Why I still think the West's 'war' is wrong

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Victory! The air is thick with exultant cries hailing the victorious armies in Kabul and Jalalabad. "Our side", we are told, has won the war in Afghanistan. The "other side" (the enemy) has collapsed. Those of us who have consistently opposed the war are denounced by fashionable liberal warmongers as ninnies, softies, traitors. We are told that we backed the wrong side, the Taliban; that we are losers, and that those of us who support the protest march this Sunday should be ashamed of ourselves.

But wait. What is this other, rather less triumphalist, headline in the Financial Times at the beginning of this triumphalist week? "US AND UK WARN REBELS AGAINST PUSH ON KABUL". The article below set out warnings by Foreign Secretary Jack Straw and the United States' Condoleeza Rice, national security adviser to President George Bush, that the victorious Northern Alliance forces should be restrained from occupying Kabul.

They know that their allies in Afghanistan were until very recently their enemies and that the ruffians who lead the Northern Alliance are every bit as bloodthirsty as the ruffians they have defeated. They know, too, that until recently the Taliban and Osama bin Laden were armed and succoured by the CIA, with disastrous consequences for the people of Afghanistan and New York. Even while their supporters exulted at the Alliance victories, politicians on both sides of the Atlantic became nervous of the forces they had unleashed - and yet were utterly impotent to restrain them.

Almost all of us who oppose the war also vehemently oppose the Taliban. The most ferocious assault on Bin Laden I have read came from George Galloway, the Labour MP for Glasgow Hillhead, in a speech in the House of Commons after the 11 September atrocity and before the beginning of the war, which he has consistently opposed. We oppose the war not because we support one side or the other (we don't) but because we believed and still believe that the involvement of our Government in the military bombardment of Afghanistan was wrong in principle, wrong in practice, has already led to untold miseries for the people of Afghanistan and can only lead to more.

After 11 September, President Bush and Tony Blair urged us to support their efforts to "bring the culprits to justice". But the prime culprits for the Twin Towers atrocity are all dead by their own hands. Not one was an Afghani, or had anything to do with Afghanistan. Most, if not all of them, we now discover, were born and bred in Saudi Arabia, the most stalwart ally of the United States in the Arab world. They were trained to fly aircraft in the United States. No one suggests that the country where the terrorists were brought up or trained should be bombed, any more than anyone suggested that the way to deal with the IRA was to bomb Belfast or Dublin.

So the main reason for popular dismay about the war is that the people who suffer most from the US bombing - the thousands of homeless and starving people who have died in it or fled from it - have nothing whatever to do with the terrorism in New York. Indeed, the initial claims that the bombing was sophisticated and "targeted" on Taliban troops has now vanished in the smoke and ruin left by the B52 bombers.

What is the point of all this mayhem? The defeat of terrorism? What if the Taliban are finally defeated, the al Qaeda camps in Afghanistan destroyed, Bin Laden killed, what then? Does anyone really believe that the result will be the end of terrorism? All the signs suggest the opposite: that for every dead Taliban fighter, and certainly over the corpse of Bin Laden, a whole host of terrorists will seek fanatical and murderous revenge.

The Prime Minister's consistent refrain harks back to his equally gung-ho predecessor, Margaret Thatcher. "There is no alternative," he says. He challenges opponents of the war to say what they would have done in the wake of the terrorism in New York. Our answer is that terrorists, including Bin Laden and his associates, can only be properly dealt with if the root causes of their fanaticism are understood and addressed.

Putting a stop forever to the frightful oppression of the Palestinian people would do more to end terrorism than would a million bombs on Afghanistan. If the US and British governments stopped subsidising and arming the criminally oppressive regime in Israel, if they stopped doing absurd and expensive arms deals with utterly undemocratic and misogynist regimes in Saudi Arabia or Pakistan or the former Russian "republics" in Central Asia; if they leaned on their new ally, the Russian President Vladimir Putin, to stop the slaughter and torture in Chechnya, they would be carrying out a far more victorious war against terrorism than the one they have so recklessly launched in Afghanistan.

Above all, if they spent even a tiny fraction of the money they waste on stealth bombers, daisy-cutter bombs and the other machinery of death on food and aid for the starving and pulverised people of Afghanistan, they would stand a far better chance of catching and trying Bin Laden without inspiring more terrorism than they do at present.

I remember years ago hearing the late Peter Jenkins, a very "moderate" Guardian journalist, speaking to a packed meeting against the Falklands war. "There is," he said, "a perfectly respectable alternative to going to war - not going to war."

There are many even more persuasive and urgent alternatives to the war in Afghanistan - which is why the demonstration on Sunday will put the Prime Minister, his advisers, our modern liberal warmongers and the supine and compliant ranks of Labour, Liberal Democrat and Tory MPs to shame.

? The demonstration assembles in Hyde Park at noon on Sunday and marches to Trafalgar Square.