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George Monbiot does the math...
quote:Yesterday morning, some fifteen hours after the airstrikes 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 which both Blair and Bush promised would be an integral component of this campaign must be delivered primarily with the help of the armed forces. 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 of them 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 7.5 million 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 Defense has announced that it possesses a further two million of these packs, which it might be prepared to drop. If so, they could feed 27 per cent 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 targetted. 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, the US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld announced, would "create conditions for sustained ... humanitarian relief operations in Afghanistan". They have, so far, done precisely the opposite. |
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