Some time in October last year a thoroughly unpleasant group of extremists proposed that they be allowed to march through the small Wiltshire village of Wootton Bassett, carrying a coffin for every Muslim killed during the war in Afghanistan and along Pakistan’s north-western border. Wootton Basset is near the Royal Air Force base at Lyneham, and all British personnel who die in the Af-Pak conflict are carried through the main street of the village, so mourners can pay the nation’s respects to their fallen soldiers.

Clearly, the group which proposed carrying coffins through the streets of Wootton Bassett for every Muslim killed in the Af-Pak region were trying to stir up trouble between the different religious groups within Britain, their interest was almost certainly only to advertise their dull presence in the country, and their request earned them nothing but opprobrium, not least from Britain’s Muslim community. Nevertheless, there was a kernel of truth in their proposal, because if one were to observe only the coffins of British dead carried through the streets of Wootton Bassett, one would have observed only 245 such casualties (to date), whereas over 600 Pakistani civilians have died in the last two months alone as a direct consequence of the Af-Pak wars.

Thousands or, depending upon when you start the count, millions of natives of Pakistan and Afghanistan have died because of Western actions there and these terrible numbers greatly underestimate the real damage done. So counting the British dead passing through Wootton Bassett gives a wholly inaccurate idea of the devastation the Western forces have wreaked upon the hapless people of that region, whose only crime is to want independence from Western geopolitical designs, especially those connected with energy resources.

I have yet to hear a single honest justification for the presence of Western forces in the Af-Pak region. Nor do the people of the countries that supply the soldiers get a remotely accurate picture of what their military forces are doing there. Nor do they get even a sketchy idea of how their forces are seen by the local people who are paying the real price of utterly dishonest enterprises in the region. The views no British newspaper will print, are those of the civilians in the firing line. The British media are, therefore, in no sense impartial about what their government (with others) is doing to the very poor people of the region.

The British, for example, are given to believe that their soldiers are heroes. Whether that perception is justified depends upon which side of the conflict you are on. Prince Harry made much of wanting to ‘see some action in Afghanistan’. Apart from the fact that when he went out there, briefly, he was, of course, kept far from any danger and that the whole exercise was simply a publicity stunt, ‘seeing some action’ in Afghanistan can only mean trying to kill Afghans in their own country. I did not notice Prince Harry visiting orphanages.

So trying to kill Afghans and Pakistanis in their own homes is, I take it, what most of the NATO troops (and their mercenary contractors) are out there to do. It should be remembered that NATO is using the most sophisticated means of industrial-scale murder ever devised on a pre-industrial, largely illiterate, mostly starving population of farmers and nomads, who scratch a living in one of the poorest countries on earth. In so far as heroism carries with it a hint of virtue, how should ‘seeing some action’ out there then be viewed as heroic? What virtue can there be in it? Certainly there is none that the locals can comprehend. Has anyone asked why coffins are not carried through the streets of Afghan villages to commemorate the deaths of NATO soldiers out there? Can a single Afghan or Pakistani—outside the circle of bribed, intimidated or naturally corrupt officials — be found out there who would mourn the death of Western soldiers who are laying waste to their homes, small farms, animals, families and friends? Can any such person be found who genuinely thinks the Western forces are out there, in countries not their own, for the benefit of the natives of the region? Of course not.

For the people of that region, who are as yet a people of real conscience, everything is personal, all that matters is done face-to-face. To them, modern industrial warfare is grotesque. To the natives, the idea that a stranger might draw a large salary to kill in their own homes, from afar, using the most sophisticated killing technology ever devised, men, women, children who have done their killers no harm is far from being heroic; it is repugnant, cowardly and without conscience . So is this psychopathic war one in which obedient professional killers can become heroes? Not for the locals it is not; but then native opinions, like native casualties, are never counted.

So, yes, something should be done to bring to the attention of the British people, the Americans, and the world, the atrocities that are being committed in the Af-Pak region. Here are my suggestions. We might as well start in Britain. Firstly, all that I am about to suggest should be organized by non-Muslim Britons, so that no one can use these actions as an excuse to persecute the loyal Muslim citizens of that country. Then all the orphaned children of Afghanistan and Pakistan, if they wish, should be brought to Britain, given citizenship and should housed, raised, loved and educated at British expense. And all who wish to stay behind should be given equal privileges there. All the maimed, crippled, physically disabled people of all ages, should be paraded through British streets, along with the orphans (a high proportion of whom are also disabled) and should also be given all the privileges of full British citizenship, if they want them, or given the similar benefits in their home territories.

All those driven mad with grief, suffering, loss and war weariness, should also be brought to Britain and paraded through the streets and should be given all the privileges of full citizenship, if they want them, or equal privileges at wherever now counts as home for them. Every house in Afghanistan that has been damaged or destroyed should be rebuilt rapidly to its original form (or better), or its owners should be given immediately all the resources they need to rebuild their destroyed property themselves. Every pet killed should be paid for handsomely, as should every dead farm animal. All the soil poisoned by munitions should be treated effectively to make it once again viable. Every person who contracts cancer from exposure to depleted uranium shells should be compensated massively. All the wildlife exterminated by the use of obscenely indiscriminate and destructive bombs (most notoriously, daisy cutters and thermobaric bombs) should be paid for handsomely and a massive effort should be made to restore the natural habitat, even though in most cases it will be impossible.

Every native victim of a mine should be treated as a hero; indeed every victim of all NATO munitions should be treated as a hero in Britain. The NATO countries, in proportion to the casualties they have caused (most of whom remain uncounted), should pay for the restoration of Afghanistan and the North Western Frontier of Pakistan to the imperfect, but still better, condition in which the those areas were before Western governments started their nefarious engagements there. Yet, even if all this were done, the aggressor nations would then still have done very little to compensate the people of the Af-Pak region for the wholly undeserved destruction over decades of all they hold dear.

Over the last 30 years, the whole structure of Afghan society has been destroyed during wars that have either been financed directly by America (and her allies) or by Russia, or both. None of these wars was intrinsic to Afghanistan. None of them would have occurred without foreign meddling. Here are a people upon whom a partial genocide has been committed by Western powers (amongst whom I class the Russians), showing a complete indifference for the rights and interests of the indigenous populations. Where, in such an appalling story, is there room for heroism on the part of paid Western killers (a high proportion of them being mercenaries, supplied by privatized war industries in which Dick Cheney, for example, has shares)?

To present the fallen invaders of the Af-Pak region to the decent British public as having been involved in a heroic struggle for good, as does Gordon Brown, is repellently dishonest. Only by doing all of what I have suggested here will the British public become even partially aware of the true cost of the Af-Pak wars to the people who, undeservedly, have to endure them.

It is amazing how efficiently Western governments, and their allies in the media, have managed to persuade their populations that the poor tribals who live in the mountains of Afghanistan and Pakistan are a serious threat to the security of Western people in their homes. Fear, generated by propaganda, is a powerful weapon against which only honest reasoning can stand. So it cannot be said too often that no Afghan, nor Pakistani, from the Af-Pak region has ever perpetrated an attack in any Western country. And we should try to remember also that if all the casualties from all Islamic terrorist attacks against Western targets perpetrated ever since the US and Britain started financing Islamist terrorist groups (originally against Russian communism) in the early 20th Century are added up, they comprise but an insignificantly small fraction of those that have resulted from unprovoked Western aggression against Muslims in the same period.

The writer has degrees from the Royal College of Art, Oxford University, and the Institute of Psychiatry, University of London. Email: charles ferndale@yahoo.co.uk