Is it Tıme or is it Ted Rall?

[Hakki Alacakaptan]

Seems to me like a lot of US journalists & columnists are beginning to
question this war despite the polls. The LA Times has been publishing
critical opinion & reports practically since the beginning of the war. This
Time report stops short of pointing a finger to the US, but other than that
it could have been written by Fisk or Ted Rall. Also check out the MSNBC
piece further down.

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.