US fighting to win over empty Afghan stomachs

The American aid raining down on Afghanistan is sealed in 1kg containers wrapped in bright-yellow, double-layered plastic designed to flutter to the ground and labelled a food gift from the people of the United States.

As the air strikes continue, America is increasing its war to win the hearts of the Afghans by dropping containers of food and radios from two big-bellied C-17 transport planes flown from Germany's Ramstein air base.

Critics complain that the high-altitude food drops are wasteful, ending up scattered over wide areas and often not reaching the people they are intended for. They are also being dropped in a country laced with 10 million landmines, a legacy of a Soviet policy of random mine drops in the 1980s.

Apart from the 37,000 small packets, a drop in the ocean of Afghanistan's daily need, the hungry millions are for the time being on their own. Last week, the United Nations World Food Programme (WFP) announced that deliveries of wheat flour, suspended after President George W. Bush's threat to attack the country, had resumed. The aim was to truck hundreds of tonnes of flour into the country so it would be ready for distribution once winter had made roads impassable in the middle of next month.

But after bombing began the WFP again temporarily suspended food deliveries.

The airborne aid drops are "culturally neutral", ready-to-eat food packs - a key part of a carefully crafted campaign to try to avoid an anti-Western backlash among Muslims worldwide.

The meals were scattered over zones for displaced people in southern and eastern Afghanistan, targeted to draw people away from Taleban-controlled areas and help "develop relationships with groups in Afghanistan that oppose the Taleban regime and the foreign terrorists they support", said Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.

A typical menu - which can be eaten hot or cold - includes bean salad, barley stew, peanut butter, raisins, flat bread, strawberry jam, shortbread cookies and a fruit pastry.

A plastic spoon and a non-alcohol-based moist towelette are the only non-food components in the meal bag.

Tailored to suit the widest possible religious and dietary restrictions, the meals included no animal products or animal by-products "except minimal amounts of dairy products," a Pentagon fact sheet said.

Each package displays the stars and stripes of the American flag and provides about 2200 calories.

- REUTERS,

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