This makes me feel ill if it’s true. The idea of thousands (millions?) starving to death in the cold winter does not seem like a desireable outcome to this screwed up situation.
So is there any truth to this article? I’ll quote a bit:
Sends shivers up my spine.
DaLovin’ Dj
Gawrsh. :rolleyes: Deej, you’re a fun guy, and I like reading your stuff, but, dude, you gotta quit getting all your news from the alternative press. 
Seven and a half million Afghans are in danger of being hungry this winter, not “dying in a matter of months”. Not “death on a scale the world has not seen in a long, long time.” Not “a staggering number of innocent people are on the verge of being condemned to death”.
Not “three times the number of people Pol Pot took years to kill. Thirty-five times the number that died in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, combined. If 5,000 died on September 11, we’re talking the equivalent number of deaths to ten World Trade Centers, every day, for 150 days.”
http://www.cnn.com/2001/US/11/07/gen.un.refugees/index.html
http://www.cnn.com/2001/WORLD/asiapcf/central/09/25/gen.un.refugees.afghanistan/
So, hunger, yes. Cold, yes. But the mass death in only a matter of a few months of millions of people? Another “Holocaust or Rwanda or Cambodia”? No.
Mazar-e-Sharif, since it’s geographically isolated, would be the Worst Case Scenario, and that involves far fewer people.
They might do , since a hungry army is an ineffective one , the bombing of two red cross food depots seems fishy to me
In fairness I see that the original source is actually only a warning, it is not something that is happening right now, and all the other sources that DDG found also said that the situation could get worse for thousands if not millions of afghans.
Yes, those were estimates made before the attacks. Since the UN can not deliver anything to areas cut off by the bombing I have to say this can indeed get worse. I agree this will not be on the levels of Cambodia, but hundreds of thousands dying of hunger will be ok because they are not millions?
BTW I still agree with the military action, but we can not afford to ignore the results.
The quoted article seems to have an anti-US slant. Starvation and hunger are terrible things. That doesn’t mean that the US is at fault.
The Taliban government deserves the blame. Their terrible governance is the main cause of the food shortage. Long before the US attacks began, there were already huge numbers of refugees (millions IIRC). Even with the food contributed from abroad, terrible hardship would have occurred. This was the situation before the war. It had nothing to do with the US.
In fact, the US deserves credit for helping. The article doesn’t mention that the US contributed more food to Afghanistan than any other country IIRC.
The quote says, “Almost all delivery of food stopped [after the bombing].” Actually, as we all know, the US is delivering considerable additional food via air drops. (Feeding one’s enemies is unique in the history of warfare, to my knowledge) Of course we cannot direct the distribution of food dropped into Taliban-controlled areas. I have no doubt that we are getting food to people in areas that we and our allies control.
In the long run, a better government is needed to eliminate hunger and starvation. A successful US operation is in the best interest of the Afghan people.
But dropping small amounts of food does not exhonerate you from some of the problems there , without the US bombing there would have been 2 more warehouses full of redcross grain and extra UN food could be driven in also. Since the
loosely termed “allies” refused a pause in the bombing for transport of Aid my cynical side seems suspicious
War is cruelty and cannot be refined
We can assume that between bombing and the Northern Alliance’s somewhat questionable military operation, things in Afghanistan are going to be tough this winter. Unfortunately that is an unavoidable consequence of policy decisions deliberately and knowingly taken by the national governments of Afghanistan and the US. The US is not involved in a police raid where you round up the usual suspects, throw them in the paddy wagon and drag them off to jail. The US is in a war that it did not start. The nature of war is that it is cruel and inflicts injury on people who are not directly involved in the conflict, save that they have the misfortune to live in one of the countries involved.
The US’s first duty is to protect its own people and after that to protect its own economy and political structure. Except to the extent restricted by conventions of humane treatment, the US has no obligation to preserve the security of the population of Afghanistan, or to preserve its economy or political structure. Having harbored the people who perpetrated the Horrors of September 11, the government of Afghanistan has selected its people, economy and political structure to take a beating as the object lesion to other states that might consider making or facilitating war on the US. It is probably irrelevant that the US does not catch the people directly responsible for September 11 as long as the point is made that making war on the US will evoke a response that will inflict unacceptable loss on the nation undertaking or sponsoring the attack.
Being the big dog in the fight surely invites attack, but it also puts the big dog in a position that it can inflict damage sufficient to make sure smaller dog will think carefully before it exposes its self to the sort of retribution that an attack on the big dog entails.
No there wouldn’t have been because the Taliban had seized the warehouses to feed its troops. UN agencies pulled out of Afghanistan soon after Sept. 11th, but long before any bombs fell. With the Taliban’s habit of arresting aid workers and trying them on cases that have the penalty of death, it is quite possible that the UN may have been forced out even if Sept 11th never happened.
We certainly do need to try and feed as many people as possible. But websites like Alternet should just post “We hate the US! Nah! Nah!”
As regards the OP question- “we”? Not the USA but the Taliban. People were already starving in mass numbers- and if the Taliban continued- the starving would have continued. Sure, our bombing will have a temporary decrease in the food- but in the long run, things will be much better for the people of Afganistan.
Next- “we” also “starved” many people when we bombed Germany in WWII. The Government of that nation made it’s choice to plunge itself into darkest evil & warfare, and the common people, by and large, went along. The Taliban made the same choice. If they cared about their people- they could have turned over ONE person- instead they choose to risk the lives of millions. Their choice.
DrDeth wrote:
I’ve heard that this was because the Taliban forbade a lot of the arable land in Afghanistan from being farmed, for religious reasons. Is this true? Did the Taliban actually prohibit Afghani from planting crops on a large scale?
Yes, a large and unacceptable number of people will starve to death this winter in Afghanistan.
That is a side issue to the main task of punishing the terrorist and those who harbour them.
The USA has made its priorities clear and it will live with the consequences. No one cared about the Afghans before, why should anyone give a fuck now?
Tell me it isn’t so.
I do not believe everything I read. Not from mainstream press, and not from alternative press. So I read both. Then I try to decide which one I believe is correct (if they differ). Sometimes it is not all that easy. Recently, when I have trouble figuring it out, I come here to see what these wonderful minds have to say about the issues. It often helps me to seperate what is exageration, and what is cause for real concern. I love this place.
I won’t stop reading alternative press, and I reccomend anyone who sticks to mainstream news take it with a grain of salt, realizing there is an agenda which is not always “Get the truth to the people”. Now, onto the subject at hand (although I wouldn’t mind seeing a GD thread about alternative news sources):
How long does it take with no food before you starve to death? A week? 2 Weeks? 3 Weeks? I think the difference between now and before the war, is that there is quickly becoming no means to get the food in and around Afghanistan at ALL. So they will be faced with NO food as opposed to very little food. The UN has said they will not send people in until their safety is guaranteed. So what might have been a survivable (albeit hungry) winter last year, could be deadly this year.
And our war is against terrorism, not the Afghanistan civilians, as our government keeps pointing out. The Taliban supports terrorists. We cannot fight the Taliban without there being civilian casualties. I don’t like it, but I understand. But a few bombs missing their targets and killing a few thousand civillians or so is a hell of a lot different (in my book) then setting up a situation which results in the deaths of hundreds of thousands (possibly millions) of people by starvation. People who would not die were it not for US actions. People the US claims are not our enemies. Even if “We didn’t start it”, as compassionate humans, we should be repulsed by the potential for such suffering and death to occur. I don’t find “They have it coming” and “Not our problem” sentiments to be very capable of offsetting my horror at the idea of so many innocent people dying in such a fashion.
Let’s see if we can’t win this war without killing millions of people. But hey, maybe that’s what this world needs every now and then. Just wipe out your enemies and the nearest million or so people, and soon you’ll have a happy little civilized world. So what if it’s never worked before. No reason to stop trying. At least we’ll kill them with hunger so we can blame it on the local government, and not take responsibility.
DaLovin’ Dj
We didn’t set up the situation. The situation was developed in spite of our efforts to prevent it. The main reason they didn’t starve last winter is because we gave them a bunch of food. We’ve been giving aid to Afghanistan for years. And now that they’ve attacked us, we’ve decreased the aid. Not eliminated, decreased. And somehow that makes us evil? We’re evil because countries that attack us get less aid than countries that don’t attack us? This winter, there are going to be millions of people dying in countries that haven’t been involved in horrific terrorist attacks. Why aren’t you concerned about them? samboy, you complain that no one "gives a fuck
" about the Afghans. I don’t see you starting any threads about the Somalians or Sudaneses or Haitians or North Koreans. Are people’s lives somehow more important because they live in a country that has attacked the US?