Hi Raymond Duray; I agree that the military is getting domestic propaganda from the food droppings, but I do not agree that the food drop has no military purpose. In fact, it's obvious to any military man that it is being very carefully targeted:
Warriors (and engineers) are people with strong inclinations to be efficient, and so to always have multiple reasons for doing anything. In the case of the food drops, the military reason is to feed the hungrier areas where the Northern Alliance is either in control or is recruiting.
If you look through the food drops you'll see that 80% or more of them are in the neighborhood of Mazar-e Sharif.
Let's put this in perspective. Afghanistan is 160,000 square miles. There have been about 1 million food packets dropped so far. That amounts to six per square mile.
But we haven't been dropping them on the crowded cities. Looking at the DoD charts, not a single humanitarian drop is on one of the major cities (that are all controlled by the Taliban). So are the drops occurring over wide areas? No! Plenty of film attests to the fact that the food is being dropped in very controlled, very limited areas. Remember that 6 per square mile figure, and click on this link:
time.com
Is that 6 per square mile? No! The food aid is being dropped to support a very small number of people. And it's being dropped in such large quantities that excess supplies are being sold at the market.
In other words, the food is being dropped in concentrated areas, and in concentrated amounts, with a definite military purpose in mind. It may be packaged to the American public as "humanitarian aid", but it is as significant as ammunition to the hungry soldiers it's being dropped on.
Contrary to the musings of the left, the military is not entirely stupid. They're dropping that food for a reason, and they're not giving it away to the enemy.
Re: "We are dropping about 37,000 meals per day, last I heard. Medicins Sans Frontieres has estimated that the relief requirement at present is about 1.5 million meals per day." The mistake here is that you're computing the needs of the whole of Afghanistan, not the needs of the hungrier sections of the Northern Alliance territory. I suppose you think that the British should have dropped food on Nazi occupied France, LOL! Instead, the US is dropping food on allied territory, and that is only a tiny percentage of Afghanistan. The fact is that countries at war don't go around dropping food on each other. If people who want to believe otherwise, well, I say let them go find an example in the thousands of years of recorded history where something like that has happened.
Re: "Shortly after 9/11 the Afghani borders were closed to the 20 ton trucks needed to bring in useful quantities of wheat. We've bombed Red Cross caches in Kabul repeatedly." This is in agreement with my theory. The United States is using hunger as a weapon against the Taliban.
Every (hard fought) war where it was possible for one side to starve the other (or both to starve each other) resulted in attempts to use food as a weapon. This is not something that the US invented, it dates back to prehistory. Read Thucydides, for instance. Every investiture involves starvation or at least so wish the besiegers. Hunger is far more kind than the alternate ways of killing people.
Re: "Especially in light of the prevalence of uncleared minefields surrounding Masar-i-Sharif, and generally whereever the airdropped foodstuffs would be sent."
If someone is hungry enough, they'll risk a mine field to eat. But you're ignoring the reality. Mines are expensive, they take time and effort to insert, and they are available only in limited quantities. All the US military has to do is contact the Northern Alliance and ask them where they want the food dropped. The NA isn't going to specify areas which are covered with minefields.
Let me review mine theory.
You put mines down in places where you want to prevent the enemy from going. They are put down in two ways: (1) You sow them in large fields to protect some area, or as a way of preventing the enemy from safely taking cover. That would be in specific battlefield areas. (2) You put them in small quantities along places where you figure the enemy will walk. That would include roads, paths, and stuff like saddles of hills and the like.
You don't sow single mines out in the middle of areas that no one cares about. You might, as a form of terror, sow a few at random in fields, but you don't bother putting mines in places where no one ever goes. Similarly, you don't shoot guns at places where no one ever stands, and you don't target your artillery for places that don't have some special significance (unless you're making a rolling barrage).
So here's the figures:
Only two of Afghanistan's 30 provinces are free of land mines, which Kelly said contaminate about 891 million square yards of Afghan soil. That's about 287 square miles of minefields.
latimes.com
Since Afghanistan has 160,000 square miles, that means that only about 1/500th of it has mines, and those areas have something like 1 mine for every 90 square yards.
Re: "Some of the trucks are now rolling into Afghanistan again, but the NGOs are in disarray, and it is anticipated that much of the food will end up in the hands of combatants." You got that right. That's why US policy is to feed areas under the control or influence of the Northern Alliance only.
-- Carl |
