Why are we in Afghanistan? Ten years have gone by and we still don’t know. Our soldiers have come back in State coffins with the tricolore flag and the authorities to welcome them, the same people that had sent them to fight a senseless war. Why have they died? We don’t know. Tens of thousands of Afghan civilians have been killed because of the conflict and the allied bombing and even about this, we know nothing. A slaughter about which we are jointly responsible even though it wasn’t us who dropped the bombs, with our aircraft, but our allies with their drones and satellite positioning. Why did Italy declare war on Afghanistan? We don’t know. Bin Laden was Arabic not Afghan. In 2011, Mullah Omar was the recognised leader of a legitimate State. The Americans asked him to hand over Osama. He replied that he would have had a regular trial and he asked the United States for the evidence of his involvement in the slaughter of 11 September. He received no response and in the days that followed, his country was invaded. We are a part of an occupation force that violated all international rules and we don’t know why.
Afghanistan is twinned with Abu Ghraib. In a report released yesterday, this was denounced by the UN. The detainees in the Afghan prisons are alleged to have been hung by their hands, systematically tortured, subject to electric shocks in various parts of their body and the genitals until they fainted. The UN’s convention against torture prohibits the transfer of a prisoner to a State in which they can be tortured. NATO, with great timeliness, after reading a first version of the UN’s report of last September has decided to no longer hand over detainees to be kept in the custody of 16 prisons where torture is practised. It has taken 10 years and a denunciation by the UN to take notice. Now NATO will transfer the captured Afghan combatants to Guantanamo where civil rights are more respected?
After 10 years of occupation, 80% of Afghanistan is in the hands of the so-called “rebels”. They just don’t have Kabul. If NATO were to leave Afghanistan, the country would return to being controlled by Mullah Omar in a few days. A political, military and humanitarian disaster that Italy is responsible for. Out of Afghanistan! Our Constitution requires it. Why are the institutions not insisting on it, starting with the President of the Republic and Parliament? Why are we in Afghanistan? Can someone reply? Is anyone at home?

PS. Remember my dates for the regional elections in Molise:
- Wednesday 12 at 19.30 piazza Prefettura at Campobasso
- Thursday 13 at 17:00 piazza principale at Isernia
- Thursday 13 at 20:00 piazza principale at Termoli