Just as Obama was completing his tour of Europe, in order to allow Cameron, Sarkozy, the Queen and a few others in high places, to re-state their allegiance to US policies, the news came of a NATO air strike which had killed 12 children and 2 adult civilians in the southern province of Helmand.

This is only the latest in a long series of western strikes "going wrong" - as the media dare to say - in which Afghan farmers' compounds are targeted and civilians killed on the strength of so-called "intelligence" which turns out to be bogus.

No wonder each one of these strikes only results in dozens of new recruits entering the ranks of the resistance against western occupation. No wonder too, that the war in Afghanistan just slides into an ever deeper, deadlier, quagmire.

Western state terrorism

In June last year, Obama appointed a new head of NATO forces in Afghanistan - General Petraeus, who was already notorious for his role in the bloody repression of insurgents in Iraq. Petraeus immediately launched an all-out offensive, officially aimed at beheading the Afghan resistance, by killing as many of its commanders as possible. Especially targeted were the southern province of Helmand, which British troops had failed to bring under control, and the eastern province of Kandahar.

Petraeus ordered a series of "intelligence-based" raids by special forces. Heavily-armed commandos were dropped by helicopter into villages, terrorising the population by carrying out house-to-house searches, lining up villagers for questioning and taking many "suspects" away.

How many villagers were killed in these raids? No-one will ever know. Western generals "don't do any body counts", as they say! And what do they care? Who will ever bring them to account?

Western governments may organise show trials in The Hague, for thugs like Mladic, from ex-Yugoslavia, or Charles Taylor, from Liberia. But neither the politicians who ordered the slaughter of whole populations as part of the western powers' numerous wars - as in Kenya, Vietnam and Iraq, among others - nor the generals who implemented their orders, have ever been brought to account!

In western capitals, the strategy implemented in Afghanistan was claimed to have been a "success". Petraeus boasted of having "killed or captured 120 insurgent leaders per month". But what he did not say is that for each "insurgent leader" many more have risen from the ranks to take over.

Because Helmand and Kandahar have become even more insecure than before - not to mention Kabul itself, where terrorist attacks keep occurring, at the very heart of the country's most militarised area, around the US embassy and government buildings. Worse, even, the resistance has now spread to regions which had been considered "safe" so far, to the north and west of the country.

This war must be stopped!

Far from being put on trial for having created even more of a bloody mess in Afghanistan and caused more unnecessary deaths, General Petraeus has now been rewarded with one of the US state's topmost positions - head of the CIA in Washington!

This probably says it all, as to the Western governments' aims in this war. Their first objective was always to terrorise the population into submission, and to impose a pliable regime that would do the West's bidding, no matter how corrupt and hated it might be.

But history has shown, time and again, how the state terrorism of the Western powers is prone to backfire. Who can forget how the invasion of Iraq, initially portrayed as a "surgical" operation by Western generals, turned into a protracted war claiming 5,000 lives among the invading troops and hundreds of thousands among the Iraqi population?

For over ten years now, despite their hugely superior weapons, the world's most powerful armies have failed to restore any kind of normality in Afghanistan. Worse, they have managed to spread the war across the country's southern border, into Pakistan. Not only has the border area turned into a war zone, but terrorist attacks have spread to Pakistan's main cities.

The father of Sam Alexander, a British marine recently killed in Helmand, was right to ask in The Independent: "Was my son's death in Afghanistan a price worth paying?" No, no-one should risk his life to shore up the stranglehold of western big business over the world!

Marx once wrote that "a people who oppress another cannot themselves be free". It is in the interests of the British working class to put an end to this war. Troops out of Afghanistan now!