Afghanistan Follow

Babar Ahmad, a 30 year old computer technician from Tooting, South London, is currently in jail awaiting an extradition hearing. He was arrested last year on the request of US authorities, who accuse him of funding "terrorism" in Chechnya and Afghanistan, which he denies.

Is the CIA too open and accountable? The US defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, thinks so. It was revealed last week that the Strategic Support Branch (SSB), which is under his direct control, has been running clandestine operations in Iraq, Afghanistan and other countries for the past two years.

BABAR AHMAD’s extradition hearing officially started on Thursday of last week. Babar is threatened with being sent to the US to face charges of running a website supporting "terrorists" in Chechnya and Afghanistan.

A 27 year old man was found dead at his flat in the Dennistoun area of Glasgow on 18 May after apparently committing suicide. He was Zekria Ghulam Mohammed, an Afghan asylum seeker. The papers that are normally so keen to splash pictures of refugees over their pages ignored his death.

GEORGE BUSH has demanded another $25 billion to fund the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan. The White House promised that the $87.5 billion approved last November would last for at least a year. So far, the \"war on terror\" has cost the US $160 billion. The UN Human Development Report for 2003 says that all its minimum goals could be met if $100 billion was spent on aid to poorer countries.

THE WARS in Iraq and Afghanistan were built on many lies, but the terrible massacre on Madrid's railways highlights one of the biggest-the world is not a safer place. As RMT members on London Underground we are only too aware of the vulnerability of the tube network. The same newspapers that supported the war regularly run stories with lurid headlines telling us how the bombers are out to get the Underground.

I'M CONSIGNING the Hutton report to my stock of dodgy dossiers. I want to go over the lies the government told to show that this wasn't just about one report by the BBC. The whole government case for the war on Iraq was flawed. After 11 September 2001, to get support for the war in Afghanistan, Tony Blair said in Oman, "There will be no war on Iraq unless we show there is conclusive evidence that links it with 11 September."

Nine children in Afghanistan died last weekend after two US attack jets opened fire on their village of Hutala in southern Afghanistan. All that's left of them is their shoes and woven hats lying strewn on the ground.

Your book gives a devastating account of Blair's previous wars in Kosovo and Afghanistan. What would you say to those who claim they were a success?

CHILDREN AGAINST War held an angry demonstration against the use of cluster bombs last Sunday. They marched on Downing Street to protest against the use of the weapons by the US and British forces in Afghanistan and Iraq.

THE neo-conservative warmongers in the White House have taken critical steps towards attacking more countries even as occupation brings further suffering to the peoples of Iraq and Afghanistan. The two states next on George Bush's "axis of evil" list are Iran and North Korea.

THE ANTI-war movement has to be seen in the context of what we built when we opposed war not just on Iraq but on Afghanistan. The strength of our movement was its breadth and its depth. The core of the movement has been increasing in size and in depth of knowledge.