It all started on September 11 2001 when in audacious simultaneous raids the al Qaeda fundamentalist Islamic terrorist group killed nearly three thousand innocent people. Against this you would not think that there could be a disproportionate response, but Bush and Blair managed it with the invasion and occupation of two countries with the loss of over half a million innocent lives there. But the attitude of the Western media and politicians seems to be that the life of a farmer in Afghanistan is somehow less valuable than the life of a financial sector worker in New York. So the 200 to 1 innocent death ratio doesn’t get reported.

Let’s deal with Iraq first. There was no reason to invade. None. Yes Saddam ran a nasty and brutal regime. But if that was a good reason then why haven’t also we also invaded North Korea, Zimbabwe, Myanmar, Syria and the People’s Republic of China? And the fact is that Iraq has been a vastly more nasty and brutal place without Saddam than it was with Saddam, and remains so today. All that has been achieved is wasted lives and wasted money as a result of Bush and Blair making stupendously bad political decisions.

We are supposed, as part of our national mantra, to support our armed forces no matter what they do. They lay down their lives to serve us. This jingoism is conveniently used to hide the reality of our involvement in these two countries. All the rhetoric is about our brave boys and so any questioning of the politics is seen as being treasonable. Which is a pity in a democracy where politicians and their decisions should be held up to scrutiny. Every Prime Minister’s Question Time the various political leaders pay their respects to the latest of our brave military to give their lives in the service of the Queen. When what they should be doing is bringing them home so they don’t get killed.

So why are we in Afghanistan? The government we helped to remove, the Taliban, were in power as a direct result of the actions of our friends, the Americans, meddling in Afghani affairs, because it had a Soviet sponsored government. The Americans (and Saudis) spent $40 billion training and arming the Islamic groups there. So today we are reaping what we have sown. Americans (and Brits) are being killed by people we have armed and trained. Do taxpayers realise that our hard earned money is spent like this?

We are in Afghanistan, ostensibly, to get rid of al Qaeda. There are two problems to this supposition. Firstly why invade and occupy a whole country to get to a few hundred people? Surely there had to be a cheaper and better way? And secondly the al Qaeda just hopped over the border to Pakistan, where they were welcomed. The fact is that India and Pakistan both see Afghanistan as a convenient battleground for a proxy war between these two regional nuclear super powers. And al Qaeda are on the Pakistani side. So, once again, why are we in Afghanistan?

So, just as in Iraq, we are told that the Taliban were a nasty regime who treated their women as chattel and didn’t allow Western culture like Coca Cola and Lady Gaga. But since their downfall things have become a whole lot nastier. The opium industry has flourished, corruption is massive beyond belief and huge numbers of innocent people are meeting violent deaths. This is a country where being a policeman means setting up a road block to extort money to buy drugs with and where many associated with the ruling elite live in new palaces paid for by Western taxpayers. So what are we achieving in Afghanistan?

Which brings us to the Taliban as freedom fighters. They are trying to rid their country of the infidel crusader invaders and the immensely corrupt regime in Kabul. And the fact is that many of us put in exactly the same position would do exactly the same thing. What if London and New York had been taken over by Afghani Mujahideen who tried to impose their world view on us?

What is amazing is the teflon coating of Blair and Bush. They never get called to account for their actions. The hundreds of thousand of innocents killed and the hundreds of billions of wasted taxpayers money. It is almost as if they are being protected by the brotherhood of freemasonry.