>>Seven and a half million people at risk of dying in a matter of
months.
>>
>>[clip]
Let's be fair both to folks concerned about terror and the folks worried about the deaths of people from starvation in Afghanistan. We don't know how many people will die in either case, although we do have educated guesses from people in the UN, the Red Cross and so on which do suggest that the figure is very high in Afghanistan. We can have a reasonable degee of confidence that if we continue to bomb and close the borders, this will be a lot worse. We don't know what the likelihood of new terror is. Whatever it, it is not a figure which we can have a very great degree of confidence in. It is certainly not like the car crash story. The death rate from terrorism looks much more like the stats on bungie jumping might have if after 100 jumps no one had died....yet. The starvation in Afghanistan, on the other hand, is like deliberately cutting the elastic rope thinner.
Also, whatever the portion of the death toll in Afghanistan that can be attributed to the strikes, blocade , border sealing and the previous sanctions (don't forget those) and what can be attributed to acts of god, bad management and drought by rational, balancist Americans, try running that line over in Saudi Arabia or Egypt. That's something to think about if we don't want future bin Ladens pointing to a tragedy potentially seven times more magnificent than that PR bonanza for fundamentalism that is the Iraqi sanctions regime.
Thiago Oppermann