Changing the tempo of the anti-war debate

The last fortnight has brought us to a turning point in Afghanistan. It's whispered in the corridors of Westminster, but few MPs are prepared to acknowledge it openly - this war is lost.

The question now is whether we are prepared to throw more of our young men and women into the maw.

The catalogue of catastrophe so far this month is staggering.

The Fort Hood shooting evidenced the collapsing morale within the US armed forces. Soldiers and their families have been saying this for many months. It took a murderous burst of gunfire before the media took notice.

Of course, the racist ideologues immediately homed in on the fact that the soldier who went berserk was Muslim. But there have been plenty of other breakdowns in the US army by non-Muslims.

The shootings echoed the infamous "fraggings" in Vietnam, where predominantly poor and black conscript soldiers made their feelings about the war and the officer class known by throwing fragmentation grenades into their tents at night.

Then there was the shooting of five British soldiers by an Afghan policeman they were "training."

The day after, while driving home from talking to a gregarious and sharp group of students at Hackney College, I heard a remarkably candid interview with a British army captain.

The public should forget about the idea of the Taliban "infiltrating" the Afghan police force and army, he said. They didn't need to.

Those forces were comprised of people with no esprit de corps, who were often high on drugs, taking bribes and extorting cash and were prepared to shift their allegiance to whoever had influence.

Yet this is the national institution which is meant to provide stability across that fragmented country.

Worse, thousands of British and tens of thousands of US troops - plus others - are to stay there until that force is in place. No wonder the military planners are blithely talking about staying in Afghanistan for decades.

The mood against this folly has turned - and turned decisively.

It is not yet at the level where hundreds of thousands will take to the streets to demand that it come to an end.

But large numbers of people are discussing and debating this with an urgency that puts the Establishment politicians to shame.

There is confusion in that debate, naturally. It is amplified by the Murdoch press, which is prepared to exploit a grieving widow to give political advantage to David Cameron over Gordon Brown. But even its hypocritical campaign is double-edged.

By the law of unintended consequences, its constant denigration of the government over the condition of the army and the welfare of the troops creates a climate in which more people can draw the conclusion that it is the war itself that is wrong.

That won't happen automatically. It will require all progressive anti-war voices to cut into this simmering debate and help to clarify the issues.

Above all, Afghanistan should be punched into the political hurly-burly in the run-up to the general election.

This is the strategy of the Stop the War coalition, which is energetically responding to what is fast developing into a political crisis.

And it is not going to go away. The spectre of a Suez or Vietnam is stalking Washington.

The usually private considerations of the core elements of the US state have now burst into the open.

The US ambassador to Afghanistan is diametrically opposed to US General Stanley McChrystal's call for pouring in 40,000 more troops. The divide in the administration is deep and bitter.

It's becoming so here, too. The call by Commons intelligence committee chairman Kim Howells for pulling back from Afghanistan is a case in point.

Typically he coupled it with a crazed policy of turning the extra state resources - you have to hope metaphorically - on the Muslim population in Britain.

The policy may be summed up as, having alienated Muslims in Afghanistan so that some have come to hate Britain, let's try a similar wheeze at home.

But leaving that aside, Howells triggered a wider debate which those genuinely opposed to the war can partake of.

Doing so requires two things. First, the left and progressives should throw their weight behind the anti-war movement and recognise the scale of the shift in public perception of this issue.

Second, we should understand the specific way that the arguments and nascent opposition to this war are developing. Compared to Iraq, the scale of opposition to the Afghan war - launched fully eight years ago - was far less.

There were very few of us in Parliament who spoke out in 2001. The demonstrations were large by the standard of what had gone before, boosted by an unprecedented mobilisation from Britain's Muslim communities, but much smaller than the Iraq protests which followed.

The length of the war and the gradual shredding of the case for it mean that the political arguments around it have had a different tempo.

But that tempo is now changing.

The central argument, which in my experience can win the middle ground, is that our troops are being sacrificed for a kleptocrat in Kabul in a military adventure two ousted leaders - Bush and Blair - plunged us into with aims that shift by the day and cannot be realised.

Further, the instability is spreading into Pakistan, threatening to tear apart a state which, unlike Iran, does have nuclear weapons.

It is the presence of foreign troops in Afghanistan that is creating havoc and hatred against Britain, not the call for them to be withdrawn.

The war's defenders say that withdrawal would mean defeat.

In a sense it would. It would be a defeat for Washington and London's attempt over the last two decades to take us back to the epoch of empire.

That's why this war will not be ended easily and the wrangling will go on, one day with a policy of capturing sparse territory at great cost, the next, abandoning it and retreating to base.

And through it all, the bombings of wedding parties, village assemblies and shepherds continue.

The Afghan dead are not counted. But their loved ones grieve as much as ours.

That is the uncomfortable truth that blows apart the racist assumptions underlying this whole disaster.

The Afghan people will fight foreign occupation of their country, just as any self-respecting person in Britain would.

Unlike the keyboard warriors in Wapping, British military families I've listened to have shown little animus towards the Afghan people.

No-one shows that more than Lance Corporal Joe Glenton. This true hero now faces additional charges for speaking out against the war in Trafalgar Square at the Stop the War Coalition demonstration last month.

Far from being ostracised in his barracks, he reports huge support from fellow soldiers who say that he is speaking for them too.

It is our duty to defend him as he faces court martial.

So here's an idea. Bombard your MP - by post (Stop the War has a new campaigning postcard), by email, by phone, at their surgery - and demand that they come out against this madness and for the rights of soldiers such as Glenton.

If MPs can plunge us further into this bloody hell hole without paying a political price, they will do so again. In at least some high-profile areas of the country, you have a chance to make them pay that political price.

That will only help to accelerate the anti-war campaign, which is going to dig in and build, not just over the next few weeks but over months and even years, which is the likely timeframe for this to play out.