No hate. No violence
Races? Only one Human race
United We Stand, Divided We Fall
Radio Islam
Know Your enemy!
No time to waste. Act now!
Tomorrow it will be too late

English

Franç.

Deutsch

عربي

Sven.

Español

Portug.

Italiano

Русск.

бълг.

Hrvat.

Češt.

Dansk

Suomi

Magyar

Neder.

Norsk

Polski

Rom.

Srpski

Slov.

Indon.

فارسی

Türkçe

日本語

汉语
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Archive/Article/0,4273,4273413,00.html
 

Folly of aid and bombs

George Monbiot

Tuesday October 9, 2001


Two weeks ago, Paul Wolfowitz, the US under secretary of defence, compared Afghanistan to a swamp, which must be drained to catch the snakes that hide there. His analogy may be rather more apt than he intended. Swamps, as everyone knows, are harder to get out of than they are to get into.

On Sunday night, the west took its first, irreversible step into the morass. It may well prove to be the only simple one on an ever more uncertain journey. But there is now no going back. Once you have initiated military action, you are committed to it, and all further adventures in Afghanistan need be armed. It is not clear that either the British or the US governments has fully grasped the implications.

Yesterday morning, some 15 hours after the air strikes began, the United Nations announced that it had halted convoys of food to Afghanistan. From now on, and for as long as the conflict lasts, the humanitarian aid that both Blair and Bush promised would be an integral component of this campaign must be delivered primarily with the help of the armed forces. But they don't seem to have any idea what this responsibility entails.

The military answer to the country's crisis so far has taken the form of 37,500 yellow ration packs, dropped from transport planes into regions in which hungry people are believed to live. Each pack contains around 2,200 calories: roughly enough to sustain one person for one day.

If you believe, as some commentators do, that this is an impressive or even meaningful operation, I urge you to conduct a simple calculation. The United Nations estimates that there are 7.5m hungry people in Afghanistan. If every ration pack reached a starving person, then one two hundredth of the vulnerable were fed by the humanitarian effort on Sunday. The US department of defence has announced that it possesses a further 2m of these packs, which it might be prepared to drop. If so, they could feed 27% of the starving for one day.

Four weeks remain before winter envelops Afghanistan, during which enough food must be delivered to last until March. Yet the US is prepared to drop, at its own best estimate, barely one quarter of one day's needs.

Some of these rations will, of course, be lost. Many, perhaps most, will be eaten by people who are not in immediate danger of starvation, as they are more mobile than the seriously hungry and better able to reach the packs. Some will remain untouched. One of the warring factions may discover that an effective means of eliminating its enemies is to remove the contents of these packs and replace them with explosives. This is just one of the problems associated with dispensing kindness at 20,000 feet: no one can be completely sure whose generosity they are about to enjoy. The usefulness of any feeding programme, moreover, is greatly diminished if it is not carefully targeted. People in different stages of starvation require different preparations.

Children, especially infants, are more vulnerable than any others. Yet all the packs being dropped on Afghanistan are identical, and all are equipped only to feed adults. The packs contain medicine as well as food but, unlike aid workers on the ground, the pilots delivering them can offer no diagnosis. This blanket prescription is likely to be either useless or dangerous.

So western governments have terminated what may have been an effective humanitarian programme and replaced it with a futile gesture. The bombing raids, moreover, have persuaded thousands to flee from their homes. Yet Afghanistan's borders remain closed, while the camps the UN is building in Pakistan will not be ready for another two weeks. The refugees have nowhere to go. The military strikes, Donald Rumsfeld, the US defence secretary, announced, would "create conditions for sustained... humanitarian relief operations in Afghanistan". They have so far done precisely the opposite.

But the purpose of the food drops is not to feed the starving but to tell them they are being fed. President Bush explained on Sunday that by means of these packages, "the oppressed people of Afghanistan will know the generosity of America and our allies". They will know it, for they know that gestures will not feed them. Hunger brooks no tokenism. It demands food, not a semblance of food.

This show of generosity is, of course, designed to impress us as well as them. The yellow packages drifting on to the minefields of the Hindu Kush are likely to be the most, over the next few days, that we will see of the humanitarian crisis in Afghanistan. The hungry will die quietly on the forgotten trails through the mountains, huddled behind rocks, searching the streets of deserted cities, clawing for roots in the empty fields. The satellites that can count the shells stacked behind a howitzer cannot peer into the faces of the starving.

And if, somehow, a sensible humanitarian mission resumed, the linkage established by both Bush and Blair between aid and ordnance, which sounds so bold and compassionate at home, could turn out to be disastrous in Afghanistan. If the humanitarian programme continues to be perceived as part of the military offensive, we could expect the dispersed guerrillas of a partly vanquished regime to slip into the feeding centres to lob a few grenades into the crowd.

While it is not hard to predict how the humanitarian operation might end, it is rather more difficult to see how the military mission could be concluded. The Taliban have vowed to fight to the last breath. While many of their conscripts will desert, the hard core are likely to do just this. They dispersed some time before Sunday's attacks. Their anti-aircraft guns, tanks and planes were peripheral to the operation of what has always, in effect, been a guerrilla force. In confronting them, as Russian veterans have warned, we will be pummelling thin air. Rumsfeld has defined victory as the Taliban's "collapse from within". But this is not victory, only the beginning of the next phase of war.

If, as Bush and Blair maintain, they aim to leave Afghanistan better than it was when they found it, then the west is committed to defend it against all oppressors, whoever they might be. This implies that if the Northern Alliance moves into the vacuum left by the nominal defeat of the Taliban, and establishes not the "broad-based" government of assorted extremists the west envisages but a narrow government of homogenous extremists, we must fight them too.

So at what point do we stop fighting? At what point does withdrawal become either honourable or responsible? Having once engaged its forces, are we then obliged to reduce Afghanistan to a permanent protectorate? Or will we jettison responsibility as soon as military power becomes impossible to sustain?

The consequences of this endless war may be dangerous for the west. They could be deadly for Afghanistan.



"When a Jew, in America or in South Africa, talks to his Jewish companions about 'our' government, he means the government of Israel."

- David Ben-Gurion, Israeli Prime Minister


Palestine banner
Viva Palestina!

Latest Additions - in English

What is this Jewish carnage really about? - The background to atrocities

Videos on Farrakhan, the Nation of Islam and Blacks and Jews  

How Jewish Films and Television Promotes bias Against Muslims

Judaism is Nobody's Friend
Judaism is the Jews' strategy to dominate non-Jews.

Jewish War Against Lebanon!

Islam and Revolution
By Ahmed Rami

Hasbara - The Jewish manual for media deceptions

Celebrities bowing to their Jewish masters

Elie Wiesel - A Prominent False Witness
By Robert Faurisson

The Gaza atrocity 2008-2009


Iraq under Jewish occupation
Iraq - war and occupation


Jewish War On Syria!

CNN's Jewish version of "diversity" - Lists the main Jewish agents

Hezbollah the Beautiful
Americans, where is your own Hezbollah?

Black Muslim leader Louis Farrakhan's Epic Speech in Madison Square Garden, New York  - A must see!

"War on Terror" - on Israel's behalf!

World Jewish Congress: Billionaires, Oligarchs, Global Influencers for Israel

Interview with anti-Zionist veteran Ahmed Rami of Radio Islam - On ISIS, "Neo-Nazis", Syria, Judaism, Islam, Russia...

Britain under Jewish occupation!


Jewish World Power
West Europe    East Europe
Americas          Asia
Middle East       Africa
      U.N.              E.U.

 

The Internet and Israeli-Jewish infiltration/manipulations

Books - Important collection of titles

The Judaization of China

Israel: Jewish Supremacy in Action - By David Duke

The Power of Jews in France

Jew Goldstone appointed by UN to investigate War Crimes in Gaza

When Jews rule...
The best book on Jewish Power


The Israel Lobby - From the book

Jews and Crime - The archive

Sayanim - Israel's and Mossad's Jewish helpers abroad

Listen to Louis Farrakhan's Speech - A must hear!

The Israeli Nuclear Threat

The "Six Million" Myth

"Jewish History" - a bookreview

Putin and the Jews of Russia

Israel's attack on US warship USS Liberty - Massacre in the Mediterranean

Jewish "Religion" - What is it?

Medias in the hands of racists

Strauss-Kahn - IMF chief and member of Israel lobby group

Down with Zio-Apartheid
Stop Jewish Apartheid!

The Jews behind Islamophobia

Israel controls U.S. Presidents
Biden, Trump, Obama, Bush, Clinton...

The Victories of Revisionism
By Professor Robert Faurisson

The Jewish hand behind Internet The Jews behind Google, Facebook, Wikipedia, Yahoo!, MySpace, eBay...

"Jews, who want to be decent human beings, have to renounce being Jewish"

Jewish War Against Iran

Jewish Manipulation of World Leaders

Al Jazeera English under Jewish infiltration

The Founding Myths of Modern Israel
Garaudy's "The Founding Myths
of Israeli Politics"


Jewish hate against Christians
By Prof. Israel Shahak

Introduction to Revisionist
Thought
- By Ernst Zündel

Karl Marx: The Jewish Question

Reel Bad Arabs - Revealing the racist Jewish Hollywood propaganda

"Anti-Semitism" - What is it?

Videos - Important collection 

The Jews Banished 47 Times in 1000 Years - Why?

Zionist strategies - Plotting invasions, formenting civil wars, interreligious strife, stoking racial hatreds and race war

The International Jew
By Henry Ford

Pravda interviews Ahmed Rami

The Founding Myths of Modern Israel
Shahak's "Jewish History,
Jewish Religion"


The Jewish plan to destroy the Arab countries - From the World Zionist Organization

Judaism and Zionism inseparable

Revealing photos of the Jews 

Horrors of ISIS Created by Zionist Supremacy - By David Duke

Racist Jewish Fundamentalism

The Freedom Fighters:
   Hezbollah - Lebanon
   Nation of Islam - U.S.A.

Jewish Influence in America
- Government, Media, Finance...

"Jews" from Khazaria stealing the land of Palestine

The U.S. cost of supporting Israel

Turkey, Ataturk and the Jews

Talmud unmasked
The truth about the Talmud


Israel and the Ongoing Holocaust in Congo

Jews DO control the media - a Jew brags! - Revealing Jewish article

Abbas - The Traitor

Protocols of Zion - The whole book!

Encyclopedia of the Palestine Problem
Encyclopedia of the
Palestine Problem


The "Holocaust" - 120 Questions and Answers

Quotes - On Jewish Power / Zionism

Caricatures / Cartoons 

Activism! - Join the Fight!