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| Joined: | Mon Nov 21st, 2005 |
| Location: | California USA |
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The first weeks of the Afghanistan bombing were accompanied by heavily-advertised food drops. After Sept. 11 the United States pressured Pakistan to cut off the flow of food from aid agencies to Afghanistan, an action for which the U.S. was criticized in some quarters abroad, especially in Europe. The food drops were supposed to make up for that, but the rations represented something like 1 percent of what had been previously supplied over land. However, the nighttime pictures of transporters tossing food packets out of open cargo bays were very good for TV, which at first broadcast more of these than of the actual bombing. I was in Germany at the time, and remember how the start of the war was presented by the German state and private media as a "food and bomb offensive," in that order. An official from an aid agency, who began to criticize the U.S. food drop as shameless propaganda on live television during the first night of bombing, was cut off within seconds. It was little surprise to learn that the food planes were taking off from the Ramstein Air Force Base in Germany. This confirmed that the maneuver's primary function was to soothe the European conscience. (At that point, with the 9/11 attacks still fresh in mind, starving Afghans were not of much concern to the American majority.) In the following days, it was revealed the food drops were conducted over territory held by the Northern Alliance, not the Taliban, highlighting their irrelevance. On top of that, the yellow ration packets looked very similar to yellow cluster bomblets (banned by international treaty, but so what), of which many more were being dropped from the air. Soon enough, the inevitable occurred and several children were killed picking up unexploded bomblets that they thought were unopened food. In the picture at the top of this page, McKinney is exposing the hypocrisy of the food drops while speaking to a congressional panel.