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.
