Nation-building and providing humanitarian aid are admirable goals as America fights a shadowy enemy in the wasteland that is Afghanistan. But so is self-defense and winning the war on terrorism.
In a variation of the Marshall Plan in the era of Federal Express, U.S. aircraft dispatched to Afghanistan sent in the bombs and, less than two hours later, the butter. The bombs have a clear purpose. But does the butter?
Even before Sept. 11, the United States was the largest donor of humanitarian aid to Afghanistan – a fact that didn’t persuade the Taliban government to turn over terrorist mastermind Osama bin Laden.
Undaunted, President Bush announced last week another $320 million in humanitarian aid. The first installment came on the wings of U.S. Air Force C-17 cargo jets, which dropped more than 30,000 “humanitarian daily ration” packets into remote areas of Afghanistan on each night of the airstrikes.
Despite the ludicrous claim by the left-wing organization Doctors Without Borders, the food packets are not simply “military propaganda” intended to justify these strikes.
It’s more complicated than that. The bright yellow, two-pound packets are not only nutritious (providing more than 2,000 calories a day) but culturally sensitive. Each contains crackers, jam, peanut butter and vegetarian entrees, but no meat products.
Yet, just for whose benefit are these wartime happy meals?
Probably not for too many of the Afghan people. Tens of thousands of aid packets – each with just enough food for one day – won’t make much of a dent among a population in which, according to relief agencies, nearly 7 million are starving or on the brink of it.
And certainly not the angry mobs in places like Pakistan, who are unlikely to temper their rage against the United States as a result of the humanitarian gesture in Afghanistan.
More likely, the main purpose of this food drop is to assure Americans that we can defend our own country and pursue justice abroad in a way that is, nonetheless, humane and caring.
That assurance will be helpful to those who, having once resisted the idea of the United States being “the world’s policeman,” now have no problem with it being the world’s social worker.
Asked the other night on Fox News Channel what it said about Americans that we were dropping food as we were dropping bombs, former Vice President Dan Quayle suggested the message to Afghans was that we were a compassionate people. In fact, Quayle said, despite our “political difference” with the Taliban, we have no beef with the Afghan people and that long after the Taliban are gone, we will be there to take care of the innocents.
It’s a sign of how strange the world of American politics has become since Sept. 11 that, beside liberals calling for war, we now have conservatives calling for foreign welfare programs.
Now is not the time for self-congratulatory exercises. The generosity of the American people is not in dispute.
Whether they like to admit it or not, the countries of the world surely realize by now that Americans know how to do good deeds. At this moment, now that we’ve been viciously attacked at home by an uncharitable bunch who play by their own rule book, the real question is whether we can stomach doing bad deeds.
Gen. Barry McCaffrey was right when, in an e-mail to a cadet at West Point, he detailed the sort of covert military exercises that one can, and must, employ to exterminate these vermin.
And, Vice President Dick Cheney was right when, on television shortly after the attacks, he said about battling terrorists: “It’s a mean, nasty, dangerous, dirty business out there and we have to operate in that arena.”
The Taliban thrives in that arena. Their response to the humanitarian offensive has been to stop trucks delivering U.N. aid, to beat relief workers and confiscate cargo. They threaten to burn the food and supplies, including some of those mysterious yellow aid packages that fell from the sky.
That so many good-hearted Americans would find such acts inconceivable helps illustrate that we are better people than those who would destroy us. All we need worry about at the moment is being better warriors so we can destroy them first.
