Has anyone ever seen the film "Charlie Wilson's War"?
It's a pretty good account of what happened during the Cold War when Afghanistan was invaded by the Soviets. To summate it a bit, the US couldn't fight the Russians because, obviously, that would lead to nuclear war. However, they wanted to stop the spread of communism and try to bleed the Russians dry leading to their eventual economic collapse.
Before the Americans intervened, the Afghans were basically getting slaughered, as they didn't have the necessary firepower of training to fight off the Soviet forces. The Americans secretly funded them, gave them weapons, and setup CIA training camps to train them to fight. This is where the whole "Bin Laden was trained by the CIA" thing comes from.
The Afghans basically fought off the Soviets and everybody was happy. Unfortunately, the US then pulled it's funding. At this point, Afghanistan was a wreck, they had no schools, hospitals, basic santitation or power systems, they had all been destroyed by the Russians. Also, thanks to a bloody war, 80% of the population was under the age of 25. Now these people returned to their bombed out homes, and due to the secret nature of the funding, most weren't aware of the help the Americans gave them.
It doesn't take a huge stretch of the imagination to get from there, having seen all the Americans taking credit for ending the Cold War, to develop a bitterness towards the country.
Over the years, the lunatic fringe started taking over the country and recruited many of these disillusioned/bitter people having filled their heads with anti-West propaganda. Opium farms gave them the funding to buy weapons from (ironically enough) the West, while also having a bunch of ex-Soviet weaponry still lying around.
So now they have a cause and they have some guns. Even at this point though, many just wanted to grow their drugs or whatever and have an easy life.
As the years progress, the small lunatic fringe who are motivated enough to do anything overseas start bombing US embassies. This still isn't Al-Qaeda, as that's more of a catch all name than an actual organisation, this is just the lunatic fringe.
US embassies get blown up, and Bush gets pissed at it. On September 10th of 2001, he recieves a plan on invading Afghanistan to stop this small lunatic fringe from blowing up any more embassies. The problem was though, the US public wouldn't tolerate a war against a small group of fanatics.
Then some Saudi nationals fly a plane in to the World Trade Center. That did a pretty good job of changing public opinion and the wheels started turning.
Somehow, we got dragged in to all of this. We go in to a country where a large number of people are still bitter towards the West. What do you think invading their country did for that? I would guess it didn't make them all love us.
So, we go from fighting a small amount of lunatics, to fighting the whole country. The Afghans don't get the Sun, or watch Sky News. As far as they are concerned, we have walked in to their country and started shooting people. Yes, these people are who we know to be terrorists, but to them, they are Bob next door.
We also have a six degrees of seperation problem too. We go to shoot Bob, and maybe we hit one of Bob's sheep. A whispering campaign starts among the population, and all of a sudden, we are 'murdering their lifestock and trying to starve them'. Yes, we drop leaflets, but so did the Nazis when they were bombing us and we ignored them, like they will ignore us. Yes, we are also helping some of their farmers - I saw a particularly heartwarming story where our troops were helping a really old farmer build irrigation ditches on his farm. We are giving farmers money to stop growing opium. Unfortunately, if they refuse and we suspect something, we bomb the shit out of their farm. Again, the whispering campaign starts.
There are two possible ways that we can 'win' in Afghanistan. Either, we stop the opium farms, get the population in to mining and create a system whereby they become more moderate in their political views. Rationalisation can only come with education, so the first thing would be to turn Afghanistan from a muddy shithole into a fully functioning country, with proper schools, healthcare and industry. You don't do this with bombs, you do this with money - and we haven't got any. The second way, is to kill every person in the country who has a nationalist or fundamentalist opinion. I'm not on the inside of the MoD, but I would imagine that this is the plan. I hope someone can give me some information about this to prove me wrong.
So, back to the original point about soldiers. Our soldiers are currently protecting us from people who are pissed at Britain. People are pissed at Britain because our soldiers are there.
Unfortunately, there is no going back now. If we pull out, they will STILL be pissed at us, and the world will become a much more dangerous place for us. If we don't pull out, they'll hate us for shooting a large majority of their working population. It's Catch-22.
Soldiers are needlessly dying because as I have said, you cannot solve a violent problem with violence. Non-violence and honesty are the only forms of morality. Anything else is inflicting direct pain to make others happy.
Every soldier is a human being who has an opinion. Every soldier has the right to be a consciencious objector, and decide not to participate in the war in Afghanistan. They could have gone to Iraq, or one of the hundreds of bases we have around the world. This is why I will never call the troops over there heroes, as they are essentially solving a problem which was started by their superiors. Soldiers in Afghanistan are capable of heroic things, and become heroes. I just think you have to do something other than be a soldier to earn that title.
Oh, and this comes from a guy who's family includes a VC, a CGC, and in 2005, a MC. We are a very proud, very British, military family.
