No To War: Fight For A Socialist World

SINCE THE bombing started six weeks ago the US has dropped 3,000 bombs on Afghanistan, one of the poorest countries in the world.

Jane James

$1 billion a month is being spent on the war. Innocent people who have nothing to do with Osama bin Laden or the Taliban have been killed, injured or forced to flee their homes.

Six million people in Afghanistan are facing hunger and cold and will only be saved if enough food reaches them from aid workers before the onset of winter.

Despite these attacks, the money they cost and the devastation caused, the US are not only no nearer to their stated aim of defeating terrorism, they have also increased its roots.

Meanwhile, mass demonstrations are taking place in cities across the world against this war. Young people in particular want to voice their anger, including a group of school students from Sheffield who are coming on the 18 November demonstration.

“There’s five of us coming on the demo from our year, Year 10. We’ve got our own banner but it needs repairing first from the last march. We’re going to London to tell Tony Blair that we don’t support his war against Afghanistan. Not in my name.”

The Northern Alliance have seized control of Kabul and other cities in Afghanistan. But the warlords and armies that make up the Alliance only have support from a minority of the ethnic populations within Afghanistan and have an atrocious history of human rights abuses.

Neither the Taliban, the Northern Alliance, nor a hastily cobbled together UN-backed government can offer a future to the people of Afghanistan. It is the Afghan people themselves who should decide the future through a democratic, socialist government of the working people and poor of Afghanistan.

The 18 November demonstration will show that opposition to the war is still growing. We have to continue to build a strong and vocal anti-war movement. But to end war and terror we also have to fight for a different world. Join us in the fight for socialism.