Matt McCarten: Our youth sent to die for politics, not freedom

Lieutenant Tim O'Donnell. Photo / Supplied

It was only a matter of time before a New Zealand soldier was killed in Afghanistan.

The family of Tim O'Donnell is devastated, of course, and the families of Matthew Ball and Allister Baker have the dubious consolation that at least their sons are only injured.

Predictably our politicians fell over themselves in Parliament to express their condolences to the soldiers' families and praised their bravery. Phil Goff echoed all the party leaders when he intoned that he wouldn't be invoking politics into the tragedy.

What bunk. It was politics that has sent hundreds of our youth to death's door. The killing this week was only a matter of when, not if.

After 9/11, our politicians (with the honourable exception of the Green Party) competed to fawn over that blockhead George W Bush.

We couldn't wait to step in line when Bush threatened: "You are either with us or the terrorists."

The small matter that all but one of the 9/11 suicide hijackers were Saudis was never mentioned.

The Afghan government at the time was ignored when it offered to hand over the spiritual head of al Qaeda, Osama Bin Laden, to a neutral country.

So off we marched into a quagmire of our own making and have been at a loss to know how we could get out without being seen as defeated.

The pretext for war was fighting terrorism, capturing the Taleban head Mullah Oman and killing Bin Laden.

After nine years, none of these objectives has been achieved. Oman and Bin Laden are safely domiciled in Pakistan and terrorism continues unabated.

The most optimistic estimate of al Qaeda fighters in Afghanistan is 50. To fight them there are more than 100,000 foreign troops. That's 2000-to-one odds. Even New Zealand has five times that number.

The United States-installed government is riddled with corruption and lacks public support. The puppet President, Hamid Karzai, is restricted to the capital, which is guarded by Western mercenaries.

He is scornfully referred as the "mayor of Kabul". Even that overstates his territory.

As we did in Vietnam, New Zealand has become the witting plaything of US imperialism and trapped in a civil war that protects an unpopular, corrupt regime without an exit strategy.

No one believes our occupation of Afghanistan will succeed.

Sooner or later the mightiest army in history will leave with its tail between its legs.

While we pretend we are fighting against terrorism, for freedom and democracy, the Taleban resistance (once funded by the US) believes it is fighting a nationalist war of independence against invaders. They are right and, because of that, they will beat us.

Having our non-SAS contingent there to rebuild infrastructure at the same time we are destroying other parts of the country is merely a propaganda stunt and makes our politicians feel better about our involvement.

Of course, elements of the Taleban are brutal and monstrous to their own people. But that's not the reason we are there. Our presence isn't needed for military purposes, it's to build good will with our US ally in the hope of a free trade deal and other associated considerations.

Nine years ago, when the then Labour government voted to join the invasion of Afghanistan, a majority of the Alliance Party caucus and party opposed it.

The internal rift caused an implosion with leader Jim Anderton and his pro-war supporters decamping to the Labour Party. The rest of us got wiped out for our stubbornness.

Anderton couldn't understand why the killing of Afghans was such a bottom line for us. The thought of a Kiwi being killed by his decision never occurred to him.

So to all those MPs who voted to send Tim O'Donnell to his death, I want you to know you have his blood dripping from your hands.

A soldier is trained to kill others and accepts he or she may also be killed.

But politicians owed our soldiers the promise their deaths were for a worthy cause. O'Donnell's death wasn't.