US-Australia alliance: an axis of evil

By Hamish Chitts

When the visit of US President Barack Obama was announced last month, an official White House statement said he “is looking forward to commemorating the 70th anniversary of Australia-US relations”. Far from being a cause of celebration, the anniversary represents 70 years of cooperation in attacks, invasions and occupations in the pursuit of economic dominance and profit for a handful of obscenely rich people in both countries — a 70-year axis of evil pitting working people from Australia and the US against working people resisting imperialist exploitation.

This alliance for profit-driven slaughter is as strong today as it has ever been. In response to the announcement of Obama’s planned visit, Kevin Rudd told ABC News on February 2: “We have a whole truckload of areas of military cooperation and to work out where we go in the future together.” When Rudd visited the US in March last year, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton declared: “America doesn’t have a better friend in the world than Australia. A friend through good times and hard times.” It is, in fact, a “friendship” saturated in the blood of the victims of their joint war efforts.

British Empire wanes
On January 8, 1940, the governments of the United States and Australia announced the establishment of bilateral diplomatic relations. Australia was already officially at war, having immediately followed Britain’s declaration of war on September 3, 1939. At this time the Australian capitalist ruling class still saw its interests tied firmly to the British Empire and its global trade and military strength. However, Britain could not defend the Australian capitalist ruler’s interests from the rapidly advancing Japanese imperial forces. When the Japanese army moved into Australia’s New Guinea colony, Canberra turned decisively toward reliance on an alliance with Washington to protect Australian corporate interests in Asia and the Pacific. The US capitalist rulers needed a willing strategic and logistic base for its war drive against its Japanese imperialist rival.

The inability of European colonial powers ravaged by war to hold onto their colonies at the end of World War II opened the door for an upsurge of national liberation struggles, particularly in Asia. The example of the Russian Revolution in 1917 and the influence of the USSR meant that many of these struggles took on socialist aspirations. The close relationship between US and Australian imperialist ruling classes was forged in their common struggle to crush the worker-peasant anti-imperialist revolutions throughout Asia.

Robert Menzies (Australian PM in 1940 and then again from 1949 to 1963) was a virulent anti-communist who espoused the theory of “forward defence”, which he described: “We either commit ourselves with great friends and allies or we do not. If we do not, then we must attend to our own defence … If there is a war of our own existence it should be carried out as far from our soil as possible.” By “a war of our own existence”, Menzies meant a war for the existence of Australian imperialist capitalism. “Forward defence” was used to justify the wars for defence of US and Australian corporate profits that underlies the US-Australian alliance.

Military intervention in Malaya
Britain and Australia used their militaries to advance the interests of their own ruling classes, whenever possible in alliance with Washington. In 1950, Australia sent Royal Australian Air Force transport planes and bombers to help British colonialism fight the Malayan National Liberation Army (MNLA), the refounding of the Malayan People’s Anti-Japanese Army, the guerrilla force that had been the principal resistance in Malaya against the Japanese occupation. The Malayan “emergency” was the term used by the British colonial government for the war against the MNLA because the British owners of rubber plantations and tin mines in Malaya demanded use of the term “emergency” rather than war so that their losses would be covered by insurers. The MNLA called it the “Anti-British National Liberation War”. The combined use of massacres, heavy bombing, paid spies, the forced relocation of some 500,000 rural Malays into concentration camps and, most critically, the playing off of different ethnic groups against each other allowed the British and Australian forces to eventually defeat the MNLA. This took until 1960, and from 1955 to 1960 Australia sent thousands of troops to fight against the MNLA.

Korean War
In August 1945, with Japan defeated, Korea’s workers and peasants rose in revolution. Grassroots “people’s committees” mushroomed and took sweeping control of industry and the land. On September 6, independence fighters and representatives of the people’s committees proclaimed a Korean People’s Republic in Seoul on the basis of a 27-point program. The key points related to land redistribution, nationalisation of major industries, rent control, an eight-hour work day and a guaranteed minimum wage.

Washington and Moscow had agreed during the war to jointly oversee Korea’s “decolonisation” on either side of a “temporary” border at the 38th parallel. The US immediately set up a counter-revolutionary government, the US Military Government in Korea (USMGIK), which began the brutal suppression of the working people’s committees. The USMGIK banned strikes and ordered the people’s committees to disband. The director of the US Department of Transportation described the US military’s role as strikebreakers: “We were out to break that thing up and we didn’t have time to worry too much if a few innocent people got hurt. We set up concentration camps outside of town and held strikers there when the jails got too full. It was war.”

The USMGIK oversaw sham elections in the south in 1948, creating a still-existing partition of Korea. Despite the brutal repression, workers in the south continued resisting and large uprisings kept occurring. Finally, after a long debate among the Communists in the north, they decided to help liberate the workers and peasants of the south and sent their army across the 38th parallel on June 25, 1950. The unpopular Republic of Korea regime in the south began to rapidly collapse, with masses of ROK Army soldiers deserting en masse to Communist-led Korean People’s Army. By September, the US-ROK forces held only 10% of Korean territory.

On September 15, 1950, the US and its imperialist allies, including Australia, began a massive offensive against the KPA forces, pouring in reinforcements from occupation bases in Japan under cover of a heavy naval artillery and aerial bombardment. After retaking the south, the imperialist forces overran the north, but were then driven back to the 38th parallel by a combined Chinese-KPA counter-offensive. Over the next two years, the areas controlled by the two sides would remain virtually the same. In July 1953 an armistice was signed. Four million Koreans had died, two-thirds of them civilians. US carpet bombing destroyed 75% of North Korea’s cities and villages. China lost at least 114,000 soldiers, and the US lost 36,934. Of the 17,000 Australians who fought in the Korean War; 339 died and 1200 were wounded.

The US-Australian war on Vietnam
Most people have some idea of the history of the war in Vietnam in the 1960s and early 1970s. Less well known is the part US imperialism played in actually starting the war. After the Viet Minh resistance fighters defeated France, they were forced into an international agreement in 1954 that partitioned Vietnam pending national elections (under international supervision) to be held by 1956. Like Korea, the agreement created two governments separated by a temporary demarcation line (known as the demilitarised zone) against the wishes of the Vietnamese people. The “international community” (i.e. the US and its imperialist allies) forced a partition and were not interested in elections because they would not allow the whole of Vietnam to be communist. US President Dwight Eisenhower later wrote, “80 per cent of the population would have voted for the Communist Ho Chi Minh”.

Washington backed a brutal puppet regime in South Vietnam, hailing sham elections as “democracy” and supplying military aid and trainers. When US officials realised that its South Vietnamese puppet regime could not survive against the popular uprising being waged by the workers and peasants, it mobilised and drafted the young men of its own working class (and lost nearly 60,000 of them) to show the whole Third World the price in lives they would pay if they challenged US domination. Australia’s rulers willingly joined in the war and also introduced conscription. More than 50,000 Australians fought against Vietnamese self-determination, of whom 520 died and around 2400 were wounded. More than 4 million civilians died in Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos during the war, and more than 1 million Vietnamese died fighting for their freedom.

While the US and its allies used similar tactics to those the British used in Malaya, they were defeated and driven out of Vietnam by a population convinced of revolution and by mass anti-war movements in the US and in allied countries like Australia. The anti-war movement cut through government and corporate propaganda and revealed the truth that working people in the US and Australia had more in common with the Vietnamese workers and peasants fighting for independence than they did with the fat cats of industry who were pushing the war.

Indonesia and East Timor
The policies of nationalising foreign-owned business and supporting strong unions pushed by Indonesia’s first president, Sukarno from 1945 to 1965 did not suit the interests of Australian and US big business. The Australian and US government’s supported the right-wing military coup of General Suharto in 1965. They continued to support Suharto’s military dictatorship right up until its demise in 1998. In the course of establishing this dictatorship, between 500,000 and 2 million Indonesians were slaughtered by the military and right-wing militias. Hundreds of thousands of people were detained and many of them were tortured.

Canberra knew in advance of the October 1975 Indonesian invasion of East Timor. Memos, cables and letters sent and received by Australia’s foreign department between 1974 and 1976 confirmed that PM Gough Whitlam’s Labor government gave tacit approval to Suharto for annexation of the former Portuguese colony. In March 1975, the US ambassador to Indonesia, David Newsom, recommended a “policy of silence” on the Suharto regimes plans to invade East Timor. On October 8, 1975, a member of the US National Security Council, Philip Habib, told an NSC meeting: “It looks like the Indonesians have begun the attack on Timor”. US secretary of state Henry Kissinger’s response to Habib was, “I’m assuming you’re really going to keep your mouth shut on this subject”. Australia and the US both provided weapons and training to the Indonesian military during its invasion and occupation of East Timor.

Global war
In the last decade, we have seen the US-led invasions and occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq, actively assisted by Australia. These wars, supposedly against “Islamic terrorism”, are really being waged against Third World countries that won’t make themselves “free and open” to super-exploitation by US or allied capitalists. Socialists in southern Yemen are labelled al Qaeda by the US to justify attacking them. Trade unionists resisting exploitation, whether in Iraq or Colombia, are labelled terrorists. The revolutionary socialist governments of Cuba and Venezuela are accused by the US of sponsoring “terrorists”, while Washington actively supports groups committed to carrying out terrorist attacks in both countries. Australian politicians parrot US politicians, saying that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are for “democracy” despite majority opposition to the wars in the countries occupied and the countries occupying, and almost everywhere else in the world. Today the imperialist politicians use the same tricks as they did last century: sham elections, indiscriminate bombing, puppet regimes, political assassinations, widespread detention and torture.

These wars and the US-Australian alliance are only for the benefit of the capitalist ruling classes in both countries — the same bosses who will risk workers’ safety to make more money, the same bosses who let people die waiting for medical treatment because they can’t pay up front. The capitalist ruling class does not have any regard for the lives of workers when there are profits to be made, whether or not the workers wave the same national flag as the capitalists. Working people in Australia and the US are duped into fighting and supporting (or staying silent about) these wars through the nationalist illusion that workers’ interests are the same as their capitalist bosses simply because they live in the same country and speak the same language.

In an October 11, 2009, TVNZ interview, Kurt Campbell, US assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific Affairs, stated: “I think Australia ... in the last 10 years, has ascended to one of the closest one or two allies on the planet, so very hard to think of any issues in which the United States and Australia are not coordinating on, whether it’s Indonesia, whether it’s Afghanistan, whether it’s Iraq, and so generally speaking there is a desire to work as closely as possible with Australia, because of what it does, what it has done and will continue to do with the United States.” What the Australian nation-state has done and continues to do with the US rulers is to inflict death and destruction on working people in order to protect the global system of capitalist exploitation and oppression. Their alliance is an axis of evil that needs to be fought against and ended.

[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.]

From Direct Action, Sydney, Australia

Afghanistan occupation quagmire enters ninth year

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!

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/

Australian death squads in Afghanistan

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/

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

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

Why the US is losing the war in Afghanistan

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/

Speech at Tet Offensive 40 years on forum

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.