BBC. 7 October 2001. US begins attack.

The United States has begun its military operation in Afghanistan.

"We are beginning another front in our war against terrorism," White House spokesman Ari Fleischer said.

There were reports of loud explosions in the Afghan capital Kabul and electricity supplies are also said to have been cut in the city.

US President George Bush is to address the nation shortly, and UK Prime Minister Tony Blair will speak immediately afterwards.

Meanwhile, the Taleban says it has sent 8,000 troops to its border with Uzbekistan, which has given the US access to an air base for its anti-terrorism campaign.

The US administration has repeatedly rejected Taleban offers to bargain over the fate of its guest, Saudi-born militant Osama Bin Laden.

So now the B boys are dropping bombs over Kabul. What's a young leftist supposed to do? Ignore the crap happening in our country and protest against the bombing of another country? Or take the humanitarian way out and join the countless protests/rallies/demonstrations/beatings that will start once people wake up and leave our orovincial worries for another day? I don't know about others, but I'm glad to do both. I just hope people don't lose sight of the problems already existing here while protesting the problems that are to come.

Where and when are the Protests being held in LA? Is there one tonight?

protest at 5 at the federal bldg in westwood

Don't expect the world to be blind that USA is the #1 sponsored of terrorism in middle east.Billion of dollars been sponsored to the Israeli to ensure a free flow of unjust to the Palestinien people.Please don't be so cunning,we are not deaf and we are not blind.Don't think everyone will be blind folded by USA unjust treatment to the other's for so long.Why only USA life is worth while others is not.This kind kind of dirty ideology stick like glue in those blind patriotic American mind.That why there's no peace on earth.

07 October 2001

Almost four weeks after the crimes against humanity in New York and

Washington, we are playing politics on the hoof and allying ourselves to

some of the nastiest butchers around.

Mr Blair may believe that "the values we believe in should shine through

what we do in Afghanistan" but few of our "friends" in the region have many

values, and some of them have a lot of blood on their hands. For as we

search for facilities and jumping-off points and air space and access -- and

we are now creating policies by the day -- we are being asked to forget a

lot of recent history.

First out of the memory goes Chechnya. The savage repression of this Muslim

republic -- complete with mass executions, mass rape and mass graves -- was

the brainchild of Vladimir Putin, the former serving KGB officer into whose

soul Mr Bush believes he peered in Slovenia.

Mr Putin's assault on Grozny was timed to bring him the Russian presidency,

and within weeks his indisciplined troops had turned the rubble of Chechnya

into something approaching Afghanistan. Mr Putin now seems our strongest

ally in the "war against terror". And why not, when he is himself such a

master of terror?

Second out of the memory goes the nasty little dictatorship run by the Saudi

royal family whose religious "mouttawa" police taught the Taliban how to run

their Ministry for the Prevention of Vice and Promotion of Virtue.

We should forget that women are not even allowed to drive a car in Saudi

Arabia, we must ignore the weekly head-choppings outside mosques, the

country's disgraceful and unfair judicial system -- everything, in fact,

which might remind us of Saudi Arabia's carbon copy, the Taliban, whose

destruction we are now seeking.

Then we must turn our attention away from the not terribly democratic regime

of General Pervez Musharraf. Only a little while ago, the general was the

Pakistani army commander who overthrew the democratically elected -- though

corrupt -- government of Nawaz Sharif. Indeed, General Musharraf was rather

keen to hang Mr Sharif until President Clinton dropped by Islamabad early

last year to condemn Osama bin Laden and appeal for Sharif's life.

Only a few weeks ago, the general appointed himself president. And while the

world tut-tutted then, it now respectfully accords General Musharraf the

title of "president" too.

Fourth down the memory hole goes our new friend Uzbekistan whose President

Islam Karimov currently holds 7,000 political prisoners in his jails. There

is no free press, no political opposition.

Mikhail Ardzinov, one of the few human rights activists in Uzbekistan -- who

was brutally beaten by Karimov's secret police two years ago -- now says

that although America had promised not to sell out human rights to get

Karimov's friendship, "We know that the tone will change now". Too true.

Karimov has promised that his air space can be "used in the fight against

terrorism for humanitarian and security aims".

And this is not the moment to remind anyone that Uzbekistan has its own

reasons to destroy the Taliban -- not just because the Taliban has been

exporting its revolution over the Afghan-Uzbek border, but because President

Karimov wants to run an oil pipeline through Afghanistan to a Pakistani

port, a project that will help to fund his bankrupt police state (as well as

a few American oil companies).

One of Karimov's allies is the anti-Taliban war criminal Abdul Rashid Dustum

whose men went on a rampage of rape in Kabul in the early Nineties and who,

for several months, went to fight for the Taliban after receiving a massive

bribe for his change of allegiance. So it's amnesia too for the anarchy and

mass human rights abuses perpetrated when the Northern Alliance -- our

friends in northern Afghanistan -- ruled Kabul. We must remember with sorrow

its former leader, Ahmed Shah Massoud, a genuine patriot murdered by Arab

suicide bombers on 9 September, but we must forget his colleague Rasoul

Sayaf whose men used Shia women as sex slaves in the early Nineties.

Now it's true that Churchill, when told in 1941 that Germany had invaded the

Soviet Union and that Stalin was now his ally, announced that if Hitler

invaded Hell, he would at least make "a favourable reference" to the Devil

in the House of Commons. But we're not making any references at all to our

"friends" in the region. We have drawn the shining bright sword and have no

time to worry if the hands we shake are covered in blood.

This is a war of democracy versus evil, according to President Bush. It's

just that there's not an awful lot of democracy around.