an olive branch to the taliban?

As UK troops pulled out from the Sangin area of Helmand in early July, commanders hailed the successes of their mission in Afghanistan.

Yet at the same time the US-backed president Hamid Karzai has sought reconciliation with the Taliban, demonstrating the sham of ‘democracy’ brought by imperialist troops. The  Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan reports.

"democratic" imperialism can even accept reconciliation with the Taliban

By inviting the Taliban, the leaders of the Islamic Party and other “Jihadi leaders” to be part of a “Consultative Peace Jirga,” Hamid Karzai is committing yet another crime against the Afghan people.

He has installed former Soviet puppets and Northern Alliance warlords in key posts of his government. He even went as far as assigning the two most notorious warlords, Karim Khalili and Qasim Fahim, as his vice presidents.

troops out of afghanistan!

editorial of The Commune

The withdrawal of the last UK combat troops from Iraq at the end of May 2009 has only served to heap more attention on the ‘forgotten war’ in Afghanistan.

In April 2006 the then Labour Defence Secretary John Reid told the House of Commons that British troops would preside over Helmand province and leave “without a shot being fired”: yet day-by-day the tally of the dead increases. Over two hundred British soldiers, many of whom were recruited to the Army as mere teenagers, desperate to get out of sink estates, have been killed: the number of Afghan civilian dead, largely ignored by the mainstream media in this country, now stands in the tens of thousands.