Afghanistan

Ten years of a failed war

04 October 2011
Joe Glenton, the anti-war soldier who refused to go back to Afghanistan, is to deliver a letter to Downing Street demanding the troops be withdrawn.

See Guy Smallman’s pictures from the Afghan war

04 October 2011
Socialist Worker photographer Guy Smallman has made several trips to Afghanistan, documenting the impact of the war on Afghan people.

04 October 2011
Russian troops killed between 500,000 and a million Afghans between 1979 and 1989—and discredited the left for a generation. The opposition Mujahideen groups that drove them out then collapsed into warring factions.

Nato’s war in Afghanistan is tearing into Pakistan

04 October 2011
Forty years of foreign intervention in Afghanistan—first with the Soviet Union, and now with NATO—have destroyed that country, and now threatens to expand to destroy Pakistan too.

Afghanistan: the war the West can't win

04 October 2011
Every night 40 raids take place. These attacks are led by the world’s richest nation deploying some of the most sophisticated weaponry ever invented. They are targetting one of the poorest nations on the globe. Yet after ten long years the wealth and weaponry is losing. This is Afghanistan in 2011.

The Boy Mir: One boy’s struggle and the failure of West’s war

27 September 2011
Six months before 9/11, shocking media images appeared of the Taliban government dynamiting the 1450 year old Buddha statues at Bamiyan in central Afghanistan. The demolition in March 2001 followed a Taliban edict that all statues be destroyed.

Afghanistan: the ten-year war that drags on

06 September 2011
Western aircraft dropped the first bombs on Afghanistan on 7 October 2001. The US-led coalition’s stated aim was to root out Al Qaida cells said to have found refuge under the Taliban regime.

US hit by its former ally

06 September 2011
US hit by its former ally

Helicopter battle has taken off

30 August 2011
Engineers who service Apache helicopters in Afghanistan are set to strike in a pay dispute.

Afghanistan: Attack chaos

23 August 2011
A huge attack on the British Council building in Kabul last week reminded the world what an unstable place Afghanistan remains.

Afghanistan: Bloody carnage of occupation

09 August 2011
A helicopter crash in Afghanistan has killed 38 Western troops—30 of them from the US.

Essential Killing

12 July 2011
Taliban fighter Mohammed (Vincent Gallo) is detained by a US patrol in Afghanistan, and subjected to the full inhumanity of the occupation.

War refusenik Michael Lyons found guilty

05 July 2011
Michael Lyons, a Royal Navy conscientious objector, was found guilty of disobeying a lawful order at his court

Overstretched Obama’s talk of Afghanistan exit

28 June 2011
Barack Obama announced last week that "the tide of war is receding". He talked of a corner being turned in Afghanistan and stated that US troops will start to pull out next month.

Stop the War conference inspired by revolutions

14 June 2011
Over 200 activists met last Saturday at a conference on the "war on terror" organised by the Stop the War Coalition as the tenth anniversary of the Afghanistan war approaches.

Every Afghan is target for Nato

31 May 2011
A Nato air attack wreaked carnage on two extended families in Afghanistan’s Helmand province last week.

Obama’s Afghan exit strategy

03 May 2011
Barack Obama concluded his announcement that US forces had assassinated Osama Bin Laden by saying, "Tonight, we are once again reminded that America can do whatever we set our mind to."

A bloody war in Afghanistan, thousands of lives lost, what have we gained?

03 May 2011
The war in Afghanistan is in its tenth year. Tens of thousands of Afghan civilians have died, and 2,375 foreign troops have been killed, including 1,509 US and 360 British soldiers.

Bin Laden—from friend to foe of US imperialism

03 May 2011
Osama Bin Laden is often presented as single-handedly controlling world "terrorism" from a bunker in Afghanistan or Pakistan. It is a myth that has suited both Bin Laden and his enemies.