No more NZ involvement in Afghanistan!

US wants increased NZ presence in Afghanistan
The United States is constantly asking New Zealand to increase its military presence in Afghanistan, papers show. About 140 army, navy and air force personnel are involved in New Zealand's Provincial Reconstruction Team (PRT) operating in Afghanistan's Bamyan Province. The team has been active there since 2003. The Government is considering whether to send Special Air Service troops back to the country; the SAS has been deployed there three times, the last in 2006. Radio New Zealand today reported papers obtained under the Official Information Act showed the United States was impressed with the PRT and regularly asked for an increased commitment in Afghanistan.

NO! NO! NO! A country so warped by US policy that funded the very Islamist fundamentalists in the 1980s who ended up ripping the country asunder, a country that the CIA fostered heroin production to pay for a multitude of dirty wars, a country that has now been flooded by Blackwater mercenaries who butcher without judicial oversight and who expand a dangerous destruction of national sovereignty while making billions in war money for their evangelical Christian masters!

NO MORE NZ INVOLVEMENT IN THIS FILTH! We are not protecting freedom and democracy, we are propping up American hegemony.

Don’t we commemorate ANZAC Day to tell the next generation of NZers that we will never throw away NZ lives as pointlessly and wastefully as we have done in the past for wars that had nothing to do with freedom or democracy? Have we learnt nothing from our history?

I’m sure Willie Apiata is a decent and brave bloke, but handing out medals to a war we shouldn’t be part of isn’t brave or courageous, it’s the usual flag blinding patriotism that keeps people from asking real questions like “what the hell are we doing in Afghanistan”. We are merely pawns in a vast game played by people with no ethics or morality and our continued presence is simply window dressing for a corrupt consensus.

We are fooling ourselves as badly as Robert Macnamara did with the Vietnam war to pretend we are fighting for freedom and democracy.

At least Macnamara had the grace to acknowledge he was wrong before he died.

U.N. report: Civilian casualties hit record high in Afghan conflict
KABUL, Afghanistan (CNN) -- The number of civilians killed in armed conflict in Afghanistan rose 40 percent last year, to a record 2,118, a U.N. report said Tuesday.

The Gunner's Lament

A Maori gunner lay dying
In a paddyfield north of Saigon,
And he said to his pakeha cobber,
"I reckon I've had it, man!

'And if I could fly like a bird
To my old granny's whare
A truck and a winch would never drag
Me back to the Army.

'A coat and a cap and a well-paid job
Looked better than shovelling metal,
And they told me that Te Rauparaha
Would have fought in the Vietnam battle.

'On my last leave the town swung round
Like a bucket full of eels.
The girls liked the uniform
And I liked the girls.

'Like a bullock to the abattoirs
In the name of liberty
They flew me with a hangover
Across the Tasman Sea,

'And what I found in Vietnam
Was mud and blood and fire,
With the Yanks and the Reds taking turns
At murdering the poor.

'And I saw the reason for it
In a Viet Cong's blazing eyes -
We fought for the crops of kumara
And they are fighting for the rice.

'So go tell my sweetheart
To get another boy
Who'll cuddle her and marry her
And laugh when the bugles blow,

'And tell my youngest brother
He can have my shotgun
To fire at the ducks on the big lagoon,
But not to aim it at a man,

'And tell my granny to wear black
And carry a willow leaf,
Because the kid she kept from the cold
Has eaten a dead man's loaf.

'And go and tell Keith Holyoake
Sitting in Wellington,
However long he scrubs his hands
He'll never get them clean.'

James K Baxter
1965

NZ out of Afghanistan now!