By IRNA,
London : The arguments are “overwhelming” for a withdrawal by NATO forces from Afghanistan, according to peace campaigner and researcher James Thring.
Thring, convenor of London-based Planning for Peace, said he suspected that secret plans for NATO to start drawing down their troops within months, as reported in the Independent on Sunday, were due to growing pressure, including from some generals.
“The argument is overwhelming,” he told IRNA, citing that the original 2001 invasion itself was “based on a lie, still being repeated, that the Kabul government refused to hand over Osama bin Laden and was ‘sponsoring terrorism’.”
“The invasion was also illegal because it was not under control of the UN, whose Charter requires any act of aggression against a sovereign state to be so controlled,” Thring said.
“Even if the invasion were justified on grounds of some immediate and existential threat to the peace, the occupation has rendered itself illegal by the interference in the government of the occupied people,” he said.
The peace researcher also believed that the invasion and occupation are “not, as claimed, protecting the people of the US and Europe from terrorist attacks, but inciting the very opposite.”
“Even if it were protecting people by ‘destroying’ the Taliban (originally al-Q’aida) it would be illegal, since destroying any group, ethnic, religious or political, is a high crime of genocide in the ICC statute,” he said.
His comments come as President Hamid Karzai was expected to announce a timetable for a “conditions-based and phased transition” at the Kabul conference, which begins on Tuesday.
The faltering war was expected to be at the top of British Prime Minister David Cameron’s agenda during talks with US President Barack Obama in Cameron’s first visit to Washington Monday.
British Defence Secretary Liam Fox on Sunday restated a target for the handover of security control to Afghan forces by 2014 so Britain’s 10,000 troops from Afghanistan by 2014, a year before the UK’s next scheduled elections.