Voices of War Dissent Grow Louder as Starvation Stalks Afghanistan
by Paul Koring

WASHINGTON -- The specter of mass starvation in Afghanistan is creating fodder for a propaganda nightmare and threatening to unravel already frayed support for U.S. air strikes.

Aid agencies are struggling to get desperately needed food to more than six million Afghans, nearly a quarter of the country's population, considered to be at severe risk of starvation this winter. Nearly two-thirds of those people have received nothing since the end of September, the agencies say.

"If a humanitarian catastrophe is attributed to our military operations, it could pull apart our international coalition to fight terrorism, radicalize more people who might be sympathetic to the terrorists' views, and may even make the American people more vulnerable in the end," U.S. Senator Paul Wellstone said.

Washington is keenly aware of the stark political consequences of a humanitarian disaster and is making major efforts to drop food in Afghanistan.

Still, the one million meal rations that U.S. planes have dropped in the past month represent a tiny fraction of the 52,000 tons, about 500 million meals, needed to feed Afghanistan's hungry over that period of time.

"The biggest obstacle to getting food and medicine to the people of Afghanistan is the Taliban," White House spokesman Ari Fleischer said, accusing the regime of seizing food destined for the needy and making aid organizations "pay outrageous taxes to try to get food into the country."

But blaming the Taliban is not likely to play any better with Muslim members of Washington's fragile coalition than blaming Saddam Hussein for the deaths of thousands of Iraqi children since the imposition of sanctions.

"The bombing victimizes the innocents, exacerbates the humanitarian disaster and creates widespread resentment across the Muslim world," the Council on American-Islamic Relations and the Islamic Circle of North America said in a joint statement this week. "The senseless starvation of women and children will fuel hate and extremism."

The Taliban have shown themselves adept in propaganda techniques, allowing foreign journalists into Afghanistan to report on alleged civilian casualties.

In Muslim countries such as Egypt and Pakistan, there are increasingly strident demands that the U.S. bombing be halted for humanitarian reasons, as well as out of respect for the holy month of Ramadan.

The large international aid agencies, such as the United Nations World Food Program, meanwhile, have painted a stark picture of impending catastrophe unless ways are found to distribute huge amounts of food.