More helicopters won't stop British soldiers dying when they're occupying another Muslim country where they're not wanted.

By Robin Beste, Stop the War Coalition

There are just over 8000 British troops in Afghanistan, rising soon to 9000. The figures just released by the Ministry of Defence show that each of those troops has a high chance of getting killed or injured in Afghanistan. And these figures do not include July, the bloodiest month for the British army, with fifteen killed in the first two weeks.

Cartoon by Martin Rowson

If you add the number of soldiers contracting disease or serious illness to the fatalities and injuries, the MoD figures show that in the last three years 2,192 British military personnel had to be evacuated from Afghanistan for medical treatment or burial in Britain.

The conclusion is pretty clear from these shocking statistics. Britain is losing the war. The argument that it is being lost because of inadequate equipment is a smoke screen.

As The Guardian's Seumas Milne wrote recently, "The reason British soldiers are dying in Afghanistan isn't because they haven't got enough helicopters, but because they're an occupying force in another Muslim country where they're not wanted."

"Can only be one winner"

US and NATO casualties are also on an upward swing. In less than seven months, 203 foreign troops have died in Afghanistan, compared with 294 in the whole of 2008.

As for more helicopters being the answer to the problem of increased casualties among British forces, they have been no help to the US military. As Ady Cousins point out, "Despite their huge number of Chinook helicopters the United States too is suffering an increased casualty rate -- about three a day in July. This is approaching some of the highest levels of the Iraq war."

Faced with a failing military strategy, what is the conclusion of Barack Obama and Gordon Brown?

"We have to win in Afghanistan," says Obama, "To advance security, opportunity and justice." To which ever obedient Gordon Brown adds, "There can be only one winner: democracy and a strong Afghan state."

Rory Stewart points out the hole in this argument, "You need to defeat the Taliban to build a state and you need to build a state to defeat the Taliban. There cannot be security without development, or development without security."

In any case, what does "defeating" the Taliban involve? Quite simply, killing Afghans. "We have to kill more of them," said the chief of the British army General Sir Richard Dannatt chillingly on BBC radio last week. Which is why he and other Army leaders are pressing Gordon Brown for more "boots on the ground" and more lethal equipment, not least the helicopters which have been so devastating in slaughtering Afghan civilians, mostly women and children.

Two quotes from Afghan civilians shows where this strategy leads. "People hate Americans because they kill innocent people," said a driver from the Afghan town of Meydan Shahr. And a shoe shop worker in Kabul spelled out the consequences, "If the Americans kill an Afghan father, the son will take up a gun and stand against foreigners."

"Failure is not an option"

Obama and Brown will have none of this. For them "failure is not an option", so they will send more troops to kill and get killed and spend billions on more equipment in the vain hope that this will "turn the corner".

And how will they know the corner has been turned? When enough Afghan police and soldiers have been trained to take over "security" from the invading armies. This is the "exit strategy" for the occupying armies. In Obama's words, "All of us want to see an effective exit strategy where increasingly the Afghan army, Afghan police, Afghan courts, Afghan government are taking more responsibility for their own security."

Obama is committed to training an Afghan army of 134,000 and a police force of 82,000, but he says that "increases in Afghan forces may very well be needed."

US generals say a combined Afghan army-police-security apparatus of 450,000 soldiers is needed. This is an Alice in Wonderland proposal. As Rory Stewart says, a force this size would cost $2 or $3 billion a year to maintain. In a country with a population half the size of Britain's and an annual government revenue of just $600 million, this would be asking Afghanistan to spend 500 per cent of its budget on defence. The idea that the US and its allies would pick up that tab is laughable.

How many more deaths and injuries

This war is doomed for the invading forces. The only question is how many more deaths and injuries of Afghans and the occupying soldiers will it take for the politicians to be forced to recognise this?

The Vietnam war -- with which Afghanistan parallels are increasingly being drawn -- shows that even when a war is lost it can take years and -- in the case of Vietnam millions of lives -- before the politicians face reality.

The anti-war movement has much work to do if we are to build the political pressure needed to make our warmongering leaders represent the anti-war views expressed by the majority of people in Britain. We need less talk from Gordon Brown of "building democracy", when used as an excuse for invading other people's countries, and more democracy at home, which -- according to the latest polls -- would see British troops withdrawn from Afghanistan by Christmas 2009.