There's Nothing Humanitarian About this War

By Rahul Mahajan and Robert Jensen, AlterNet. Posted October 8, 2001.

Our undeclared war on Afghanistan is the culmination of a decade of U.S. aggression with a humanitarian façade.

Once the natural sympathies of the American people were touched by the plight of the long-suffering Afghan people, public opinion swung toward helping them. In response to this, the administration concocted the most shameless and cynical cover story for military strikes in recent memory. The idea, leaked last Thursday, went like this:

- The Afghan people are starving, so we need to do food drops. (Never mind that all those experienced in humanitarian aid programs are opposed to food drops because they are dangerous and wasteful, and, most important, preclude setting up the on-the-ground distribution networks necessary to making aid effective.)

- We need to destroy the Taliban's air defenses before doing food drops.

- The transport planes may be endangered by the Stinger anti-aircraft missiles that the United States supplied the mujaheddin in the 1980s when they were fighting the Soviet Union, and some of which ended up in the Taliban's hands.

- We have to destroy the Taliban's air defense. Because so much of it is mobile, we have to bomb all over.

The bombing will seriously hinder existing aid efforts. The World Food Program operates a bakery in Kabul on which thousands of families depend, as well as many other programs. A number of United Nations organizations have been mounting a major new coordinated humanitarian campaign. These efforts were not endangered by the Taliban before, but the chaos and violence created by this bombing -- combined with a projected assault by the Northern Alliance -- will likely force UN personnel to withdraw, with disastrous effects for the Afghan people.

To add insult to injury, in the first day the United States dropped only 37,500 packaged meals, far below the daily needs of even a single large refugee camp. With 7.5 million people on the brink of death and existing programs disrupted, this is a drop in the bucket compared to the damage caused by this new war.

Those who starve or freeze will not be the only innocents to die. It should finally be clear to all that "surgical strikes" are a myth. In the Gulf War, only 7 percent of the munitions used were "smart," and those missed the target roughly half the time. One of those surgical strikes destroyed the Amiriyah bomb shelter, killing somewhere from 400 to 1,500 women and children. In Operation Infinite Reach, the 1998 attacks on Afghanistan, some of the cruise missiles went astray and hit Pakistan. Military officials have already admitted that not all of the ordnance being used is "smart," and even the current generation of smart weapons hit their target only 70 to 80 percent of the time.

Contrary to U.S. propaganda, civilian targets are always on the list. There are already reports that Mullah Omar, the leader of the Taliban, was targeted for assassination, and the Defense Ministry in Kabul -- surely no more military a target than the Pentagon -- and located in the middle of the city, has been destroyed.

This is standard U.S. practice. In the Gulf War, virtually every power station in Iraq was destroyed, with untold effects on civilians. A correspondent for al-Jazeera TV reported that power went out in Kabul when the bombing started, although it was restored in some places within hours. Targeting of any pitiful remnants of civilian infrastructure in Afghanistan would be consistent with past U.S. policy.

George Bush said we are not at war with the Afghan people -- just as we were not at war with the Iraqi people or the Serbian people. The hundreds of thousands of Afghans who fled the cities knew better.

Military analysts suggest that the timing of the strikes had to do with the weather. Another possible interpretation is that the Taliban's recently-expressed willingness to negotiate posed too great a danger that peace might break out. The Orwellian use of the term "diplomacy" to describe the consistent U.S. policy of no negotiations -- accept our peremptory demands or else -- helps to mask the fact that the administration always intended to launch this war.

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