Hakki --------------- http://www.time.com/time/nation/printout/0,8816,185636,00.html Friday, Nov. 23, 2001 Lying to Refugees Alex Perry on the humanitarian crisis in Northern Afganistan BY ALEX PERRY
Imagine living with your entire family, wife, brothers, sister, children, their wives and husbands, and children, in a tent the size of a car trunk. Imagine that tent is a waist-high from made of sticks and scraps, sacks, blankets, has no floor and no sides so that the freezing wind and dust storms find it no opposition at all. Imagine no money, no food, no firewood and no water except for a black, stinking roadside ditch that bears all the plastic wrappers, oil, excrement and soap from the city and daily carries off camp neighbors who starvation and exposure do not take away. Then imagine your reaction as two well-dressed men, one a foreigner, pull up in a taxi, stride over to your hovel and start asking questions. Your name, how you came to be here, what it is like watching friends and family dies and whether, really, you have any hope at all. You'd think: "Foreigner." You'd think: "Money." You'd think: "Salvation."
Reporting the humanitarian crisis in Northern Afghanistan, I have been begged by fathers to take their children, angrily led by the hand by a husband to see his wife lying unconscious from malnutrition, and, again and again, asked to explain why the aid isn't coming. On Monday the mere sight of my health reduced a 75-year-old man to tears. My translator and I have found we can only stay for an hour or so in a refugee camp before the crowd becomes hysterical with need. In every visit, there comes a point when it becomes too dangerous to stay, when we have to flee the pressing mob in fear, it seems, of being eaten alive.
And what do we do to part the sea of beseeching hands? We lie. We lie our heads off. I become a mute, signing that I don't understand, as if anyone could fail to comprehend what they're asking of me. My translator makes great speeches about how we're going to see what's holding the aid up (true), how there's huge problems in its distribution (true) and how we're going to rail against the aid agencies, the Afghan authorities and the governments of the world, and, if we have to, physically force them to bring food here (absolutely false). And then we jump into our taxi and speed away, leaving a trail of screaming children in our dust.
We tell ourselves the truth must out, my translator and I. Tell the world and help should come. Stumbling over graves, interviewing the hopeless, taking pictures of the dead. That's the discipline. That's my training. There's a steely war reporters bravery to that. Strange, because it feels like perfect cowardice. ---------------- The ‘airlift of evil’
http://www.msnbc.com/news/664935.asp Why did we let Pakistan pull ‘volunteers’ out of Kunduz? A convoy of several hundred Taliban soldiers evacuate their northern foothold of Kunduz to surrender to opposing Northern Alliance forces earlier this week.
By Michael Moran MSNBC
NEW YORK, Nov. 29 — The United States took the unprecedented step this week of demanding that foreign airlines provide information on passengers boarding planes for America. Yet in the past week, a half dozen or more Pakistani air force cargo planes landed in the Taliban-held city of Kunduz and evacuated to Pakistan hundreds of non-Afghan soldiers who fought alongside the Taliban and even al-Qaida against the United States. What’s wrong with this picture? THE PENTAGON, whose satellites and drones are able to detect sleeping guerrillas in subterranean caverns, claims it knows nothing of these flights. When asked about the mysterious airlift at a recent Pentagon briefing, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and Gen. Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, denied knowledge of such flights. Myers backpedaled a bit, saying that, given the severe geography of the country, it might be possible to duck in and out of mountain valleys and conduct such an airlift undetected.
But Rumsfeld intervened. With his talent for being blunt and ambiguous at the same time, he said: “I have received absolutely no information that would verify or validate statements about airplanes moving in or out. I doubt them.”
(...)
The history of American policy in Southwest Asia, from the shah of Iran to Saddam Hussein to Afghanistan and Pakistan, is marred by one example after another of short-term decisions that stored up enormous trouble for later. We failed for decades to find common ground with the world’s largest democracy, India. We failed to temper the shah’s domestic abuses in Iran in the name of anti-communism and wound up with the ayatollahs. We decided not to rile our Gulf War coalition allies by pushing onto to Baghdad and find ourselves a decade later wondering how to deal with Saddam Hussein. We pumped Afghanistan and Pakistan with billions of dollars worth of weapons and military know-how to fight the Soviet invasion, but then adopted the Pontius Pilate approach in victory, washing our hands of these struggling nations as soon as Moscow withdrew.
Now, are we careening down the same road with a nuclear-armed Pakistan? Are we allowing an army of anti-American zealots to live and fight another day for the sake of our convenient marriage with Pakistan’s current dictator? I wish I could quote Rumsfeld. I wish I could say “I doubt it.” I can’t.