’t rely on Rudd anymore than we can rely on any other politician. That is why we need to keep building a movement against these occupations. We need to build a movement that can unite dissenting soldiers, peace activists, antiwar activists, political groups, community groups and unions. To do this we need to campaign for demands like “Bring the troops home now!” — demands that all these diverse groups can rally behind.

This weekend is a good example. There are many different people protesting for many different reasons but they are all here rallying behind the demand “Stop the Talisman Sabre war games!” We need to build this movement to show real support for the people in the armed forces, to show our real support for the people of Iraq and Afghanistan by demanding from the Rudd government a true and complete troop withdrawal from Iraq and Afghanistan immediately.

Both the ADF and the US military describe Talisman Sabre as, “focusing on operational and tactical interoperability through a high-end, medium intensity scenario involving live, virtual, and constructive forces. Includes combat operations transitioning into peacekeeping or other post-conflict operations.” Now if you cut through the military jargon, this means the Australian and US militaries refining their ability to conduct future Iraq and Afghanistan-style invasions and occupations of sovereign nations. This is one of the reasons I’m here representing Stand Fast in protest against these invasion and occupation rehearsals. Support the troops — bring them home now!

From Direct Action Sydney, Australia http://directaction.org.au/

Afghanistan: Karzai builds warlord alliance

2009-07-07T16:12:00.003+10:00

By Hamish Chitts

On August 20, Afghanistan will conduct its second presidential election under the US-led occupation. Current Afghan President Hamid Karzai is the clear frontrunner in the election, despite a December Gallup poll having found that only 10% of Afghans supported Karzai’s government. Karzai was handpicked by the US to head the Afghan government during the US-led invasion in late 2001.

During the 1980s US-backed war by Afghan Islamists against the Soviet-backed secular leftist People’s Democratic Party government, Karzai was the CIA’s contact in Afghanistan. When the Pakistani-created Taliban emerged in the mid 1990s, Karzai was an initial supporter but then broke with them, refusing to serve as their UN ambassador after they took control of Kabul in 1996. However, in August 1998 he told the Washington Post that “there were many wonderful people in the Taliban”.

The Taliban was driven out of Kabul and other Afghan cities in late 2001 after — as the Washington Post’s Bob Woodward detailed in his 2002 book Bush at War — the CIA and US Special Forces distributed US$70 million in bribes to buy the support of local warlords who had previously backed the Taliban regime.

While the US-led invasion of Afghanistan was underway, 16 representatives of Afghan militia factions opposed to the Taliban met in December 2001 in Bonn, Germany, under the auspices of the UN to set up a new Afghan government. According to the US Public Broadcasting Service’s September 2002 Frontline program “Campaign Against Terror”, “In a surprise move, the US arranged for Hamid Karzai, the Pashtun leader whom the US was promoting as a viable candidate for leading the interim administration, to address the opening session of the conference via satellite phone from inside Afghanistan.” By the end of the Bonn conference, on December 5, Karzai had been selected to head the Afghan Interim Administration.

In an effort to appear independent of his US masters, Karzai has become increasingly outspoken in criticising the slaughter of Afghan civilians by the occupation forces. After a May 4 US air strike in the western province of Farah that killed at least 140 civilians, Karzai told the crowd of mourners: “I have been talking to the foreigners about preventing civilian casualties on a daily basis for the past five years. I tell them ‘terrorism does not live in the houses and villages of Afghanistan … those who wear turbans and Afghan clothing are not necessarily Taliban. Stop bombing them’.”

Karzai’s ‘narcostate’
US President Barack Obama’s administration has responded to Karzai’s criticisms by publicly labelling his government corrupt. In January, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton told the US Senate: “Afghanistan has turned into a narcostate ... The Afghan government is plagued by limited capacity and widespread corruption.” This fact has long been known. The January 9, 2006 Newsweek, for example, reported that Ahmad Wali Karzai, President Karzai’s half-brother, was “alleged to be a major figure” in the opium trade “by nearly every source who described the Afghan network to Newsweek”. Since the overthrow of the Taliban, Afghanistan has emerged as the source of 90% of the world’s heroin supply. Under the US-backed Karzai regime, opium exports account for 52% of Afghanistan’s GDP

The June 24 New York Times reported that “Karzai has deftly outmaneuvered a once formidable array of opponents, either securing their backing or relegating them to the status of long shots” in the upcoming presidential election. “With the Taliban now stronger than ever — early this month, attacks reached their highest level since 2001 — a Karzai victory could threaten the American-led push to turn the war around...

“Yet there is a widespread perception among Afghans that Karzai is the American favorite. Some American officials express resignation that they may be stuck with him for five more years. Indeed, the Obama administration appears to have begun preparing for that prospect. American officials, for instance, have done nothing to oppose the discussions between Karzai and Zalmay Khalilzad, the former American ambassador here, about Khalilzad’s becoming a senior official in a new Karzai administration.”

Karzai has been increasing his chances for re-election by creating an alliance of warlords. On June 1, the Bloomberg news website reported that “While large parts of the east and south [of Afghanistan] are out of Karzai’s control because of a renewed Taliban insurgency, his political authority over the rest of the country is intact. He’s bought off once-powerful warlords with government positions, and appointed loyalists as governors in each of the 34 provinces.”

The May 10 London Sunday Times reported that “One of Afghanistan’s most wanted terrorists is to be offered a power-sharing deal by the government of President Hamid Karzai as the country’s warlords extend their grip on power. Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, who is on America’s ‘most wanted’ terrorist list, is to hold talks with the Kabul government within the next few weeks. Hekmatyar is the leader of Hezb-i-Islami, which has been fighting Nato troops alongside the Taliban … [His group] is expected to be offered several ministries and provincial governorships in return for laying down its arms and agreeing not to disrupt the presidential elections due in August…

“A representative of Richard Holbrooke, President Barack Obama’s regional envoy, has met Daoud Abedi, an Afghan-American businessman close to Hekmatyar, and the US administration will fund an Afghan government department to conduct negotiations with Hezb-i-Islami and the Taliban. It will be headed by Arif Noorzai, the former tribal affairs minister, and will receive $69m (£45m) of largely US money to offer sweeteners to win over the Taliban.” The Obama administration’s effort to bribe the Taliban is a clear admission that Washington is losing the war.

Growing GI resistance
Growing numbers of US soldiers are seeing through the lies that they are defending democracy in Afghanistan. Organised through Iraq Veterans Against the War (IVAW), soldiers are joining the growing resistance to participating in Washington’s Afghan war. One example is IVAW member and GI Victor Agosto, who has refused to fight in Afghanistan and may face court martial for doing so.

Agosto, who returned from a 13-month deployment to Iraq in November 2007, is based at Fort Hood in Killeen, Texas. On May 19, Agosto was ordered to get his medical records in preparation to deploy to Afghanistan. He refused to do so. “There is no way I will deploy to Afghanistan. The occupation is immoral and unjust. It does not make the American people any safer. It has the opposite effect”, he told the Inter Press Service on May 21. Agosto had already been questioning his service in Iraq and saw parallels with Afghanistan. “Both occupations fuel the insurgencies in those countries. We are creating ‘terrorists’ and we are killing so many innocent people.” He argues that the wars are both “power plays” whose real intent is to “establish more control and spread US hegemony.”

US Army soldiers are resisting service at the highest rate since 1980, with an 80% increase in desertions, defined as absence for more than 30 days, since the invasion of Iraq in 2003, according to the Associated Press. More than 300 US soldiers fled to Canada, 75 of them to Toronto. Many assumed they’d get a visa, settle down and live a normal life. But the Canadian government has rejected their refugee claims and ordered them deported. Some go into hiding. Others wait for appeals and judicial reviews of their cases. Many US soldiers stationed in Europe who refused service in, or in support of, the wars in Iraq or Afghanistan have been tried in US military courts in Europe and imprisoned in the US military’s prison at Mannheim. The most well known are Blake Lemoine in 2005 and Agustín Aguayo in 2006-2007.

From Direct Action Sydney, Australia http://directaction.org.au/

Australian death squads in Afghanistan

2009-06-14T11:16:00.004+10:00

By Hamish Chitts

Last month the Melbourne Age revealed that members of the Australian Defence Force (ADF) had covered up the killing and wounding of civilians in Afghanistan by Australian Special Air Service (SAS) troops. In the same month, The Australian newspaper proudly reported the use of SAS patrols as death squads carrying out assassinations in Afghanistan.

In July 2006, near Tarin Kowt in Uruzgan province, Abdul Baqi was driving with members of his family when their car was fired upon. Baqi was killed, his wife blinded and their daughter so badly injured she later had a leg amputated. His son, a niece and a nephew were also injured. Afghan MP Haji Abdul Khaliq, who is related to the victims of the attack, told the May 11 Age he was convinced Australian soldiers were responsible. Khaliq said: “We asked the governor and police chief who made the investigation. They said that they were Australians [who had fired at the car]. They did not give any sign to stop. And my car’s windows were not dark. Inside the car was visible.” He said none of the Australian soldiers helped the injured. “They didn’t even give them a bottle of water and they didn’t even take them to hospital.”

ADF chief Angus Houston told an Australian parliamentary hearing in early 2007 that an investigation had found no substance to the allegations that Australian troops were involved in the shooting. An ADF spokesperson told The Age that Khaliq’s claims did “not correspond to coalition patrol reporting”. This contradicts the evidence ADF investigators found — that a SAS patrol was nearby when Baqi’s car was attacked and reported a “contact” (meaning they’d fired their weapons) in the same area where the car was hit. At the time, the SAS patrol believed taxis were ferrying Afghan resistance fighters in the area. Abdul Hakim Monib, the former governor of the area, told reporters that a senior ADF officer had told him Australians were responsible. “They expressed their sorrow for the incident and they said, ‘We thought they were the enemy.’ They said it was a mistake and we are upset about it”, said Monib.

Plausible deniability?
The Age reported that it was “almost certain” the information about Australian troops having attacked the Baqi family was not passed on to Houston before he gave his testimony to the parliamentary committee. However, it is unlikely that relatively low-ranking ADF investigators, upon finding that Australian troops may have killed and maimed the family of an Afghan MP, would decide not to inform the officials in Canberra. It is more likely that the Australian government tried to conceal the fact that Australian operations had resulted in the slaughter of innocent civilians. Prime Minister Kevin Rudd has refused calls to hold an independent investigation and has asked Houston to set up an investigation of the original investigation, whose correct findings never saw the light of day.

Prior to the 2003 invasion of Iraq, the US and Australian governments used the supposed existence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq to justify the invasion. When they could no longer hide the fact that these weapons did not exist, these same governments called this “a failure of military intelligence” and blamed their intelligence agencies for not giving them the correct information. In reality, it was known even at the lowest levels of Australia’s spy organisations that there were no weapons of mass destruction. When the truth came out, the politicians were ably assisted in covering up the fact that they had lied to a few senior intelligence officials, who took the blame for deceiving the public and resigned — taking decent payouts and still able to pursue lucrative consulting contracts with private military and security corporations.

The Department of Defence has yet to release the findings of two inquiries into allegations Australian troops were responsible for the deaths of Afghan civilians this year. In January, an Australian military operation allegedly left four civilians dead. Five children were killed in an incident involving Australian troops in February. No doubt investigators will find there is no substance to these allegations as well.

Phoenix program revisited
The May 7 Australian reported that ADF special forces troops had taken part in a “targeted assassination” of a senior Taliban leader, Mullah Noorullah. The report could not say how senior Noorullah was, nor when the assassination took place, but it did say the assassination occurred in Deh Rafshan district in southern Uruzgan, where the Australian Special Operations Task Group is based. The Australian went on to admit: “The SOTG tag is commonly used by [the ADF] as a synonym to describe elite Special Air Service operatives authorised to hunt and kill Taliban leaders in an Afghan variation on the Vietnam-era Phoenix Program.”

The Phoenix program officially ran from 1967 to 1972, but the US and its allies in Vietnam employed similar tactics before and after these dates. Through infiltration, detention, terrorism and assassination, the program was designed to “neutralise” the civilian infrastructure supporting the National Liberation Front (NLF) of South Vietnam. The program used small special forces units, including the Australian SAS, for the systematic murder of Vietnamese civilians suspected of supporting the NLF. Men, women and children who were family members of an alleged NLF leader were massacred. Between 20,000 and 70,000 people were murdered, and tens of thousands more were detained and tortured.

The US military and CIA also used these methods in Latin America throughout the 1970s and ’80s and up to the present day. US-funded and trained death squads have propped up brutal and unpopular pro-US governments in Chile, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras and Nicaragua. In Colombia they continue to operate, murdering union officials and anyone considered a left-wing leader. Today Washington uses death squads in an attempt to destabilise the leftist government of Bolivia and the revolutionary government of Venezuela.

Washington has also used death squads in Iraq since 2003. In a report by Rafael Epstein for the ABC Lateline program in November 2008, Australian Major General Jim Molan admitted to overseeing assassinations of suspected resistance supporters. In 2004 Molan was chief of operations, coordinating all of the occupation forces in Iraq. He said:“I conducted these kind of operations every day of the week for the year that I spent in Iraq. We go to extraordinary lengths to try to get it right. But in a war, things don’t always go the way you want them to go and unfortunate accidents, incidents, do happen.”

Operation Peeler
Operation Peeler is the name given to the activities of Australian SAS death squads in Afghanistan’s Uruzgan province. According to Australian military documents, its aim is to “disrupt Taliban leadership and Improvised Explosive Device facilitators”. This means night raids on villages, doors kicked in and detention or assignation of people suspected of being part of or supporting the resistance. Those detained face torture at the hands of local and foreign interrogators — the same people behind extraordinary renditions, waterboarding and the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse.

In November 2007, the SAS killed three men, two women and a child during an assault on an alleged insurgent house. The alleged insurgent was not there. Last September, the SAS was ordered to assassinate someone identified as “Musket”. Pro-government villagers thought the approaching Australian troops were resistance fighters; the Australians thought the villagers were resistance fighters and in the ensuing gunfight mistakenly shot dead a district governor, Rozi Khan, and another man and wounded five others. An Australian investigation found: “The forensic evidence is not available to definitively attribute responsibility for Rozi Khan’s death.” During March and April this year, the SAS reportedly carried out a major operation in parts of Helmand province that resulted in the deaths of 80 alleged Taliban fighters. In at least one case, it called in US air strikes on a civilian house where a resistance commander was allegedly making a last stand.

The use of Australian SAS troops as death squads that originate in the US Phoenix program should disgust all working people, including soldiers involved in Operation Peeler. The fact that these operations continue under Rudd and US President Barack Obama should shatter any illusions that these politicians are any different from Howard and Bush. There is no real difference between the policies of the leading capitalist politicians in Australia and the US; they all serve the interests of imperialist capitalism, with its drive to dominate the natural and human resources of the Third World.

From Direct Action Sydney, Australia http://directaction.org.au/

Rudd government prepares for new wars

2009-05-14T16:00:00.008+10:00

By Hamish Chitts

The global crisis of capitalism is being used by the ALP as an excuse to water down workers’ rights and measures to tackle climate change as well as for a general "belt tightening" of public services. But the Rudd government is keeping its commitment to maintain the Howard government’s annual 3% real increase in the Australian Defence Force (ADF) budget. This will increase from $22 billion last year to almost $24 billion this year. In 2009, military spending will surpass 2% of GDP, a level not reached in almost 20 years. This is Australia’s biggest military build-up since World War II.

A new white paper, unveiled by PM Kevin Rudd on May 2, outlines the long-term build-up of the ADF, led by a multi-billion-dollar naval investment. The navy will receive 12 new submarines to replace the current Collins-class vessels. This will double the size of Australia’s submarine fleet and enable the navy to deploy up to seven submarines to the north of Australia, including at "choke points" of maritime traffic in the Indonesian archipelago. Also on the shopping list are eight 7000-tonne warships equipped with ballistic missile defence systems, a new class of 1500-tonne corvette-size patrol boats and at least eight P-8 Poseidon long-range surveillance aircraft. Six new heavy landing ships and 24 naval combat helicopters will also be purchased.

The air force will get 100 new F-35 fighters and seven pilotless aerial surveillance vehicles, possibly the US-made Global Hawk, operating out of an expanded Edinburgh air base in South Australia. The army is to get seven new Chinook helicopters, 1100 personnel carriers, and new rockets and mortar systems. The Defence Signals Directorate will set up a centre to increase the electronic spy agency’s monitoring of internet and telephone communications. The white paper claims the upgrades are all aimed at boosting capacity to move ADF units en masse, allowing the military to "act independently where we have unique strategic interests [the Asia-Pacific region]". A new land-attack cruise missile able to travel almost 400 kilometres will be fitted to submarines, frigates and air warfare destroyers.

Threats rather than solutions
In a speech addressing a US think-tank, the Center for a New American Security, in Washington on April 10, titled "Australia and the United States: The Indispensable Alliance", Australian war minister Joel Fitzgibbon said: "Our global security environment will be challenged by the consequences of climate change and associated resource security issues, involving future tensions over the supply of food, energy and water". Fitzgibbon admits that the Australian government recognises the catastrophic consequences and potential human suffering resulting from climate change. What is its solution? Boosting its ability to use military force, rather than serious plans to reduce climate change or provide assistance to people affected by it.

This is not a policy failure of this particular government but a standard capitalist response to crisis. Speaking at an Australia-Israel Chamber of Commerce function on April 24, Rudd said his "government will not resile even in the difficult times from the requirement for long-term coherence of our defence planning for the long-term security of our nation. This is core business for government." That is, in times of crisis, the priority is to maintain and increase the capabilities of the military in order to protect the property and profits of Australian big business, not to look after the interests of the working majority. A beefed-up military is needed to secure overseas profits for Australian capitalists and to suppress any resistance to this from the exploited here or abroad. And it is working people who have to pay for this permanent war footing — with cuts in their living standards, or with their very lives.

Talisman Sabre ‘war games’
Of course, Canberra will not do this on its own, but as part of its imperialist alliance with Washington. As part of this alliance the ADF conducts regular war preparation exercises with the US military. The biennial Australian-US war "games" known as Talisman Sabre 09 (TS09) will be held from July 6 to 26, involving 30,000 troops from both militaries in the Timor Sea and at joint Australian-US training facilities: Shoalwater Bay in Queensland and Bradshaw and Delamere Range in the Northern Territory. Support sites will include ADF and civilian facilities in Australia, offshore and overseas. The main purpose is to increase "interoperability" between the two militaries. The Australian Department of Defence says the exercise will practise "combat operations transitioning into peacekeeping or other post-conflict operations" — i.e., Afghanistan-style operations and other future wars of occupation of Third World countries.

TS09 is to proceed despite many concerns raised by its two predecessors in 2005 and 2007. Negative environmental, social and economic impacts and the rights of Aboriginal people all take second place to Australian imperialism’s military alliance with Washington and the US military’s need for large tracts of land and sea for target practice.

Shoalwater Bay is home to the largest dugong population in the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park World Heritage Area and is considered crucial to the stabilisation and recovery of local dugong numbers. The region also supports nesting sites for green turtles and critical feeding areas for turtles and dugongs and is home to 26 species of dolphins and whales, including humpbacks. Cowley Beach, also part of the reef heritage area, contains important wetlands and has nationally significant populations of migratory birds. There are endangered and vulnerable species of both flora and fauna. The Delamere Range is located within the Kakadu wetlands catchment, and this region hosts threatened fauna and migratory species.

Nuclear-powered vessels, potentially carrying nuclear weapons and almost certainly carrying depleted uranium munitions, were used in TS07. They pose a nuclear risk. In Tokyo in 2006, radiation was detected in the waters around a nuclear-powered submarine, the USS Honolulu. The impact of nuclear radiation on the Great Barrier Reef is not known.

Perchlorate, an ingredient of live ammunition, is highly toxic. Perchlorate has been found in groundwater in 25 US states and near many US bases overseas. The people of Byfield and Yeppoon are concerned that perchlorate may be leaking into their water supply because one of the live firing areas at Shoalwater Bay is within the catchment of their water supply. Despite the risk, local authorities will not test the water.

Red and white phosphorus are extremely toxic. Mangrove death has been reported from past use of white phosphorus in military exercises in Shoalwater Bay. Red phosphorus is used in markers for sea mines and has been released into waters in the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park in previous exercises. Red phosphorus markers washed ashore on a Yeppoon beach after TS05.

It is the policy of the US Navy to dispose of domestic waste (including paper and plastic) overboard — a significant threat to marine wildlife. Other impacts include ballast release, reduced air quality, collision with marine animals, fire potential, noise pollution, waste disposal (including sewage,) chemical and fuel spills, erosion from amphibian craft landings and weapons damage.

Social cost
As well as an enormous monetary cost, there is a social cost when large numbers of troops are allowed "rest and recreation" in one place. Around the world, military bases have become centres of major social problems. The governor of Okinawa in Japan has said that US bases on the island brought a major increase in prostitution, drugs, alcoholism, rape, sexually transmitted diseases and abuse of women and children. The Anglican Church in Hobart has reported frequent sexual assaults on juvenile men and women by visiting US service personnel.

Many of the training areas to be used during TS09 contain sacred sites and areas of significance to Aboriginal people. In the Shoalwater Bay area alone, there are thousands of archaeological sites providing evidence that the Darumbal people regularly moved between the mainland and nearby islands to access food and raw materials or for ceremonial purposes. The Darumbal wish to re-establish physical and spiritual links to their land. They state that ownership of, and access to, land and sea are the basis of their cultural renewal.

Protests against TS09 will occur during the exercises. The largest will be on July 10-12, when protesters from across Australia will converge on Shoalwater Bay and nearby Rockhampton. By taking a stand against the threats posed by TS09, these protests provide an opportunity to highlight the militarist madness of capitalism to people in general and especially to members of the US and Australian military forces. This madness can be stopped only when workers and soldiers unite to replace capitalist rule with working people’s governments, governments capable of organising working people to replace the capitalist profit system with a socialist planned economy oriented to meeting social needs and sustaining the environment. For more information on the protests against TS09, visit Peace Convergence.

From Direct Action Sydney, Australia http://directaction.org.au/

Veterans Group reflects on brutality of war and question how politicians use our armed forces on ANZAC Day

2009-04-23T23:41:00.004+10:00

Press release

23 April 2009

The Australian-based veterans group Stand Fast, comprised of veterans and former military personnel who oppose the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, today called on people to reject blind patriotism and flag waving this ANZAC Day. Stand Fast has called for reflection on the brutality of war and for people to question if Australia’s current wars are really in the interest of the people of Australia.

In Brisbane Stand Fast spokesperson and East Timor veteran, Hamish Chitts said the group thinks the increasing spectacle of flag waving and cheering on ANZAC Day departs from its origins as a sombre day of remembrance. The group is concerned that this trend stops people openly questioning these wars amid fears that they will be accused of being ‘unpatriotic’ or not supporting the troops.

Vietnam veteran and Sydney based Stand Fast member Gerry Binder said, “The original idea was to remember the brutality that war is so that we would never let it happen again, not marching up and down with bands and people waving and shouting and cheering.” He said, “I’ve marched in Anzac Day marches and I was horrified that people are bringing their kids to cheer, to clap. I don’t want to be congratulated; I want them to understand that this must not be repeated.”

In Melbourne former army Major Chip Henriss, a Bouganville and East Timor veteran said, “I march on ANZAC Day every year but along with my medals I wear a button that says "War is Terror". For us in Australia it's been about mainly young people that have gone off time after time on what we believed was a just crusade only to return wounded physically and mentally. Yes I love the mates I served with and many of whom continue to serve but it doesn't mean I can't see these wars for what they are.”

According to Chitts Stand Fast believes that “to claim these wars bring democracy and that they are in our best interests are ridiculous. Stand Fast believes politicians are looking after the interests of big business and dressing it up to look like the people of Afghanistan or Iraq have the capability and desire to attack Australia”.

Former Royal Australian Navy officer Mark Rickards led over 70 vessel boardings in the Red Sea following the first Gulf War. Speaking from Hobart Rickards said, "Anzac Day is an opportunity to pay tribute to those who served, and particular who died, in wars which were fought in defence of peace. However it is also the perfect time to stop and reflect on the growing death toll of Australian service personnel who are currently serving in unjust wars.

Chitts continued, “These members of parliament, both Labor and Coalition vie with each other to be more ‘the diggers friend’ than the other. Most have never served in the Defence Force and would be horrified if their children did. As veterans, our thoughts are with all those who have suffered from war, those still suffering physically and mentally because of war and all those still in harm’s way in Iraq and Afghanistan. No more blood should be shed for the profiteers. Those who truly support the troops should join the call to bring all the troops home now”.

For further information contact Hamish on 0401 586 923 or email standfast.au@gmail.com or visit www.stand-fast.webs.com

Afghanistan: Rudd endorses Obama’s war surge

2009-04-16T15:14:00.004+10:00

By Hamish Chitts

By the end of March, 10 Australian soldiers had been killed in the US-led occupation of Afghanistan, including nine in the past 18 months. Last month alone, there were two Australian Defence Force deaths in separate incidents as the Rudd government endorsed Washington’s decision to escalate the occupation forces’ war in Afghanistan. Total “coalition” fatalities in Afghanistan had reached at least 1061 by the end of March, 90% of which have occurred since 2005. The number of Afghan war dead is unknown.

On March 27, US President Barack Obama announced what he called “a broad new approach on Afghanistan”. Obama actually narrowed official US goals — replacing the stated aim of bringing “democracy” to Afghanistan with a more limited mission to “defeat” the Saudi Arabian millionaire Osama bin Laden’s al Qaeda terrorist network. “I want the American people to understand that we have a clear and focused goal: to disrupt, dismantle and defeat al Qaeda in Pakistan and Afghanistan, and to prevent their return to either country in the future”, Obama said.

In addition to the plan announced in February to send an extra 17,000 US troops to Afghanistan, Obama now plans to send 4000 more to serve as trainers and advisers to the US-created Afghan army. The new strategy calls for a “civilian surge” involving mainly international police training Afghan police and greater economic aid for Afghanistan and neighbouring Pakistan. With the arrogance typical of the world’s self-appointed cop, Obama proclaimed benchmarks for the governments in Islamabad and Kabul to measure their progress in fighting “al Qaeda”.

War against al Qaeda?
In reality, the imperialist powers’ counter-insurgency war in Afghanistan is against Afghan anti-occupation guerrillas organised by the leaders of the Taliban, an Afghan Islamist movement created, with Washingtion’s approval, by the Pakistani military intelligence agency in 1994-95. The Taliban ruled most of Afghanistan from 1996 to the end of 2001. Following the 9/11 al-Qaeda terrorist attacks, Washington decided to invade and occupy Afghanistan as a propganda preparation for the prime target of its “Global War on Terror” — US-imposed “regime change” in oil-rich Iraq.

After six years of counterinsurgency war in Iraq, in which more than 1 million Iraqis and 4300 US troops have been killed, Obama announced on February 26 that “by August 31, 2010 our combat mission in Iraq will end”. However, he also announced that he plans to leave up to 50,000 US troops engaging in “targeted counter-terrorism missions” in the Iraq warzone for an indefinite time after this date. Bringing US troop numbers in Iraq to the same level as in Afghanistan is thus being sold by the Obama administration to the US public as the “end” of Washington’s Iraq war. Immediately after Obama made his Iraq “Mission Accomplished” announcement, NBC Pentagon correspondent Jim Miklaszewski reported that “one senior military commander told us that he expects large numbers of American troops to be in Iraq for the next 15 to 20 years”.

In an interview with the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s March 26 7.30 Report television program, David Kilcullen, a former Australian army officer who now works as a top ranking US State Department counterinsurgency warfare adviser, estimated that it would take at least another 10 years for the US-led occupation forces to militarily defeat the Afghan resistance forces.

Obama’s new strategy for Afghanistan demands that Washington’s puppet Afghan government do more to fight corruption, curb the drug trade and share power with the regional authorities. These noble-sounding goals are purely for US public consumption however. The majority of the warlords now ruling Afghanistan have been bribed to remain loyal to the US since the formation of the Northern Alliance that defeated the Taliban government in 2001. Now the receivers of these bribes are expected to fight corruption!

Obama’s idea of Afghan President Hamid Karzai’s government sharing power with Afghan regional authorities is a veiled admission that the supposedly democratically elected central government controls little more than Kabul itself.

While urging a counter-narcotics effort to curb “one of the Taliban’s key funding sources”, Obama ignored the fact that many officials in the Afghan puppet regime make a lot of money from opium. In a 2007 report for the US Army War College’s Strategic Studies Institute, John Glaze wrote: “Afghan government officials are now believed to be involved in at least 70 percent of opium trafficking, and experts estimate that at least 13 former or present provincial governors are directly involved in the drug trade ... In some cases ... [local leaders] are the same individuals who cooperated with the United States in ousting the Taliban in 2001.” US officials know that if they tried to eliminate the Afghanistan opium trade, they would lose most of their Afghan collaborators. The new counter-opium effort will be aimed only at the 30% of the opium trade protected by the Taliban resistance forces.

Rudd’s honour guard at Pentagon
On March 26, a week after the latest ADF fatality in Afghanistan, a military honour guard welcomed Australian PM Kevin Rudd to the Pentagon. This was the first time in his 27 months as US war secretary that Robert Gates had welcomed a foreign head of government in this way. A spokesperson for Gates said: “It was not merely a sign of respect for the prime minister, but a measure of our appreciation for Australia’s contributions on the battlefields of Afghanistan”. Rudd enjoyed US military honours in Washington because he’s been willing to sacrifice soldiers’ lives for the imperalist occupation of Afghanistan, despite a majority of Australian voters now being opposed to Australia’s involvement in this war.

In New York the next day, Rudd described Obama’s new Afghanistan strategy as “absolutely right” and a “credible long-term strategy denying terrorists a safe haven in Afghanistan”. Rudd then invoked the 9/11 attack on the New York World Trade Center to justify the continuing occupation of Afghanistan, ignoring the fact that none of the perpetrators of that attack were Afghans and that al Qaeda is headquartered in Pakistan.

The Rudd government claims that the soldiers it has sent to Afghanistan have died fighting for “freedom”, but the realities of the occupation show it is not for the “freedom” of the Afghan people. A recent survey by several aid agencies found that, while in 2004 nearly 80% of Afghans surveyed thought security was improving, now nearly 80% say security has worsened. While the killing of civilians by foreign bombs and village searches by occupation troops has turned many Afghans against the occupation, it is the US- (and Australian-) backed warlords and opium barons who have made life for many Afghans even worse than it was under the religious fanaticism of the Taliban. According to the Afghan news website Quqnoos, just one hospital, the Ibn-e Sina Emergency Hospital in Kabul, has had more than 600 suicide attempts referred to it during the past 12 months. The deputy director of the hospital said they are “mainly women, trying to commit suicide to flee violence in life”. This is in the capital, Kabul, which has supposedly enjoyed “freedom” for seven and a half years!

At the beginning of March, the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission said that poverty has forced 80% of the children in western Ghor province into labour. Marzai Rahimi, head of the child development section of the commission in Ghor, said that “the children who are forced into labour are aged between 7 years and 16 years”. She said that 60% of girls were forced into marriages before reaching adulthood. “When these girls go to the houses of their husbands, they force them into labour”. Particularly in poor rural communities, child slavery and debt bondage are growing, but are often disguised as marriage, labour or family affairs.

Extreme poverty, lack of awareness about child rights, weak law enforcement and conservative traditions have forced many children into debt bondage. Destitute parents sometimes offer their young daughters as “loan brides” in order to pay off debts, settle feuds or achieve other social and economic benefits. Drug smugglers who pay poor farmers in advance often demand young brides when farmers fail to produce opium and lack other means to repay their debts. In the western province of Herat, the department of women’s affairs and a local rights group said more than 150 cases of selling children, mostly girls, were reported in 2008.

The Rudd government’s commitment to Obama’s war escalation in Afghanistan will lead to more deaths of Australian soldiers and more Afghan deaths. What are these deaths for? Is it to continue a war originally undertaken as a propaganda preparation for the harder-to-sell invasion of Iraq? Is it for military honour guards when Australian politicians go to Washington? Is it to maintain a regime of thugs and opium barons that brutalises its own people? The US-led forces have already politically lost this war. It is time to bring all the troops home now.

From Direct Action Sydney, Australia http://directaction.org.au

Labor tiptoes around sending more troops to Afghanistan

2009-03-10T11:54:00.001+10:00

By Hamish Chitts

Australian soldiers of the Special Operations Task Group (SOTG) were searching through homes in southern Uruzgan province on February 12, when, they claimed, they were fired on by Afghan resistance fighters. The troops returned fire, killing five children and wounding two children and two adults. In a slightly conflicting report, the Afghan Defence Ministry said one woman and two children were killed and eight other people wounded. However, its condemnation of the Australian Special Forces was clear: "The Defence Ministry condemns the martyring of one woman and two children and the wounding of eight others ... in an operation by international forces ... and asks international forces not to conduct operations without the coordination of Afghan forces."
Australian troops help occupy Afghanistan as part of the nobly named International Security Assistance Force. The ISAF is led by the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO), which in turn is dominated by the United States. Last September, due to mounting anger in Afghanistan over civilian casualties, the ISAF issued a directive saying its soldiers should not enter an Afghan house or mosque uninvited without having the lead from the Afghan army. The directive also said ISAF troops should retreat if they were able and there was a risk of civilian casualties. While this directive sounds like an important concession for minimising civilian casualties, the recent actions of the Australian SOTG and other ISAF forces prove that the directive does not reflect the tactics still being employed.
In order to minimalise their own casualties the foreign forces (as in Iraq) are ignoring the presence of unarmed civilians and using greater firepower than ever in their military operations. So-called advances in weapons technology have not only made hand-held weapons, like grenade launchers, more deadly but have also made rapid assaults like air strikes more readily available to the ground forces occupying Afghanistan. If troops approaching a village are fired upon, they can call on the air force to bomb the building (and surrounding buildings) where the shots came from rather than fighting house to house. If the troops are already in a built-up area they can employ their own devastating weapons in a similar way.
The killing of unarmed civilians by the occupation forces has turned more and more Afghans against the occupation and its puppet government in Kabul. On February 18, US President Barack Obama ordered that an additional 17,000 US soldiers be sent to Afghanistan. The US plan to increase the number of occupation troops in Afghanistan will only lead to an increase in the numbers of those taking up arms against the foreign occupiers.

Canberra under pressure
Since Obama’s announcement, the US has been pressuring its allies to increase their occupation troop numbers. The day after Obama’s order, US war secretary Robert Gates said: "The [US] administration is prepared ... to make additional commitments to Afghanistan, but there clearly will be expectations that the allies must do more as well."
Australia is the largest non-NATO contributor to the ISAF, but Australian war minister Joel Fitzgibbon downplayed this in order to point the finger at other nations for not rallying to the US call. On February 18, Fitzgibbon said: "Australia could double its troop numbers tomorrow, and without significant additional contributions from others it would make no difference. We have always said this is not about numerics. It’s about ensuring, [before] we even consider doing more, that those NATO countries, which I believe are under-committed, are prepared to do more."
Fitzgibbon has tried to sidestep whether the Australian government will add to the 1090 troops it already has in Afghanistan by saying other countries have to commit first. The pressure is now back on the Australian Labor government because other countries are increasing their troop commitments. Germany has announced it will send an extra 600 troops, while Italy said it would add an additional 500. The February 21 London Daily Telegraph reported that Britain, which has 8300 troops in Afghanistan, is considering sending 1500 more.
British foreign minister David Miliband said on a recent visit to Kabul that Britain was already paying a high financial and human cost for its role in Afghanistan: "The high level of British casualties is something which brings trauma to Britain." London wants to spread more of this trauma to its NATO allies by announcing plans for a 3000-strong permanent defence force for NATO in central Europe. In an interview with the Financial Times, British war secretary John Hutton said the force could persuade some reluctant NATO countries to send more troops to Afghanistan, by assuring them that there were enough NATO troops to defend alliance home territory.
At a February 20 meeting in Krakow, Poland, NATO war ministers agreed to make "election security" in Afghanistan a top priority. The US and especially its NATO allies are using the excuse of a "constitutional crisis" in Afghanistan to justify a troop surge. Hamid Karzai’s "mandate" as Afghanistan’s president runs out in May, but there will not be elections until August. The NATO powers are citing the potential political instability from this "constitutional crisis" as the reason more NATO troops are needed, rather than the reality of a growing popular resistance to the occupation.
The February 19 British Independent reported that a confidential NATO document that it had seen gave clear evidence of this reality. Summarising the document, the Independent reported: "Direct attacks on the increasingly precarious Afghan government more than doubled last year, while there was a 50 per cent increase in kidnappings and assassinations. Fatalities among Western forces, including British, went up by 35 per cent while the civilian death toll climbed by 46 per cent, more than the UN had estimated. Violent attacks were up by a third and roadside bombings, the most lethal source of Western casualties, by a quarter. There was also a 67 per cent rise in attacks on aircraft from the ground, a source of concern to Nato which depends hugely on air power in the conflict."

‘Tough year’ ahead
The top US commander in Afghanistan, General David McKiernan, gave an unusually frank assessment after Obama’s surge order was announced: "Even with these additional forces, I have to tell you, 2009 is going to be a tough year". This year will be tough for the occupiers, and so will the next one because the longer the occupation goes on, the more Afghans take up arms to resist. McKiernan indirectly admitted this, saying: "We’re not going to run out of people that either international forces or Afghan forces have to kill or capture."
On February 19, asked how long Australian troops would remain in Afghanistan, Fitzgibbon replied: "No one believes we will meet with success any time soon. The reality is we are talking years." McKiernan said: "For the next three to four years, I think we’re going to need to stay heavily committed and sustain in a sustained manner in Afghanistan." He also said that the bolstered number of US soldiers in Afghanistan — about 55,000 in all — was two-thirds of what he has requested.
The US-led occupation has already lasted more than seven years, at an enormous physical and mental cost to both the people of Afghanistan and the foreign troops. Add McKiernan’s prediction, and that means that the occupation would last for at least 10 years.
The US government is ignoring the lessons from Vietnam, Iraq and Palestine. Popular organised resistance to foreign occupation cannot be defeated by more troops or greater force; it only results in greater loss of life and a protracted, bitter conflict that the occupiers end up losing anyway. After the Vietnamese resistance was able to withstand US troop surges in the late 1960s — which took the US occupation force to over 569,000 troops — the surge in the US anti-war movement, particularly within the ranks of the US military, forced Washington and its allies to withdraw their forces from Vietnam. Without their presence, the US-installed puppet regime in Saigon and its million-strong army began to disintegrate, finally collapsing completely on April 30, 1975 in the face of a six-week offensive by the Vietnamese national liberation forces.
The defeat and withdrawal of the imperialist occupation forces in Afghanistan is inevitable; the people of Afghanistan are making sure of that. But it is the responsibility of the working people and soldiers of the occupying countries to organise to make this happens sooner rather than later.

From Direct Action Sydney, Australia www.directaction.org.au

Why the US is losing the war in Afghanistan

2009-02-10T11:39:00.002+10:00

By Hamish Chitts

Barack Obama’s first military act as US president was to order two remote-controlled air strikes that killed 22 people, many civilians, in Waziristan, northern Pakistan. The Hellfire missile attacks on two villages were accompanied by presidential rhetoric about "smart power" and "tough love" that could easily have been spoken by his predecessor, George Bush.
Obama’s continuation of US bombing of territory of its supposed ally without consultation with and against the wishes of the Pakistani government’s, his plan to "surge" 30,000 troops into Afghanistan, tensions between NATO members over Afghanistan and even growing tensions between the US and its puppet government in Kabul are all signs that US imperialism has already lost the war. But as in Vietnam and in Iraq, many more civilians, resistance fighters and soldiers will die before Obama or another president decides that the US can withdraw "gracefully".

Unpopular occupation
The US and its allies have knowingly installed a corrupt puppet government whose powers don’t extend far beyond the outskirts of the Afghan capital, Kabul. A Kabul resident quoted in a January 19 article in the French newspaper La Depeche said: "Nobody I know wants to see the Taliban back in power, but people hate [puppet president] Hamid Karzai and his deeply corrupted government. The parliament and the government are useless and don’t care about our security. With so many internally displaced refugees pouring into Kabul from the countryside, there’s mass unemployment — but of course there are no statistics."
Warlords and opium barons installed by the US as local governors rule the rest of the country with an iron fist in their own interests. These brutal unelected officials are judge and jury, with their own militias (backed by foreign troops) as executioners.
Eman Mansour wrote in the Scottish fortnightly Journal on January 16: "The US government brought back to power the men who devastated the country and the lives of the people like no government before. These are the criminals of the Northern Alliance who fought among themselves from 1992-96, immersing the country into deep turbulent years of unimaginable crimes: abductions, torture, rape, looting and forced labour."
The Taliban regime quickly collapsed in 2001 because it did not have popular support. Now more and more people are realising that the new regime of old criminals is no better or worse than the Taliban. This is one of the main reasons more and more Afghans are joining the growing resistance against the US occupation.
The high number of civilians killed by US, NATO and allied forces is another reason for people joining the resistance. A report released by an independent Kabul-based group called Afghanistan Rights Monitor on January 20 said that military operations conducted by US-led NATO and coalition forces in 2008 caused at least 1100 civilian deaths and 2800 injuries and displaced from their homes around 80,000 people. Around 680 died in air strikes, it said, adding that US combat aircraft conducted at least 15,000 close air support missions over the year. Afghan forces had meanwhile killed around 520 civilians, the report said.
The ranks of those fighting against the occupation grow with people who have lost friends and relatives in indiscriminate attacks on villages. In a sign that things aren’t going well for the US, Hamid Karzai said on January 20 that the US and its military allies have not heeded his calls to stop air strikes in civilian areas. Karzai told the Afghan parliament: "For years the Afghan people have come to me and said, ‘We are allies and we are committed to fighting terrorism and we welcomed the international community in Afghanistan — why are we the victims of air strikes?’"

Previous surges
During the Vietnam War, US troop numbers were increased from 25,000 "advisers" to 120,000 troops in just seven months between March and November 1965. Only a few months later, in February 1966, the US military argued that this first surge had prevented the immediate fall of the South Vietnamese government, but that another would be necessary to conduct offensive operations to defeat North Vietnamese and National Liberation Front forces. A year and a half later, the US troop level had reached 429,000 — plus tens of thousands of "allied" troops, including Australians. These surges were not enough to defeat the people of Vietnam, and the US eventually had to withdraw, but only after many more years of carnage, including "Vietnamisation", in which the US sought to have Vietnamese kill each other on its behalf.
On January 10, 2007, Bush announced the deployment of "20,000 additional American troops to Iraq". The full increase turned out to be 28,000 by mid-June 2007, and this level has been maintained although Obama is now talking about reducing troop numbers in Iraq for his surge in Afghanistan. While the US claims that Iraq is now more secure, the surge has not worked. The resistance has not been defeated and history is repeating itself as the US and allies like Australia, knowing that they cannot win the war, continue to build up and re-equip Iraqi forces. The "Iraq-isation" of the war is a sign of defeat, just as "Vietnamisation" of the Vietnam War was.
On January 27, the first troops from the Third Brigade of the 10th Mountain Division settled in Logar and Wardak provinces, neighbouring Kabul, as part of Obama’s promised increase of up to 30,000 extra US troops in Afghanistan by the middle of this year. This surge will double US forces to 60,000. However, as in Vietnam and Iraq, the increased number of civilian casualties caused by troop escalations is likely to win more people to the resistance.

The cost of saving face
One particularly disgusting aspect of US imperialism is its willingness to prolong war, to kill more people, including the soldiers it holds in such esteem, so that it can save face or withdraw gracefully. In Vietnam, the US continued the war for five years after it had decided to pull out. Hundreds of thousands of civilians, resistance fighters and soldiers died during those five years. The US also knows it has lost in Iraq, but its military and civilian leaders are now talking of combat operations until at least 2011, meaning more years of misery and death for everyone involved, especially the Iraqi people.
Obama’s commitment to the occupation of Afghanistan hasn’t been given a timetable yet, but it has already been going on for more than seven years. The greater the number of US troops involved in the fighting, the longer it will take for the US to withdraw.
The occupation of Afghanistan is not a "good war", as our politicians claim. The fact that more and more Afghans are taking up weapons to resist the occupation proves that US imperialism is not interested in Afghan freedom and democracy. The Afghans’ struggle is to remove a brutal foreign occupier. How many more people have to die attempting to prevent this?
Australian Labor PM Kevin Rudd is also considering increasing Australian troop numbers in Afghanistan. Australia’s contingent of 1090 troops is the largest non-NATO contingent fighting in Afghanistan. Eight Australian soldiers have already died pointlessly in this war. How many more soldiers will Rudd allow to be killed while the US looks for a way to withdraw gracefully? As the corporate media and politicians try sell this unjust war, we need to continue increasing the political pressure on the Rudd government to withdraw from the occupations of both Iraq and Afghanistan.

From Direct Action Sydney, Australia http://www.directaction.org.au/

A year of Rudd's wars

2008-12-08T17:44:00.002+10:00

By Hamish Chitts

Many who voted for the ALP on November 24, 2007, did so thinking that a Rudd Labor government would end Australia’s involvement in the US-led war in Iraq. One year on and the Australian military under PM Kevin Rudd is still an active cog in the US-led imperialism war machine in Iraq.

In the lead up to the 2007 election, Rudd described the decision by the Howard Coalition government to go to war in Iraq as the “single greatest error” of Australian foreign policy since the Vietnam War. He told voters that if Labor was elected “the combat force in Iraq, we would have home by around about the middle of next year”, adding that a Rudd government would leave behind some Australian soldiers to provide security at Australia’s embassy in Baghdad.

Upon Labor’s election, newspaper headlines in Australia and around the world proclaimed that the incoming Australian government was going to withdraw its troops from Iraq in 2008. On June 28 Rudd used a welcome home parade through Brisbane’s streets marking the return of 550 Australian Battle Group troops from southern Iraq to give the impression that he had fulfilled this promise to withdraw Australian troops from Iraq. But according to Australian defence department figures, the reality of Rudd leaving “some Australian soldiers” in Iraq is that there are currently 980 Australian troops are stationed there — nearly twice the number that were withdrawn in June and an increase of 145 troops on the 835 that remained in Iraq in June.

When confronted with this fact, Rudd’s apologists will argue that his government did bring home from Iraq the “combat” troops as he promised, but this too is false. Many of the 980 Australian Defence Force personnel that are in Iraq are in officially recognised combat roles. Furthermore, all of the ADF personnel in Iraq play some role in the continuing US-led war. There is no such thing as a “non-combatant” role for someone wearing an Australian uniform in Iraq.

In a speech to parliament in March, on the fifth anniversary of the US-UK-Australian invasion of Iraq, Rudd denounced Howard’s decision to commit Australian troops to fight in Iraq, saying: “Have further terrorist attacks been prevented? No, they have not been, as the victims of the Madrid train bombing will attest. Has any evidence of a link between weapons of mass destruction and the former Iraqi regime and terrorists been found? No. After five years, has the humanitarian crisis in Iraq been removed? No it has not.” Rudd says one thing then does another. It’s complete hypocrisy for Rudd to publicly denounce Howard’s decision to invade Iraq, make a show of bringing some of the troops home and yet still provide nearly 1000 troops to the US-led occupation of Iraq. If Rudd were really opposed to the occupation of Iraq he would have already withdrawn all the ADF personnel from Iraq.

While Rudd, his spin-doctors and their willing apologists in the corporate media have led many people to believe that all Australian troops have been withdrawn from Iraq, his phoney withdrawal is merely a re-shuffling of warfare for the tiny and overstretched ADF. Most of the 550 troops who have returned will soon be used to bolster Australian efforts to defend the corrupt US-installed puppet government of Afghanistan. One of the first things Rudd did after being sworn in as prime minister on December 3 last year was visit Afghan President Hamid Karzai to assure him and his US masters that Canberra was fully committed to the imperialist war in Afghanistan. Rudd told Australian troops in Afghanistan: “We’re committed to being here for the long haul.”

Rudd has always maintained that Afghanistan is a “just” war and that somehow Australians are safer for it. In an October 15 address to the C.E.W Bean Foundation at the Australian War Memorial in Canberra, Rudd said: “Our commitment to Afghanistan is critical. It is critical because it is clearly in our national interest.” He added: “Under the Taliban, the people of Afghanistan lived in an environment of oppression and extreme poverty with the constant threat of violence.”

But under the rule of US-backed warlords and opium barons, the people of Afghanistan face even greater oppression and poverty than they did under the Taliban. They not only have to endure the constant threat of violence from local warlords and their militias, but also from US-led foreign occupation forces who carry out indiscriminate air attacks on their villages. On July 6, for example, US warplanes attacked a village wedding party killing the bride and 22 others.

In September 2006 the BBC’s South Asia bureau chief, Paul Danahar reported that “when the Taliban were driven out [of Kabul and other Afghan cities] and the old regional warlords came back, so did a lot of robbery, rape and murder”. Danahar reported that the Taliban had made “southern Afghanistan a lot safer for ordinary people than it is now”.

As the US-led occupation continues, more and more Afghans aren’t just voicing their opposition to it; they are willing to take up arms against the world’s most powerful military and its allies. Many were not previously supporters of the Taliban but now see it as a lesser evil to the horrors of the US-led occupation.

The majority of military and intelligence analysts around the world agree that the invasion of Afghanistan has increased the likelihood of terrorist attacks against those countries involved in the invasion and occupation. In a 2007 Center for American Progress survey, 91 of America’s top 100 foreign-policy experts believed that the world was less safe for US citizens after the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. While there has never been a strong credible threat of a terrorist attack in Australia, the Rudd governments continual involvement in the occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq actually increases this threat.

On July 8 SAS Signaller Sean McCarthy became the sixth Australian soldier to die as part of the occupation of Afghanistan when a roadside improvised explosive device was detonated as the vehicle he was in passed by. McCarthy’s death was the first by an Australian soldier in Afghanistan since Rudd’s election. Commenting on McCarthy’s death, Rudd said: “We’ve had losses before, my fear is we will lose them again.” This was an attempt to prepare the families of Australian soldiers for more deaths in the face of growing Afghan resistance to the occupation of their country. Rudd’s “fear” was confirmed on November 27 when another Australian soldier was killed by a roadside bomb during a skirmish with Taliban forces.

Under Rudd there has been an increase in ADF personnel numbers in Afghanistan — from 950 when he came into office at the end of 2007 to 1090, according to the latest defence department figures.

Currently we have the absurd situation where most people in Australia oppose Australian participation in the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq yet the protests against them have gotten smaller and smaller since the election of the Rudd government. This is largely due to Rudd’s success in convincing opponents of the Iraq war that Australia has withdrawn its troops and the corporate media’s success in demonising the Afghan resistance — convincing them that the occupation is a lesser evil to the return of Taliban rule.

One lesson that can be drawn from this past year is that it wasn’t a particular right-wing ideology under John Howard or George Bush that resulted in Australian and US troops being sent to and kept in Iraq and Afghanistan. The capitalist rulers and their politicians in both the US and other imperialist countries including Australia need these occupations to secure their control over the energy resources of the Third World. This is why Australian Labor, a party that has always defended the interests of imperialist capitalism, is just as committed to the occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq as John Howard and George Bush.

From Direct Action, Sydney, Australia www.directaction.org.au

Dollars from death: The arms industry in Australia

2008-11-13T22:31:00.002+10:00

By Hamish Chitts

The global arms industry is a very lucrative way for businesses to profit from death, destruction and oppression. It is estimated that each year 2% of world gross domestic product (GDP), or more than US$1 trillion, is spent on the military. Part of this goes to the procurement of military hardware and services from the arms industry.

Australia’s rich want a greater share of this global industry. Particularly the governments of Victoria, South Australia, Queensland and the Northern Territory are vying with each other to be the most arms industry-friendly place in the Asia Pacific. Promoting the Asia Pacific Defence and Security Exhibition (since cancelled due to planned protests), organisers of this arms fair proudly announced in a press release in September 2007, that between 1994 and 2006 the Asia Pacific was the only region with increased defence expenditure as a percentage of GDP. It has been forecast that the Asia Pacific will overtake Europe and the Middle East, becoming the world’s largest arms market with US$104 billion of military projects scheduled in the next 10 years, of which US$25 billion is projected from Australia. Threats of instability and future conflict, real or imagined, caused primarily by the US “war on terror”, are driving this arms race.

The Australian government’s military spending is over A$62 million per day. According to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, Australia was the eighth largest arms importer for the period 2003-07, accounting for 3.08% of world deliveries. Most of this spending in was a result of Australia’s involvement in the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan, but there has also been lavish spending securing Australia from the threat of mythical terrorists, and the big players in the arms industry have been quick to exploit this market.

Privatisation

This new climate of government and corporate media-induced fear has not only allowed some of the most vile arms dealers to receive taxpayers’ money; it has also allowed these dealers to set up shop in Australia. In recent years, the federal government has privatised the local arms industry, which used to be dominated by state-owned enterprises such as Australian Defence Industries (ADI), whose sole purpose was to serve and supply the Australian armed forces. Now private, often multinational, corporations dominate arms and military equipment manufacturing. The former ADI is now owned by Thales Australia, the local branch of the French-based Thales Group.

Before privatisation, the production of arms through the defence department allowed some public scrutiny through limited parliamentary processes. Since privatisation, the arms industry has been able to shroud itself in secrecy by classifying all its activities as “commercial in confidence”. It has allowed more weapons and military hardware to be produced for export. According to figures gathered by the Medical Association for the Prevention of War, from July to December 2006, Australian-based arms dealers exported A$314,387,766 worth of arms, including A$84,623,989 to the United States and A$21,445,060 to Israel.

Australia’s biggest arms export market is the US. Because of this, the four big defence companies in Australia — Raytheon, Boeing, Thales and BAE — are now allowed to hire, fire and redeploy people based on where they were born. Under a recently signed defence trade agreement between Australia and the US, Australian-based arms dealers are required to investigate the birthplace of their workers if they want to do business with the US government, and anti-discrimination laws have been bent to allow this. Countries proscribed include Afghanistan, Belarus, Burma, China, Cyprus, Cuba, Haiti, Iran, Iraq, Lebanon, North Korea, Sri Lanka, Sudan, Venezuela, Vietnam, Yemen and Zimbabwe. Employees only have to have been born in one of these countries (no other factors are considered). Washington can add to or change the list any time it likes.

Nuclear connection

Multinational arms dealers with dubious records like BAE Systems and Raytheon are now firmly planted in Australia. BAE Systems, the third largest global arms dealer, has locations at Abbotsford (Victoria), Braddon (ACT), Edinburgh (SA), Holden Hill (SA), North Ryde (NSW), Tamworth (NSW) and Williamstown (NSW). BAE is indirectly engaged in production of nuclear weapons. It is involved with the production and support of the ASMP missile, an air-launched missile that forms part of France’s nuclear arsenal. BAE is also the UK’s only nuclear submarine manufacturer and thus produces a key element of the UK’s nuclear weapons capability. US-based Raytheon is the fifth largest global arms dealer. It has offices in Brisbane, Canberra, Sydney, Nowra, Alice Springs, Tindal (NT), Perth and Adelaide.

Raytheon is most infamous for its development and production of cluster munitions, each containing hundreds of smaller bomblets that scatter before they hit the ground. Many of the bomblets do not explode initially, leaving deadly unexploded “duds” for years afterwards. The New York-based Human Rights Watch organisation estimates that 1600 Iraqi and Kuwaiti civilians were killed and 2500 injured between 1991 and 1993 by unexploded cluster bomblets dropped by the US and UK in the first Gulf War. Because the bombs’ appearance is toy-like and attractive to children, 60% of those victims were children under 15.

Land Warfare Conference

BAE Systems and Raytheon, along with more than 200 others, attended the Land Warfare Conference in Brisbane in the last week of October. The conference is the Australian army’s annual planning and strategy meeting. Once exclusively involving military and government personnel, in recent years it has been opened to arms dealers. It now tours around the country each year looking for pleasant locations to do business. At these conferences, army heads meet and socialise with big business and academics and discuss army strategy and policy, with particular emphasis on the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan. Arms dealers are able to pitch their products of death and destruction directly to the conference, allowing aspects of army policy to be set by the public relations and advertising campaigns of arms dealers.

The security of Australian working people is not enhanced, but undermined, by the continued dominance of big business interests over the Australian Defence Force. Hundreds of thousands of civilians and soldiers have been killed in the illegal and unjustifiable occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan, primarily for oil profits and to help maintain big business domination of the Third World. The money arms dealers receive comes directly from the wages of working people via taxes and diverts resources that could be used for health, education and our social and environmental security. The billions of dollars consumed by Australian imperialism’s war budget should be reallocated to help meet the social needs of working people.

The Australian government can spend A$62 million per day on the military, yet it can’t pay for adequate health care for working people. Decisions related to war must be taken out of the hands of the capitalists, their political representatives and general staffs. Working people and rank-and-file soldiers have a right to know all the real aims and commitments of the government’s military and foreign policy. All military and diplomatic treaties, agreements and business contracts should be made accessible to the public, and the public should have the right to vote directly on the question of war.

[Hamish Chitts is a member of the Revolutionary Socialist Party in Brisbane and one of the founders of Stand Fast, an organisation of veterans and service people against the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. For information about Stand Fast visit www.stand-fast.webs.com or phone 0401 586 923.]

From Direct Action, Sydney, Australia www.directaction.org.au

The hidden casualties of war

2008-10-18T03:24:00.001+10:00

By Hamish Chitts

Officially the governments that wage war on the peoples of Iraq and Afghanistan acknowledge that by August 26 this year, 4460 of their troops had died in Iraq and 934 had died in Afghanistan. Warmongers like US President George Bush and Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd claim that they honour every sacrifice made by the working people they have led into fighting these wars, whose only purpose is to maintain and increase the profits of big business. However, their actions prove that they do not believe their own rhetoric. Their deliberate attempts to distort and hide the real human cost of these imperialist wars shows the callous disregard they have for the people they claim to represent.

“Officially about 4100 GIs have died in Iraq till now, but in reality there have been approximately 25,000”, US Army sergeant and Iraq Veterans Against the War member Selena Coppa was quoted as saying by the July 7 German newspaper Tageszeitung. Coppa went on to explain how fatality statistics are falsified when badly injured soldiers are flown to the Landstuhl Regional Medical Center in Germany for treatment. If they die in transit to or while in Landstuhl, they are officially counted as deaths in Germany rather than as fatalities of the war in Iraq.

Coppa said that “about 120” US war veterans commit suicide each week. She referred to an investigation by the CBS television network that found that in 2005 alone at least 6200 veterans killed themselves. In that one year, US military losses to suicide were higher than the official figure of US troop fatalities over five years of war in Iraq.
87,000 US Iraq war casualties

As of July 15, the official figure for US military personnel injured in Iraq reached 67,203. This included 33,766 dead and wounded by what the Pentagon classifies as “hostile” causes and more than 33,437 dead and medically evacuated (as of May 31) because of “non-hostile” causes. In a July 15 article for GI Special (an internal information service produced by war resisters within the US armed forces), Michael Munk reported that the actual total is more than 87,000 because the Pentagon chooses not to count as “Iraq casualties” the approximately 20,000 casualties discovered only after they returned from Iraq — mainly from brain trauma from explosions. Again, these figures do not include mental health casualties with approximately 30% of the hundreds of thousands of US Iraq veterans being diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).

Coppa also told Tageszeiting of the particular price women in the US military are paying. According to a study by Columbia University professor Helen Benedict, of the approximately 200,000 US woman soldiers in combat zones since the beginning of the “Global War on Terror” in 2001, almost three-quarters have been sexually harassed and almost a third have been raped. “I too know many such cases”, Coppa said. “A woman soldier in Iraq died of dehydration, because she did not dare go to drink water in the hospital area, she was too afraid of being raped. Another female soldier was raped by a group of men, but was sentenced for alcohol abuse. All this is kept quiet,” she said.
The ‘little Aussie battler’

Australia is the only country to have participated in all the major wars of the 20th and 21st centuries directly involving the UK and/or the US governments. Australian governments have sent Australians to fight as junior partners of British imperialism in the Boer War, World War I and World War II, and as junior partners of US imperialism in Korea, Vietnam, the two Gulf wars, and Afghanistan. History books tell us that Australian casualties for World War II are 33,826 killed and 180,864 wounded but these figures only count the physical casualties from this particular war. They do not reflect the psychological wounds inflicted on those who directly participated in this war or on those close to them.

Due to a combination of lack of understanding, no official record keeping and official government and military denial, there are no reliable figures describing the psychological casualties suffered by Australian troops in the first half of the 20th century. This does not mean they did not occur. In 2000, Monash University’s Margaret Lindorff interviewed 88 survivors of battles along the Kokoda Track in 1942. She found many said that they had yet to recover from the experience.

Many indicated continuing ill effects including nightmares, sleeplessness, negative imagery, “flashbacks”, problems with concentration, weeping, generalised anxiety, and distress caused by situations recalling the battle. Many also commented that they had never talked to anyone about their war experiences, or the effects of these experiences. Of the 88 veterans only two veterans reported seeking or receiving any treatment for their symptoms. The emerging experience of World War II veterans is a long way from the myth that the rich and powerful who profit from war would like us to believe — that after the end of the war in 1945 veterans just rolled up their sleeves and got back to work.
The Vietnam War homecoming myth

Australian governments and the corporate media, like their counterparts in the US, continue to propagate the myth that the well-publicised psychological casualties of the Vietnam War were due to the lack of a proper welcome home, rather than participation by soldiers in a brutal counterinsurgency war against a national liberation movement. As if some ticker-tape parade would have erased the mental trauma and anguish suffered by soldiers in Vietnam. Imperialist politicians in the US and Australia, from Bush senior to Bush junior, from Howard to Rudd, have all used this myth to try to discourage the growth of a movement against their wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. They say: Look how the protesters traumatised the Vietnam veterans. If you protest Iraq or Afghanistan you will traumatise the new veterans. In Australia and the US, the warmakers have tried to shift the blame from themselves to those who protest against the wars that are killing Iraqis, Afghans, young Americans and young Australians.

A recent Australian government-funded study showed that after more than 50 years Korean War veterans are significantly more likely to suffer psychological problems than a control group. They are also three times more likely to suffer alcohol-related problems. Only 18% felt “pleased about their life” compared with 40% of other elderly men. Major research on the health of Australian veterans of the first Gulf War shows their mental health years later was strikingly worse than that of Australian Defence Force personnel not deployed to the Middle East. It also found that of the 900 ADF personnel who had served in war-torn Somalia, at least 20% had serious mental health problems. Hundreds from the East Timor deployment have lodged compensation claims with the Department of Veterans Affairs.

These figures are still only a fraction of the psychological casualties from these conflicts as some veterans would not have sought help and many more may not suffer conditions such as PTSD until years, sometimes decades, after their return. None of the figures reflect the psychological casualties these conflicts inflict upon the children of veterans either.

Information collated from a “grassroots” self-reported study conducted by the Partners of Veterans Association of Australia of 2500 children and grandchildren of Australian Vietnam War veterans has found that 70% of children and 30% of grandchildren suffer mental health problems. The proportion of the total Australian population suffering these problems is 18%. There can be a significant impact generations after a conflict. Many families of World War II veterans bore the brunt of black moods and difficult behaviour. It is only now that the children of World War II veterans are looking at their father’s or mother’s temper, drinking problem, panic attacks and depression, which impacted upon them, and realising this was due to their parent’s wartime experience.

Since the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 the Australian government has sent tens of thousands of military personnel to both Iraq and Afghanistan. This year around 7000 Australian army, navy and air force personnel will be directly involved in these wars. Given the experience of previous conflicts and those of current US military personnel, it is not unreasonable to assume that at least one-third of these people will become psychological casualties. This equates to over 2000 Australian casualties this year without even considering those who will be killed or physically wounded. Add to this the casualties among the children and grandchildren of these 7000 and the casualty figure will exceed 10,000.

This is yet another reason why people in Australia and around the world need to demand the immediate and unconditional withdrawal of all foreign troops from Iraq and Afghanistan. The imperialist governments will not willingly withdraw their troops. The business interests that these governments serve believe in sacrificing (other, i.e., working people’s) “blood” for “oil” profits or anticipated profits, just as they believe in sacrificing workers’ health and safety on the job for corporate profits.

The US rulers and their Australian allies have already lost the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The majority of Iraqis and Afghans are against the occupations of their countries by foreign troops and their resistance to these occupations has proved that it will not be crushed. We need to minimise the casualties of these wars by reinvigorating resistance at home to these wars by taking the anti-war message into our workplaces, schools and universities, and into the ranks of the armed forces.

[Hamish Chitts is a member of the Revolutionary Socialist Party in Brisbane and one of the founders of Stand Fast, an organisation of veterans and service people against the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. For information about Stand Fast visit www.stand-fast.webs.com or phone 0401 586 923.]

From Direct Action, Sydney, Australia www.directaction.org.au

Rudd and Nelson reveal contempt for soldiers

2008-08-04T17:04:00.004+10:00

By Kathy Newnam

Prime Minister Kevin Rudd and federal Liberal Party leader Brendan Nelson have shown their willingness to use the soldiers they claim to honour and respect to suit their own political ends, cynically using the emotions generated by the return of Australia’s Overwatch Battle Group from southern Iraq and the death in early July of the sixth Australian soldier in Afghanistan since 2002, to promote their bipartisan pro-war agenda.

On June 28, Rudd used a welcome home parade through Brisbane’s streets marking the return of the 500-member battle group from southern Iraq to give the impression that he had withdrawn Australia’s troops from the US-led war on Iraq. Hamish Chitts, a former Australian infantry soldier, East Timor veteran and spokesperson for Stand Fast, a group of veterans and former military personnel who oppose the current wars of occupation in Iraq and Afghanistan, told Direct Action: “Stand Fast is glad that those soldiers are no longer being placed in harm’s way for the sake of the profits the Western oil corporations hope to get out of Iraq. But this so-called withdrawal is less than one third of the Australian military personnel deployed in Iraq. The other two thirds will continue to remain in harms way supporting this unpopular and unjustifiable occupation.”
Phoney withdrawal

Chitts went on to note that Canberra’s direct military commitment to the occupation of Iraq is now approximately 835 Australian Defence Force (ADF) personnel, including: a combat team of about 110 soldiers comprised of two infantry platoons, a cavalry troop, a military police detachment and some combat service logistic support personnel. “This continued commitment of direct support for the US-led war belies the claim, made by much of the media in Australia, that all Australian combat forces have been withdrawn”, said Chitts. He also noted that a Royal Australian Air Force detachment of about 160 personnel operates three C-130 Hercules transport aircraft and that about 110 ADF personnel are either part of the US-led Multi-National Force headquarters or serving on exchange in the militaries of other nations in Iraq. There is also an RAAF detachment of about 170 personnel conducting maritime patrol operations, with two AP-3C Orion aircraft.

“There is also a Royal Australian Navy ANZAC-class frigate with approximately 160 personnel patrolling the northern Persian Gulf as part of Operation Catalyst, which works with US and British warships to guard Iraq’s offshore oil assets, and to carry out provocations along Iran’s coastline”, said Chitts. He pointed out that 15 ADF personnel are employed with the Coalition Counter Improvised Explosive Device Task Force that coordinates efforts focused on intelligence collection, material solutions and training for the US-led occupation forces throughout Iraq, and that there is a tri-service (army, RAAF and RAN) grouping of 110 personnel that are responsible for a range of logistic, training and communications activities.

“The removal of some combat elements is far from a withdrawal of Australia’s involvement in the war against the Iraqi people. It is a re-shuffling. Most of the troops who have recently returned will soon be used to bolster Australian military efforts to defend the corrupt puppet government of Afghanistan and Western business interests in that country”, said Chitts. Australia currently has just over 1000 troops in Afghanistan, making Canberra the 10th-largest provider of foreign occupation personnel to the Central Asian country and the largest non-NATO occupation contingent.

The emotive atmosphere created by the relief of the battle group soldiers to be out of Iraq and the relief at their safe return by their relatives was too tempting a political opportunity for Rudd to pass up. At the June 28 ceremony he proclaimed: “Freedom is not for free. Freedom comes at a price and you are our front line in the defence of our freedom.” But, Chitts observed, “since the previous Iraqi government headed by Saddam Hussein, ousted through the US-British-Australian invasion of 2003, never had the means nor the aim of invading Australia (or the US or Britain), the ADF’s role in Iraq was not and isn’t to defend ordinary Australians’ freedoms. As the AWB scandal revealed, Australian troops were sent to invade and occupy Iraq to protect Australian business interests there. Labor has always claimed to have opposed the Iraq invasion, but now Rudd tells us it was to protect “our freedom”!

With 63% of Australians opposed to Australia’s involvement in the war in Iraq and just over 50% opposed to Australian involvement in the war in Afghanistan, Chitts asked: “How can Rudd claim to be acting for freedom and democracy when a majority in this country want all the troops bought home? And it is not just freedom and democracy here that is being ignored; the majority of Iraqis and the majority of Afghans don’t want foreign troops occupying their countries. That’s why the people of Iraq and Afghanistan will keep resisting the occupation forces. The only freedom being fought for by Australian troops in these countries is the freedom of the big corporations to exploit new markets and to secure control of Iraq’s oilfields. It only costs $1.50 to extract a barrel of oil out of the ground in Iraq. With oil now priced at around $140 a barrel, and predicted to go higher, the privatisation of Iraq’s nationalised oil resources will bring a profits bonanza to the big Western oil companies.”

In March this year, on the fifth anniversary of the invasion of Iraq, Rudd denounced the Howard Coalition government’s decision to involve Australian troops in the Iraq war, telling the federal parliament: “Have further terrorist attacks been prevented? No, they have not been, as the victims of the Madrid train bombing will attest. Has any evidence of a link between weapons of mass destruction and the former Iraqi regime and terrorists been found? No. After five years, has the humanitarian crisis in Iraq been removed? No it has not.” Chitts told DA: “While opponents of the war in Iraq will agree with these comments, Rudd says one thing then does another. It’s complete hypocrisy for the Labor politicians to publicly oppose the war in Iraq, make a show of bringing some of the troops home and yet still provide nearly 1000 military personnel to support the US occupation of Iraq. The troops still in Iraq not only provide practical support for the occupation but also help legitimise the notion that the occupiers are a coalition of nations rather than essentially just the US. If Rudd really opposes the occupation of Iraq, he should withdraw all the ADF personnel.”
Afghanistan

On July 8, SAS Signaller Sean McCarthy became the sixth Australian soldier to die as part of the occupation of Afghanistan when a roadside improvised explosive device was detonated as the vehicle he was in passed by. Two other soldiers and a “coalition national” were injured by the blast. The soldiers were based at Tarin Kowt military base in Oruzgan province in the south-east of Afghanistan. Rudd’s response, said Chitts: “highlighted his commitment to keeping Australian troops in Afghanistan, propping up the US-installed puppet regime” of Afghan President Hamid Karzai. Rudd said: “We’ve had losses before, my fear is we will lose them again.”

Brendan Nelson, seeing an opportunity to use McCarthy’s death to try to turn public opinion to support the war in Afghanistan, claimed that: “Signaller McCarthy has given his life in our name, in the cause of fighting extremism and the Taliban in particular. It’s essential that we continue to fight these terrorists in their own backyard so they do not get into ours, here in Australia.” Chitts pointed out that the Taliban is not, and never has been, officially listed by either Washington or Canberra as a “terrorist” organisation. He said Stand Fast was disgusted by Nelson’s patronising rhetoric. “To hide this war under the cloak of a war against terrorists is ridiculous. As veterans and ex-service personnel, we reject this attempt to say that anyone in Afghanistan has died in our name. We think Dr Nelson is looking after the interests of Australian big business and trying to justify it up by claiming the people of Afghanistan have the capability and desire to invade Australia. That’s absurd. Stand Fast would like to ask Dr Nelson and Mr Rudd, did the bride and 22 other members of her wedding party who were killed by US bombs in Nangarhar province on July 6 also give their lives in our name? Were they terrorists, plotting to invade Australians’ backyards? Have the thousands of other civilians who have already died as part a result of the occupation of Afghanistan also given their lives in our name?”

Not to be outdone by Nelson’s comments on McCarthy’s death, Labor war minister Joel Fitzgibbon told July 14 Australian newspaper, Australians have a “quite robust” tolerance for battlefield casualties in Afghanistan, and “Australians understood the national interest was under direct threat in Afghanistan, and accepted the risks facing the Diggers”. Chitts told DA: “If both Australian soldiers and civilians think the Canberra politicians are really risking the lives of the troops for them, they wouldn’t think it acceptable. Fitzgibbon’s, Nelson’s and Rudd’s comments are that of butchers preparing the Australian people for the bill in lives that ordinary Australians will have to pay as the resistance to foreign occupation in Afghanistan escalates.”

Chitts explained that before the US-led invasion, production of opium, the key ingredient in heroin, had virtually been wiped out from Afghanistan by the Taliban regime. “Since then Afghanistan, one of poorest countries in the world, has re-emerged as the world’s main opium supplier. The UN estimates that Afghanistan now accounts for 93% of the global market in illegal opiates. The total area used for opium cultivation increased by 59% in 2006 and by a further 17% last year, according to a UN report released on March 5. The US bribed and continues to bribe Afghan warlords, who profit from the opium trade, to gain their support, which has not only allowed the rapid growth of opium production but has also created a culture of corruption in Afghanistan. In 2001 alone, Afghan warlords were given US$70 million in bribes by the CIA to turn against the Taliban government.

“The US-backed government of Afghanistan controls little more than the capital, Kabul, with the warlords ruling the rest with an iron fist. Corruption among police and local authorities is worst in southern Afghanistan, where drug profits are highest. Despite his repeated public denials, President Karzai’s half-brother Wali, head of Kandahar’s provincial council, continues to be accused by senior government sources, as well as foreign analysts and officials, as having a key role in orchestrating the movement of heroin from Kandahar westward through Helmand province and out across the Iranian border.” Chitts explained that the continued occupation of Afghanistan is aimed at securing US oil corporations’ access to the huge gasfields in Turkmenistan and the oilfields in Kazakhstan, to the north of Afghanistan, including a possible pipeline from these fields through Afghanistan to lucrative markets in Pakistan and India.”

Chitts said that the war in Afghanistan was initiated to use the shock of Al Qaeda’s terrorist attack on New York’s World Trade Centre to prepare public opinion for an already planned attack on oil-rich Iraq. “Soldiers are sacrificing their lives and civilians are being killed so that big-business interests in the West will be able to earn huge profits from controlling the energy resources of Central Asia. Of course we in Stand Fast don’t support the politics and religious fanaticism of the Taliban. Initially the Taliban was easily defeated because they didn’t have the support of most Afghans. Now their ranks are being swelled, not by people who have suddenly been won over to the Taliban’s view of the world, but by people who oppose US-backed Karzai regime of warlords and opium barons whose rule our troops help impose.

“The Labor and Liberal politicians in Australia are vying with each other to be more `the Digger’s friend’ than the other. Most of these politicians have never served in ADF, and would be mortified if their children served. These politicians betray the criminal disregard they have for the soldiers in sending them to risk their lives to impose Western business interests on the people of Iraq and Afghanistan. Whether it is the use of a welcome home parade to hide the continual participation in the bloody US-led occupation of Iraq or the disgusting use of a soldier’s death to sell the unpopular and unjustifiable war in Afghanistan, these politicians must be exposed, condemned and publicly challenged. We can write letters to these politicians and send out media releases but these will not change anything if there isn’t visible public pressure on them in the first place. We need to get people back onto the streets in protest. No more blood should be shed for the corporate profiteers and their political servants. Those who truly support our troops should support Stand Fast’s call to bring all the military personnel, from all the foreign countries involved, home from Iraq and Afghanistan.”

For more information about Stand Fast or if you are a veteran, currently serving or have served in the armed forces and would like to get involved, phone 0401 586 923, email standfast.au@gmail.com or visit www.stand-fast.webs.com/

From Direct Action. Sydney, Australia

Veteran Group disgusted by Nelson’s patronising rhetoric about soldier’s death

2008-07-23T11:58:00.002+10:00

The Australian-based veterans group Stand Fast today rejected statements made by Federal opposition leader Brendan Nelson regarding the tragic death in Afghanistan of SAS Signaller Sean McCarthy.

Stand Fast spokesperson Hamish Chitts said the group, comprised of veterans and former military personnel who oppose the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, regards the rhetorical remarks of Dr Nelson as a vile attempt to turn public opinion to support the war in Afghanistan.

“This war is primarily about having easier access to the oilfields in Turkmenistan to the North of Afghanistan, including a possible pipeline from these oilfields through Western Afghanistan to lucrative markets in Pakistan and India. Soldiers are sacrificing their lives so that others can earn a profit from it,” he said.

“To bury this war under the cloak of democracy and a war on terror is ridiculous. As veterans and ex-service personnel, we reject this attempt to say that anyone in Afghanistan has died in our name. We think Dr Nelson is looking after the interests of big business and dressing it up to look like the people of Afghanistan have the capability and desire to invade Sydney,” Chitts said.

Chitts’ comments came after Brendan Nelson was quoted as saying; "Signaller McCarthy has given his life in our name, in the cause of fighting extremism and the Taliban in particular.”

“Stand Fast would like to ask Mr Nelson and Mr Rudd did the bride and 22 other members of her wedding party who were killed by U.S. bombs in Nangarhar province on Sunday (July 6) also give their lives in our name? Have the thousands of other civilians who have already died as part of the occupation of Afghanistan also given their lives in our name?” Chitts asked.

“Of course we don’t support the politics and religious fundamentalism of the Taliban. Initially the Taliban was easily defeated because they didn’t have the support of most Afghanis. Now their ranks are being swelled, not by people who have suddenly been won over to the Taliban’s view of the World but by people who oppose the puppet regime of thugs and opium barons whose rule our troops help enforce.” he said.

“These members of parliament, both Labor and Coalition vie with each other to be more ‘the diggers friend’ than the other. Most have never served in the Defence Force nor left the comforts of their parliamentary offices. The fact that these politicians use this death to sell their unpopular and unjustifiable war in Afghanistan is disgusting. As veterans our thoughts are with Sean’s family and all those still in harm’s way in Iraq and Afghanistan. No more blood should be shed for the profiteers, bring the troops home now,” Chitts said.

For further information
contact Hamish on 0401 586 923
or email standfast.au@gmail.com
or www.stand-fast.webs.com

Anti-war veterans group welcomes home troops, condemns false withdrawal

2008-06-23T14:31:00.000+10:00

press release press release press release press release press release press release

23 June 2008

A parade through Brisbane streets on June 28^th marking the return of last Australian Battle Group from Southern Iraq is being falsely heralded as a withdrawal of Australian troops from Iraq.

“Stand Fast, welcomes home the troops that have recently returned from Southern Iraq,” said Hamish Chitts, former Australian infantry soldier, East Timor veteran and founder of Stand Fast, a group of veterans and former military personnel who oppose the current wars of occupation in Iraq and Afghanistan.

“We are glad that they are no longer being placed in harm’s way for the sake of oil and the interests of global corporations. Unfortunately this so called withdrawal is less than one third of the Australian military personnel currently in Iraq. The other two thirds will continue to remain in harms way supporting this unpopular and unjustifiable occupation.”

Chitts explained that “it is far from a withdrawal - it is a re-shuffling. Most of the troops who have recently returned will soon be used to bolster Australian military efforts to defend the corrupt puppet government of Afghanistan and U.S. government and business interests in that country.”

63% of Australians today are opposed to the war in Iraq and over 50% oppose the war Afghanistan. Chitts asked, “How can Kevin Rudd claim to be acting for democracy when a majority in this country want all the troops bought home? And it is not just democracy here that is being ignored; the majority of Iraqis and the majority of Afghanis don’t want foreign troops occupying their land. That’s why the people of Iraq and Afghanistan will keep resisting the occupation of their countries.”

“So while we welcome home these troops, we continue to condemn the criminal politicians who sent them to Iraq, who kept them there and are continuing to send troops to participate in the bloody US-led occupation. Those who truly support our troops should join our call to bring all the military personnel, from all the countries involved, home from Iraq and Afghanistan.”

For further information

contact Hamish on 0401 586 923

or email standfast.au@gmail.com

or www.stand-fast.webs.com

Veterans Join Anti-war Movement in Australia

2008-03-17T23:54:00.005+10:00

The following speech by Hamish Chitts marked Stand Fast's public launch at the Palm Sunday Peace Rally in Queens Park, Brisbane, 17th March.

Photo: Hamish Chitts at Palm Sunday Rally by Willy Bach

I would like to acknowledge the Turrabul and Jaggera people on whose land the people of Brisbane live and continue to profit from with no true recompense to the Jaggera or the Turrabul.

I am from a new veterans group called Stand Fast which is being launched nationally today. We have someone speaking at the rally in Melbourne today and someone in Sydney as well.

Stand Fast is a group of veterans and former military personnel who oppose the current wars of occupation in Iraq and Afghanistan.

We who have borne arms denounce these wars because:

· These wars are about money, power and fear.

· Soldiers are people; they are our neighbours, our sons, daughters, brothers and sisters.

· Too many have died, often leaving behind partners, children and other loved ones.

· Many will carry the psychological scars for the rest of their lives.

Stand Fast seeks to add weight to the antiwar movement in Australia through organising veterans to speak out against the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and by debunking the myth that “If you’re against the war, you’re against the troops.

We are also encouraging current serving members of the Australian Defence Force to inform themselves about what is really happening in Iraq and Afghanistan. We will provide advice and support for those who may question serving in either of these wars. During the Vietnam War an anti-war movement grew within the U.S. that by 1971 had, in the words of one colonel, infested the entire armed services. This group added great strength to the anti-war movement and by the Pentagon’s own figures, 503,926 “incidents of desertion” occurred between 1966 and 1971; and by 1971 entire units were refusing to go into battle in unprecedented numbers. In 1972 there was fear among some generals that the majority of their armed forces would mutiny and take control if the Vietnam War did not end soon.

Stand Fast also draws inspiration from U.S. based group Iraq Veterans Against the War. Last year when Matt Howard from Iraq Veterans Against the War spoke in cities around Australia he said, “In Iraq you saw this testosterone filled bloodlust. A lot of people just shot things for the sake of shooting things. Buses, vehicles, houses, whatever. Donkeys, camels...people.” Today, Matt and hundreds of other veterans travel to schools, universities and demonstrations to speak out against the war. In Australia alone his one tour encouraged thousands to protest against these wars. It is his testimony and that of other veterans that is having strong pull on people in the U.S. to protest against these wars.

There are Australian casualties occurring everyday in Iraq and Afghanistan that no one sees or hears about. Through my own experiences as a former infantry soldier and veteran and through those of my mates I can tell you no one who sees active service comes back the same. Recent figures from America have shown that troops coming back from Iraq and Afghanistan are suffering 3 times more Post Traumatic Stress Disorder than their counterparts did on return from Vietnam. But it doesn’t just effect those who’ve been directly involved, it effects their children and even their grandchildren. A recent survey of 2500 children and grandchildren of Australian Vietnam veterans has found 70% of children and 30% of grandchildren suffer psychiatric or psychological problems. The average for Australia is 18%. So currently the thousands of Australians sent to Iraq and Afghanistan each year equates to tens of thousands of lives adversely effected either directly or indirectly by mental health problems that has a flow on effect through generations to come.

So military personnel are risking their minds as well as their bodies and for what are we as people and as communities paying this high price for? For what are Iraqi and Afghani civilians paying with their bodies and their minds for? It is being done for oil, in the interests of multi-national corporations and it is being done for strategic real estate for the U.S. military. Most people recognise this about Iraq but not everyone knows that the same reasons have brought about the occupation of Afghanistan. In 1998 Californian company UNOCAL withdrew from negotiations with the Taliban government after failing for several years to be allowed to build a gas pipeline from fields in Turkmenistan through Western Afghanistan to lucrative markets in Pakistan and India. The top negotiator for UNOCAL was fellow named Hummed Karzai. The same Karzai that is currently President of the puppet regime in Afghanistan which is comprised of warlord thugs who are no better to the people of Afghanistan than Taliban thugs they replaced. The pipeline however is back on the agenda.

Our new Prime Minister has called Afghanistan a ‘good’ war. It is not. It is no better than the war in Iraq and it is being done for the same reasons. But he knows this that is why he still supports the occupation of Iraq. Rudd has made a big public show of bringing the troops home from Iraq later in the year, but, when you look at the fine print he is only bringing back one third of the personnel currently over there.

That is why we need to keep coming out on the streets and why Stand Fast has formed. To show real support for the people in our armed forces, to show our real support for the people of Iraq and Afghanistan by demanding from the Rudd Government a true and complete troop withdrawal from Iraq and Afghanistan.

If you want further information about Stand Fast or if you are a veteran or have served in the armed forces of any country and would like to get involved (or know someone who would) please see me after the speakers have finished.

Bring the troops home now!

Veterans Join Anti-war Movement in Australia

2008-03-06T14:53:00.005+10:00

Recently the founders of Stand Fast finalised their preparations for going public. Below is their statement of what they are about and contact details for those interested in joining.

Stand Fast is a group of veterans and former military personnel who oppose the current wars of occupation in Iraq and Afghanistan.

We who have borne arms denounce these wars because:

· These wars are about money, power and fear.

· Soldiers are people; they are our neighbours, our sons, daughters, brothers and sisters.

· Too many have died, often leaving behind partners, children and other loved ones.

· Many will carry the psychological scars for the rest of their lives.

Stand Fast seeks to add weight to the antiwar movement in Australia through organising veterans to speak out against the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and by debunking the myth that “If you’re against the war, you’re against the troops.”

If you are a veteran or have served in any armed forces and would like to get involved contact:
t) 0401 586 923 or e) standfast.au@gmail.com

Speech at Tet Offensive 40 years on forum

2008-01-31T10:15:00.000+10:00

Speech delivered by Hamish Chitts as part of a forum on the 40th Anniversary of the Tet Offensive, Brisbane Activist Centre, 31st January 2008.

Photo: Australian Soldiers in Vietnam

The fact has been widely publicised that many of service men and women who came back from the Vietnam War, returned with some from of mental scaring. The legacies, for some veterans, of the military training and combat experience in Vietnam include:
• difficulty in making sense of emotions in themselves and others
• difficulty in relationships
• excessive emotions or emotional bluntness
• resorting to ‘learned’ action responses (violence and other forms of abuse)

Combat in the Vietnam War exposed veterans to severe traumatic situations of
threat, death or serious injury for themselves and those around them. These
experiences often involved feelings of fear, helplessness or horror. Many veterans may have recurring thoughts and feelings about such traumatic events and in some veterans there will be a longer lasting disorder such as Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD).

Conservative thinkers acting as apologists for the ruling class that created this War have eagerly taken up the idea that it wasn’t so much what happened in Vietnam that has caused these problems but the lack of a heroic homecoming that is the main cause. As if some ticker tape parade would have made things all right. Capitalist governments have used this idea to suppress antiwar movements in their own countries. They say, ”Look how the protesters traumatised the Vietnam veterans.” They shift the blame from themselves to those who protested. This is completely false. All conflicts take a high and lasting psychological toll on its participants.

Just looking at Australia: There is a growing number of surviving World War 2 veterans now seeking counseling for PTSD. A recent Federal Government funded study showed that after more than 50 years Korean War veterans are significantly more likely to suffer psychological problems than a control group. They are also three times more likely to suffer alcohol-related problems. Only 18 per cent felt "pleased about their life" compared with 40 per cent of other elderly men. Major research on the health of Australian veterans of the first Gulf War shows their mental health years later was strikingly worse than that of other defence force personnel not deployed to the Middle East. Of the 900 who had served in Somalia, at least 20 per cent had serious mental health problems. Hundreds from the East Timor deployment have lodged compensation claims with the Department of Veterans Affairs. There is an undeniable pattern here and it is happening again, right now 7000 Australian Defence Force personnel are being deployed each year on six-month stints to Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere. Many of these men and women will be permanently crippled mentally. With the flow on effects to their families and communities this 7000 people deployed a year equates to 10’s of thousands of lives adversely effected every year this continues.

What can be done?

The introduction to the film Sir, No, Sir! states: During the Vietnam War an anti-war movement emerged that didn’t take place on university campuses, but in barracks and on aircraft carriers. It flourished in army stockades, navy brigs and in the dingy towns that surround military bases. It penetrated elite military colleges like West Point. And it spread throughout the battlefields of Vietnam. Hundreds went to prison and thousands into exile. And by 1971 it had, in the words of one colonel, infested the entire armed services.

By the Pentagon’s own figures, 503,926 “incidents of desertion” occurred between 1966 and 1971; officers were being “fragged”(killed with fragmentation grenades by their own troops) at an alarming rate; and by 1971 entire units were refusing to go into battle in unprecedented numbers. In the course of a few short years, over 100 underground newspapers were published by soldiers around the world; local and national antiwar GI organizations were joined by thousands; thousands more demonstrated against the war at every major base in the world in 1970 and 1971, including in Vietnam itself; stockades and federal prisons were filling up with soldiers jailed for their opposition to the war and the military.

Let us be clear, the main reason that stopped the Vietnam War and turned public opinion in the West against the war was the resistance of the Vietnamese people. However the GI antiwar movement was a strong expression of solidarity with the people of Vietnam and added a lot of weight to the antiwar movement in the U.S.

Today it is also the resistance of the Iraqi and Afghani people that bogs the U.S. and it allies down and turns public opinion against the wars there. The longer they have resisted the more people have realised the hypocrisy of the U.S. and allied governments’ reasoning for their involvement in both Iraq and Afghanistan. In the name of ‘freedom’ and ‘democracy’ tens of thousands of civilians and thousands of troops have died to set up puppet governments run by warlords and thugs no better than the tyrants they have replaced. The only winners have been large multi-national companies who have made billions from the war and seek to gain more from Iraqi oil fields and a gas pipeline from Turkmenistan's oil fields through Afghanistan to lucrative markets in India and Pakistan.

I am one of the initiators of a new group called Stand Fast, which draws inspiration from the traditions of the G.I. antiwar movement and current groups in the U.S. such as Iraq Veterans Against the War.

Stand Fast is a group of veterans and former military personnel who oppose the current wars of occupation in Iraq and Afghanistan. We who have carried rifles denounce these wars because:

· These wars are about money, power and fear.
· Soldiers are people; they are our neighbours, our sons, daughters, brothers and sisters.
· Too many have paid the price with their lives. Leaving behind partners and children who will never know their parents.
· Many will carry the psychological scars for the rest of their lives.

Stand Fast seeks to add weight to the antiwar movement in Australia through organising veterans to speak out against the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, by debunking the myth that “If you’re against the war, you’re against the individual service people involved.” We also seek to ferment and support resistance to these wars within the Australian Defence Force.

Stand Fast hopes to have speakers at the March 15/16th rallies marking the fifth anniversary of the invasion of Iraq in Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane. If anyone is interested in joining the group or knows of someone who might, please take one of these open letters. If you're not a veteran or former soldier I urge you to get involved in the antiwar movement, Brisbane we have the Stop The War Collective and I urge you be at the Palm Sunday rally on March 16th here in Brisbane protesting the fifth anniversary of the Iraq War.

Let’s bring all the troops home and stop anymore from going over.

120 US war veteran suicides a week

2007-11-15T09:47:00.000+10:00

Article from: Agence France-Presse

THE US military is experiencing a "suicide epidemic" with veterans
killing themselves at the rate of 120 a week, according to an
investigation by US television network CBS.

At least 6256 US veterans committed suicide in 2005 - an average of 17
a day - the network reported, with veterans overall more than twice as
likely to take their own lives as the rest of the general population.

While the suicide rate among the general population was 8.9 per
100,000, the level among veterans was between 18.7 and 20.8 per 100,000.

That figure rose to 22.9 to 31.9 suicides per 100,000 among veterans
aged 20 to 24 - almost four times the non-veteran average for the age
group.

"Those numbers clearly show an epidemic of mental health problems,''
CBS quoted veterans' rights advocate Paul Sullivan as saying.

CBS quoted the father of a 23-year-old soldier who shot himself in
2005 as saying the military did not want the true scale of the problem
to be known.

"Nobody wants to tally it up in the form of a government total,'' Mike
Bowman said.

"They don't want the true numbers of casualties to really be known.''

There are 25 million veterans in the United States, 1.6 million of
whom served in Afghanistan and Iraq, according to CBS.

"Not everyone comes home from the war wounded, but the bottom line is
nobody comes home unchanged,'' Paul Rieckhoff, a former Marine and
founder of Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans for America said on CBS.

The network said it was the first time that a nationwide count of
veteran suicides had been conducted.

The tally was reached by collating suicide data from individual states
for both veterans and the general population from 1995.

http://www.news.com.au/heraldsun/story/0,21985,22762457-5005961,00.html

An open letter to all activists who have served in any armed forces

2007-10-10T09:17:00.000+10:00

The recent successful tour by Matt Howard from U.S. based group Iraq Veterans Against the War (IVAW) has highlighted the extra weight that veterans and former military personnel can add to the anti-war movement in this country. IVAW’s key strategy, and one which assisted the anti-Vietnam War movement, is organising resistance within U.S. armed forces. The setting up in Australia of a group of former soldiers/guerrillas, sailors and air force personnel against the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan could be an important step in building resistance to these wars within the ADF. You know through personal experience that the words and actions of former service personnel carry far more resonance with current serving members than the words and actions of 'civilians'. Such a group can also be an effective counter to the idea that the Government likes to portray, “If you’re against the war, you’re against the individual service people involved.”

A group like this will not appear spontaneously. It is up to veterans and former service personnel already organised through groups within the anti-war movement to make this happen. The question is; are there enough of us out there within activist groups to make this work?

If you are a veteran, or have served in the armed forces of any country, are already part of the anti-war movement in Australia and you think it is worthwhile to have such a group contact me at hamish@ripper.com.au so I can find out who’s out there, where they are and how many of us there are.

Organised together I think we can add to and strengthen the anti-war movement.

Hamish Chitts
m) 0401 586 923
e) hamish@ripper.com.au
Former infantry soldier (Australian Army), INTERFET campaign and U.N. mission to East Timor veteran.
Brisbane, Qld.

Iraq Veterans Against the War tour speech

2007-08-12T09:10:00.000+10:00

Speech delivered by Hamish Chitts

St Mary's Church, South Brisbane

11th August 2007

Early in 2003 a few months before the invasion of Iraq I was working in the intelligence cell of my infantry battalion in Darwin. I had been an infantry soldier in the Reserve and Regular army for 11 years and had seen active service in East Timor in 1999 and 2000 as part of INTERFET and the subsequent UN mission. I was relatively new to the job of intelligence and was still in close email contact with the people I'd done my int course with. We were all in similar roles around the country and basically at the lowest level of Australia's intelligence community.

When the politicians started rattling their sabers we discussed and questioned the reasons and motives for this new war. When Colin Powell gave his now infamous power point presentation to the UN Security Council to justify an invasion of Iraq we knew it for the farce that it was. We started sending around joke emails to each other about their reasons, the best being a take off of Powell's presentation with photos of plastic soldiers, toy trucks and rubber finger puppet monsters in somebody's sandpit. Our superiors soon clamped down on any dissent but the point is there was no failure of intelligence. Everyone knew there were no WMDs, everyone knew that Al Qaeda had no significant presence in Iraq. Osama bin Laden had previously and publicly denounced Saddam as a 'lesser Satan'. Career 'yes men' on large salaries agreed with their political masters knowing the worst they could face is having to resign with a big pay out and a nice job lined up for them in private industry. I decided I did not want to be a part of or contribute in any way to this nor did I want to risk my life again, especially for the sake of big business so put in my discharge.

Through its relatively small contingents and through being placed in lesser risk areas Australia has suffered few physical casualties in Iraq. But everyday there are Australian casualties that no sees or hears about. Through my own experiences and through those of my mates I can tell you no one who sees active service comes back the same.

Recent figures from America have shown that troops coming back from Iraq and Afghanistan are suffering 3 times more Post Traumatic Stress Disorder than their counterparts did on return from Vietnam.

But it doesn’t just effect those who’ve been directly involved, it effects their children and even their grandchildren. A survey of 2500 children and grandchildren of Australian Vietnam veterans has found 70% of children and 30% of grandchildren suffer psychiatric or psychological problems.

John Howard likes to have his photo taken with Australian troops. He likes to use the memory of the fallen to push his political career and his vile 'rich get richer' policies. He likes to use troops but he doesn't like them or care one bit about them if he did he wouldn't send them to war in Iraq and Afghanistan knowing full well the only thing they are risking their lives for is the profits of multi-nationals.

I admire the courage of Iraq Veterans Against the War and the excellent work they are doing in the U.S. More Australian soldiers and veterans need to know what they are doing and to organise, to dissent and to show the general public , by marching themselves, that challenging the war is not an attack on veterans or current serving soldiers. That is why I am a member of the Stop The War Collective and that is why I will be protesting the APEC conference in Sydney in September. There is a war on. A war the extremely rich few have declared on anyone who stands in the way of them making even more money. Whether a worker in a factory, an Aboriginal person in a remote community or a person in Iraq if you do not go along with what the elite want then they will try to sweep you aside or destroy you.

As soldiers in a Western so called democracy you are told you fight for freedom and democracy which couldn't be any further from the truth. You fight for big business and global monopolies. The true freedom fighters and defenders of democracy are the protesters, the activists and anyone who will stand up to the powerful few and demand a fair deal fro all.

Iraq War Veteran tour kicks off in Brisbane

2007-08-12T08:55:00.000+10:00

By Ian Rintoul

"And in my heart, the chains falling apart
The wildness in my soul
And for once in life, for once in life I know

I'm not alone, for the mountains make our bones
With the oceans in our blood
Our feet planted, planted firmly in the mud"

From 'A Drop Of Water', Dana Lyons, 1991

These words echoed throughout St Marys, West End [Brisbane] this afternoon [11/8/07], as a young woman sang to the large gathering who had amassed to hear Iraq war veteran Mr Matt Howard speak.

Mr Howard, who served as a Corporal in the US Marine Corps, and is now an activist with Iraq Veterans Against the War (IVAW), was involved in the initial invasion of Iraq in March 2003. He made it clear at the outset that it is a mistake to say that if we had done it right, it would have been ok.

"That is not the case," he said.

"The tone was set at the outset."

Mr Howard drove a supply truck which carried food, water and equipment for tanks and palettes of humanitarian rations. When he crossed the border from Kuwait into Iraq, he saw hungry children lining the streets. He opened the rations and handed them out. His Sergeant confronted him with his M-16 and said, "What the hell do you think you are doing?" He was ordered not to throw one more box of food out to one more starving child. He took the remaining rations all the way to Baghdad, and back again to Kuwait, without delivering one more ration to starving people. When he asked his Commanding Officer, in Kuwait, what he should do with the food, he was ordered to "F*cking bury it." He buried it.

Howard's Commander explained that he didn't want Iraqis to get the "wrong impression about why we were there".

"It was like that the whole way to Baghdad," said Mr Howard.

"We just destroyed the place for the hell of it."

A year after the invasion, Mr Howard said the situation in Iraq was "infinitely worse", with no electricity (the whole country running on generators for only a few hours a day), no sewerage, and hospitals becoming morgues.

"We were told Iraq was a third world country, but we turned it into a third world country."

Mr Howard said that the war in Iraq is not going to end through a political process and that the only way it will end is if the soldiers "put down their weapons and say no".

"The Democrats are not going to end the war. Since they've taken power, they continue to give Bush all the funding he asks for," he said.

Mr Howard pointed out the inconsistencies of contractors being paid $300,000 a year as opposed to US soldiers, who are receiving $20,000. (He later said that there are as many contractors in Iraq as US troops, and that contractors are "acting like cowboys", shooting people in broad daylight in the middle of the street).

And, when the only mission for US troops is to drive around in a Humvee all day waiting to be blown up by an IED.

"Without that, we don't have a mission to be there," he said. "We are told that our mission is 'Troop Protection' but that is no mission at all."

Mr Howard was joined by Mr Hamish Chitts, a former Australian infantry soldier who served in East Timor (1999-2000), and in the intelligence services.

Mr Chitts said that at the time of Former Secretary of State Colin Powell's presentation to the UN about Iraq's alleged weapons of mass destruction, "We knew it was a farce."

Mr Chitts said that he and his colleagues exchanged joke e-mails parodying the WMD presentation, until their superiors clamped down.

"It was obvious. Everyone knew there were no WMDs," he said.

Having decided he didn't want to participate or risk his life for big buisness, Mr Chitts put in his discharge.

He went on to say that in his experience, no-one who sees active service comes back the same, and that soldiers are suffering three times as much post traumatic stress disorder as those who served in the Vietnam war.

"We are told we fight for freedom and democracy, but this couldn't be further from the truth," he said.

During the question and answer session, a gentleman in the audience who said he worked in the oil and gas industry asked, "What is the true reason for the American nation making this huge investment in occupying Iraq?"

"To truly understand this war you have to understand energy," he said.

Mr Howard said, "Everyone is dreaming if they think the US will ever get out of Iraq."

He explained that 'Operation Crown Jewel' (to secure the Ramadi oil field) was very explicitly his battalion's first objective when they invaded Iraq in 2003, which they accomplished.

And as for the troubles between the Shias and the Sunnis?

"Sectarian violence is being fuelled by our presence," said Mr Howard. He was quite clear that CIA "Black-Ops" were at work, and pointed out that these two groups had happily co-existed, side by side, for 1,400 years before the invasion.

He expressed empathy for the Iraqis resisting the occupation.

"What the hell would you do if people invaded your country? There's no way Americans would stand for an occupying presence," he said.

Mr Howard said that he understands what the Iraqi resistance are fighting for, and explained that his own progression from warrior to peace activist had been difficult.

"Violence begets violence," he said.

Source: http://www.peaceconvergence.com/news/44

The Ground Truth film introduction

2007-04-02T07:26:00.000+10:00

Speech by Hamish Chitts delivered at Red Cinema

Sat. March 31

People have said that if there were more Australian casualties in Iraq and Afghanistan that this would shake the general public into a greater questioning of these wars, this may be true. But I put it to you that there are Australian casualties everyday that no one sees or hears about.

Through my own experiences as a former infantry soldier and combat veteran and through those of my mates I can tell you no one who sees active service comes back the same.

Recent figures from America have shown that troops coming back from Iraq and Afghanistan are suffering 3 times more Post Traumatic Stress Disorder than their counterparts did on return from Vietnam.

But it doesn’t just effect those who’ve been directly involved, it effects their children and even their grandchildren. A survey of 2500 children and grandchildren of Australian Vietnam veterans has found 70% of children and 30% of grandchildren suffer psychiatric or psychological problems.

This movie is about soldiers telling their own stories, so when someone accuses you of not supporting our troops you can pass on some of the things you’ll see tonight. There are many reasons to stop these wars of greed, here is just one of them.

The Ground Truth.

Speak out for Hicks

2007-03-03T07:33:00.000+10:00

Hamish Chitts, Brisbane

About 50 people gathered in Brisbane Square on 2nd March to demand the release of David Hicks from his unlawful detention in Guantanamo Bay. Many more people paused on their way home to sign petitions and listen to speakers organised by Birsbane's Stop The War Collective as part of an ongoing series of public speak outs against Hicks' wrongful imprisonment.

Ross Daniels, Senior Human Rights Lecturer at Queensland University of Technology, told those gathered that the United States and Australian governments claim to be bringing freedom and democracy to Iraq but their treatment of David Hicks and others at Guantanamo Bay contradicts their commitment to these values. Daniels cited a list of concerns the Australian Lawyers Association has published which calls the treatment of Hicks unfair, unjust, a breech of the Geneva Convention, a breech of human rights and a basic disregard for international principles of law. He urged people to hound the Howard Government to respond to these concerns.

The Democrats Andrew Bartlet said the Howard Government has let people's rights and freedoms be grossly undermined. He warned that the Australian Government is willing to sacrifice people for its own ends and that if they can do it with Hicks they can do it with others. Bartlet called on people to keep the pressure up on all political parties and to keep voicing their concerns with the treatment of Hicks.

Socialist Alliance Senate candidate and leading Murri activist Sam Watson noted that the Australian Government had totally suspended Hicks' rights in order to serve the corrupt interests of the Bush administration. "Howard only has one agenda and that is to retain power." Watson argued that we all have a responsibility to stand up and confront Howard and demand Hicks' release.

Lee Rush whose son Scott is facing the death penalty for his involvement with the Bali 9 expressed his sympathies to Hicks' father Terry and to the rest of his family. Rush tried to protect his son by letting the Federal police know about the planned smuggling of drugs. Instead of taking action to prevent this crime Australian Federal police merely told Indonesian police about it. Rush accused the Federal police of sentencing his son to death by assisting Indonesian police.

Mark Gillespie from Brisbane's Stop The War Collective told the crowd that the Australian government has a history of and will continue to put diplomatic relationships before the rights of its citizens. They constantly lie to people and their actions internationally have nothing to with freedom or democracy. Gillespie explained while Donald Rumsfeld described Guantanamo detainees as "the most dangerous, best trained, vicious killers on Earth" they couldn't even charge Hicks with attempted murder. Instead they have charged him with providing material support for terrorism. Gillespie argued that if anyone has provided material support to terrorism it is the United States who during Israel's recent attacks on Lebanon supplied cluster bombs which Israel dropped on towns all over Southern Lebanon.
The Stop The War Collective is organising Brisbane's March 17 anti war rally and march which will hear a range of speakers including Terry Hicks. Friday's speak out for Hicks was part of an ongoing series which occur every few weeks in Brisbane Square.

War on Terror update

2007-02-26T07:45:00.000+10:00

Hamish Chitts, Brisbane

Occupation fomenting violence

US politicians and military leaders actually thought the Iraqi people would welcome them with open arms in something akin to the scenes of liberation in France near the end of WWII. Their nice quick war has turned into a disaster when their occupation met solid resistance.

Around 60 000 civilians have been killed since the invasion and the rate of civilians dying as a result of military actions has steadily increased with the increase US and coalition casualty rates.

U.S. Military Deaths in Iraq reported at 3,155, British military 132 deaths; Italy, 33; Ukraine, 18; Poland, 19; Bulgaria, 13; Spain, 11; Denmark, six; El Salvador, five; Slovakia, four; Latvia, three; Estonia, Netherlands, Thailand, two each; and Australia, Hungary, Kazakhstan, Romania, one death each.

The idea that the occupation is necessary to prevent Iraq from descending into violent anarchy and sectarian civil war is a sick joke. The occupation is deliberately creating such an outcome.

US meddling in Iraq politics actively supports some factions with military muscle causing those not supported to retain their weapons. They will even play factions off against each other for their own ends.

Last October, the head of the British Army, General Richard Dannatt, told the Daily Mail that Britain should withdraw its troops from Iraq “soon”, as their continued presence helped foment violence.

Those generals who wouldn’t sign on to a military escalation have been ditched. General John Abizaid, the top U.S. commander for the Middle East and a vocal opponent of the surge option, is being eased into retirement. So is General George Casey, Jr., the top commander in Baghdad. He slapped down administration plans the week before Christmas by noting, “Additional troops have to be for a purpose,” then reversed course and backed the escalation, “eliminating one of the last remaining hurdles to proposals being considered by President Bush for a troop increase” (LA Times, December 23, 2006). But it was too little to save his post.

Living standards

Policies, which reflect U.S. free-market priorities, dismantled state-run enterprises that employed hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and ended subsidies once received by individuals and families. They presented Iraqis with wrenching change, leading to high unemployment and frustration.

The report found Iraq’s damaged infrastructure to be the single largest factor in creating poor living conditions. It found that 85 percent of households lacked a stable source of electricity, with weekly and even daily outages, cutting into other basic needs. Nearly 70 percent of households struggled with disposing of garbage, and more than 40 percent were deprived of healthy sanitation facilities.

Among health concerns, deprivation levels were seen as a factor in undernourishment. The U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees estimates there are 1.6 million Iraqis displaced inside the country, including 425,000 who fled their homes after the bombing of the Samarra shrine in February 2006 unleashed a wave of sectarian violence.

In the face of larger and increasing more organised resistance occupying forces are no longer focusing on Victory but the consequences of defeat.

Howard on the weekend: "My argument is that if there is a coalition defeat in Iraq the terrorists will be emboldened, American authority will be weakened, and that will have consequences for all of us and most particularly for us."

The issue of credibility was so central to America's Vietnam policy that tens of thousands of Americans died in the pursuit not of victory, but of saving face. They died because American leaders believed then -- as the Bush administration apparently believes now -- that defeat would have uncontrollable consequences. But the wiser voices inside the Johnson administration were arguing as early as the mid-1960s that the costs of defeat were manageable.

The last couple of weeks have shown cracks forming in the original coalition of the willing.

Mounting opposition to the war in countries participating in the occupation has put pressure on the governments involved. The recent electoral victories of the democrats in the US senate should be seen as a vote against the war and George W Bush rather than any surge in popularity of the Democrats.

Under extreme public pressure on February 21 British PM Tony Blair announced that his government would withdraw 1600 troops from Iraq in coming months.

At the same time as Blair made his troop reduction announcement, Danish Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen announced that his country’s 460 ground troops would be withdrawn from Iraq by August. Like the Australian “battle group” in Iraq, these Danish troops rely on the British occupation force for air, medical, artillery and other tactical support.

Hidden casualties

Colonel Tony Cotton, director of mental health and psychology at the ADF, concedes that 10 per cent of the 1200 servicemen and women who underwent compulsory psychological screenings after their recent return from Iraq, required "immediate follow-up support". The "returned to Australia psychological screenings" (R-TAPS) examine such things as trauma exposure and mental distress. "Certainly we have no indication of PTSD or acute stress disorders that we're seeing from them," says Cotton. "Certainly not in the short term." The symptoms of post-traumatic stress - emotional hypertension, acute anxiety, sadness and guilt - can sometimes take months, perhaps years, to manifest.

Afghanistan

Total number of Coalition forces in Afghanistan: About 18,000

Britain is increasing its troop numbers and Australia is talking about doing the same. There is great pressure on NATO countries from the over stretched US to increase their troop commitments and to place more of their forces in southern Afghanistan where fighting has been the fiercest. Both Taliban and the western backed warlord government are talking about a big Spring offensive in the south which with our Autumn starting in the next couple of days is far off.

UNOCAL has been trying to build the north-south pipeline through Afghanistan and Pakistan to the Indian Ocean for several decades. In 1998, the California-based UNOCAL, which held 46.5 percent stakes in Central Asia Gas (CentGas), a consortium that planned an ambitious gas pipeline across Afghanistan, withdrew in frustration after several fruitless years. The pipeline was to stretch 1,271 km from Turkmenistan's Dauletabad fields to Multan in Pakistan at an estimated cost of $1.9 billion. An additional $600 million would have brought the pipeline to energy-hungry India.

UNOCAL cut off its earlier agreement with the Taliban in 1998 when it became clear that the Taliban could not control all of Afghanistan and provide a stable political environment for a north-south pipeline construction project. It was likely at this juncture that a new "war against terrorism" ploy was conceived by the Standard Oil-influenced U.S. government. The "war against terrorism" in Afghanistan has come to a hiatus, with war-lords once again ruling the country, and the Bush administration has put their own man, Karzai, in power to control Afghanistan. Karzai was a top adviser to UNOCAL during the negotiations with the Taliban to construct a Central Asia Gas (CentGas) pipeline from Turkmenistan through western Afghanistan to Pakistan.

The war on terror – the home front

As demonstrated by David Hicks and Jack Thomas the price of this so called war on terror is not just being paid by people in savage far off lands. The fear of mythical threats are allowing capitalist governments to curtail the rights and freedoms of its people. Control orders and military tribunals are the most visible of a raft of legislation giving free democratic western governments greater control over their citizens.