THE need to spend billions of pounds to restore Afghanistan and to rid it of its heroin and war lord domination has been expressed by Pendle MP Gordon Prentice.

He told Labour Party workers in Pendle that the government was determined to avert a humanitarian crisis in the country.

The scale of the task must not be underestimated. Before the dreadful events of September 11, a quarter of Afghan children died before their fifth birthday.

If they survived childhood things didn't improve much with the overall life expectancy being only 46 years compared to 77 in Pendle, said Mr Prentice.

Only 39 per cent of boys and three per cent of girls had access to education.

The MP said the increased conflict would bring the total vulnerable to starvation to 7.5 million.

Very few people felt comfortable with the bombing but the objective was to strike the Taliban military targets and eliminate terrorism as a force in international affairs.

Mr Prentice said: "We cannot close our eyes and pretend the terrorists will go away or are no threat to us. The deranged fanatics who can fly planes into skyscrapers are capable of any atrocity."

There was a need to focus on the reconstruction of Afghanistan. Only sustained international development had any chance of ridding Afghanistan of heroin and the domination of the war lords.

He said 90 per cent of heroin on British streets originated in Afghanistan.

The point needed to be repeated that it was not a war against Islam. "We need to remind people that the UK intervened in Kosovo to protect Muslims from Slobodan Milosevic," he said.