End the Imperialist War in Afghanistan

Another month in the decade long imperialist war in Afghanistan, another high profile massacre of innocent Afghan civilians by an American soldier. This time Staff Sergeant Robert Bales of the 3^rd Stryker Brigade left the NATO military base in southern Kandahar province in the early hours of Sunday 11 March and broke into the homes of local Afghan villagers living near the base. He then calmly made his way through the hamlet and shot dead 16 people mostly women and children. It’s reported that the soldier hunted down members of a family like military targets and that some of his victims were found covered in burn marks inflicted by Bales.

This horrific incident, though astonishing, is not unprecedented. It was only in 2010 in the same province that three US Soldiers formed a ‘kill team’ which murdered three Afghan civilians. Last year a hungover British guardsmen stabbed a 10 year old boy in the kidney for no apparent reason. British soldiers are currently on trial for abusing Afghan children whilst US wikileaks files reported 21 separate incidents of British troops shooting dead or bombing Afghan civilians. The UN reported that last year NATO and its Afghan allies were responsible for 410 civilian deaths, a figure widely agreed to be a gross underestimate of the true number of civilians killed by the occupying forces. 

Nor is the murder of civilians limited to Afghanistan. The war in Iraq was punctuated by occupation massacres from the start: Haditha, where 24 men, women and children were murdered in cold blood by US marines in 2005, the killing of 17 by Blackwater military contractors in 2007, and another dozen by a US Apache crew in Baghdad the same year are among the more notorious.

NATO will no doubt blame the latest massacre on a mentally unstable Robert Bales and wash its hands of all responsibility for the atrocity. The fact though that such horrors occur time and time again during their imperialist occupations prove that they are endemic. Afghanistan is being occupied, not for the good of the Afghan people but due to the strategy of the U.S.A in maintaining it’s hegemony over the region. It props up  one of the most corrupt and unpopular regimes in the world, that of President Karzai, and bombs any opposition into the ground. As of going to press,  404 British soldiers, 1,827 American soldiers and tens of thousands of innocent Afghan civilians have lost their lives during the war. Many more will die before the planned withdrawal of NATO troops in 2014 but nothing will have been achieved, an incredibly sad loss of human life to feed the needs of imperialism.