No direction home

We lost another soldier this week.

That's 27 dead and 181 wounded since 2002. Figures don't include soldiers suffering from post traumatic stress disorder.

Still, our defence chief says Australia shouldn't be considering an immediate withdrawal. "Why", he said, "would you pull out when you are making the best progress you've ever made? You have the Taliban completely disrupted and on the back foot. Why would you do it? ...The Taliban in Uruzgan is totally disrupted and that's because of the efforts of our people working very effectively with the Afghan National Army and the Afghan National Police."

A United States Government Accountability Office report, released in February, noted that:

...As of September 2010, IJC reported that none of the 163 Afghan National Army (ANA) rated was independent and capable of conducting the full spectrum of its missions without coalition assistance…

Our ADF is charged with the responsibility of training and mentoring the Afghan National Army 4th Brigade in Uruzgan province. It may be faring a little better, but we don't know because no-one asks. Who pays members of the 4^th Brigade, and how much? Will they continue to be paid after coalition forces withdraw, and if so by whom? If not, will they still be willing to fight? What are the Brigade's desertion rates? Its ethnicity? Literacy rates?

People, including ours, might be working together effectively, but the insufferable conditions and destruction continues and the death count climbs. More than 200 young soldiers from countries all around the world have been killed in Afghanistan so far this year, along with uncounted "insurgents" and undoubtedly even more Afghan civilians.

The voices we tend to hear from the Afghan people aren't singing songs of praise and thanks so much as asking that foreign troops leave their soil so that they can make their own efforts towards self-determination. Earlier this year The New York Times reported on the US withdrawal from the Pech Valley:

What we figured out is that people in the Pech really aren't anti-U.S. or anti-anything; they just want to be left alone," an American military official familiar with the decision told the Times. "Our presence is what's destabilizing this area."

And without slighting the efforts or the sacrifices of foreign soldiers and Afghans who are "working together" for their greater purpose, there are many who say that propping up President Karzai and his notoriously corrupt regime does not warrant spilling the blood of our fine young soldiers or innocent Afghans.

In fact 62% of Australians have had enough of this war and want the troops to come home within six months.

Three in five Americans also think the decade long war should be ended and their troops brought home. They see billions of dollars that the country can't afford being thrown at the war in Afghanistan, while the country is ravaged by financial and other crises and 47 million Americans – well over one in 10 - are living in poverty.

With such widespread opposition why do our governments pursue such an unpopular agenda? The people protest from the start but the government insists we go and later insists that we stay, and go and stay we do. It's almost as though once the juggernaut's set in motion it becomes an unstoppable force on a single destructive course, oblivious to putative changes in destination along the way and blind to the damage it wreaks.

Does it matter at all what the public thinks? The perpetuation of this war is one instance where both sides of politics, without providing reasoned explanations or producing credible evidence, and contrary to the majority will, cooperate to send young men to their deaths saying simply, "We know what's best". What excuse do they give for ignoring the majority will of the

people and thus hijacking power? Shhh, we're "making progress".

Define progress? Does it encompass the "new" focus on economic development, like JP Morgan's hunt for Afghan Gold? It all sounds suspiciously like the Western mercantile imperialism that "liberated" Iraq.

Ending wars, and particularly unwinnable wars, takes time for countries like America and those of us on its coattails. In America, public support for US involvement in the Vietnam war fell from 60% in 1964 to 38% in 1970. Nixon was elected in 1968 on a platform that included ending it, and when he didn't nationwide protests in October 1969 demanding immediate withdrawal sparked his "silent majority" speech but nothing else. In May 1970 there were more protests when Nixon announced that the war had expanded into Cambodia, but still nothing happened. Nixon stayed in office until 1974 when he was brought down by the Vietnam war, via the Pentagon Papers and Watergate. America then withdrew from its unpopular war, defeated, in 1975.

Unfortunately popular opinion is expressed less often and less vocally now than it was then. Much of the popular opposition to Vietnam was marshalled by press photographers who sent across the world graphic images of innocent men, women and children blown to bits, or hideously burned or injured, or overcome by insufferable anguish, and of young soldiers dead or with appalling wounds. But the coverage of Afghanistan is sanitised if it is not censored, and trivialised by being presented almost as computer gaming screens. Where are Afghanistan's equivalent of the Phan Thị Kim Phúc images in Australia's mainstream media? Innocent men, women and children are being killed and young soldiers injured and maimed all the time, but we never see images of this reality. Protecting our sensibilities is a convenient excuse for preventing us from having to face the reality of what our intervention causes, but the Indonesian live cattle scandal shows how people react to undeniable truths. What Australians would see peering through the keyhole at the war in Afghanistan would be so unpalatable and popular revulsion so great, that no government would dare quietly enthuse about progress in Afghanistan. Our troops would be home in a flash.

Censorship isn't the exclusive province of America's or Australia's government-media-business-military cabals, either. Kabulpress' founder Kamran Mir Hazar's book, Censorship in Afghanistan details who carries out censorship there, including Afghan security forces, the Taliban, the Ministry of Culture, various governors, warlords, commanders, and those involved in the massive drug trade. He adds to that list international troops, the Attorney General, Interior Ministry, Education Ministry, Finance Ministry, Parliament and other governmental institutions.

It seems we like our news delivered in clean and innocuous words. But wars aren't the sanitised affairs that are served up to us. They are death and blood and pain and anguish and destruction, and if we're involved in them we should have to face the reality of both the death and damage we cause or contribute to, and the losses and pain our soldiers and their families suffer.

In 2006 journalist Robert Fisk said "...War is not about victory or defeat. It is about the total failure of human spirit. When you see the things I see, you would never support war ever again… film-makers saw fit to include the full gore of war in productions such as Saving Private Ryan and there was no reason why news broadcasts should be any different..."