Armed Services Day: Glorifying a career killing and being killed

Stop the War groups were out on Britain's high streets and shopping centres on Saturday 27 June, leafletting their support for the troops in Afghanistan, by calling for them all to brought home now.

This day has been designated the first Armed Forces Day and there were events glorifying the army taking place all over the country.

This is part of a publicity barrage over the past year by the government and the armed forces to glamorise the job of killing and getting killed in foreign countries.

If you’re one of the hundreds of thousands of students leaving school or college this year with little prospect of finding work in a world of escalating unemployment, a career in the army may seem preferable to life on the dole.

Reality of today's British army

But what the glossy brochures, the jingoistic parades and the Hollywood style recruitment adverts won’t tell you is the reality of what you face as a soldier in today’s British army.

The deaths, the serious injuries, the daily attacks on the British army, get little media coverage because the Ministry of Defence controls all access by journalists wanting to report from war zones. Only a sanitised version of the blood soaked reality is permissable.

"I was told quite candidly that the priority was the tabloids and television because it was important for recruitment," says The Guardian's James Meek.

And what is the reality of a career in the army?

You’ll be sent to fight an unwinnable war in Afghanistan. British army commanders have stated repeatedly that “we are not winning”, but their only response is to call for more war, more killing of Afghans resisting invading armies, more futile deaths of British soldiers.

Deaths of foreign troops across Afghanistan increased by 78% over the first three months of the year compared with the same period in 2008.

One in eight chance of serious injury

12,000 US troops have recently been rushed into Helmand province to “rescue” the British army, facing on average eleven attacks each day.

At the current rate of around 1000 serious casualties a year, every soldier deployed to Afghanistan has a one in eight chance of being seriously injured or contracting a serious illness.

The daily slaughter of Afghan civilians by forces claiming to bring “security” and “stability” is drawing into the resistance ever increasing numbers of Afghans who have seen their mother, brothers, sisters, neighbours killed or injured by the foreign armies.

A recent NATO report reveals that the number of Afghan civilians killed in the past year has doubled.

And that was before 4 May missile attack on an Afghan village slaughtered 150 civilians, most of them women and children. And before other "accidental" missile attacks on Afghan villages.

Selling war as an honourable profession

Despite the Ministry of Defence manipulation of the media reporting, the latest poll shows that 68 per cent of the British people want all British troops withdrawn from Afghanistan.

Armed Forces Day is intended to hide this reality and sell war as an honourable profession. But there is nothing honourable or glamorous about the role of the British army in Iraq and Afghanistan. These two wars have killed over one million civilians, devastated the two countries and created millions of refugees.

We should not be celebrating war as an honourable profession, but campaigning as widely as we can against the warmongering of our government and not least for the immediate withdrawal of all British troops from Afghanistan.