ISLAMABAD – It was the sugar on the pill of the air strikes, but according to aid workers in the Pakistan city of Islamabad the decision by the United States to drop 37,000 food packets on Afghanistan as well as bombs and missiles was not merely irrelevant: it could be lethal.
The food aid is being dropped from two C-17 cargo planes flown from Germany flown at high altitudes to avoid missiles.
But high altitude food drops end up being scattered over wide areas and often do not reach the people they were intended for.
"Random food drops are the worst possible way of delivering food aid," the spokesman of a major international charity active in Afghanistan told The Independent on condition of anonymity.
"They cause more problems than they solve. We only use them as a last resort. They create flows of people fleeing the fighting migrating to the sites where the drops have been made. And most important, they are happening in Afghanistan, which is the world's biggest minefield."
Attempting to retrieve dropped food packets, hungry and desperate Afghans could get themselves blown up.
According to OMAR, the organisation working to rid Afghanistan of 10 million of mines left from the Soviet invasion there are still 750 square kilometres of Afghanistan seeded with unmapped mines, a legacy of the Soviet policy in the 1980s of random mine drops.
"There are still 10 to 15 mine incidents every day," the spokesman went on.
"The food packets were mainly dropped in the central Highlands and along the Pakistan border, both areas with suspected mines. We have to ask if the Americans are aware of the situation on the ground."
Aside from the 37,000 small packets - a drop in the daily ocean of Afghanistan's need - for the time being the hungry millions of Afghanistan are on their own."
Last week the United Nations World Food Programme (WFP) announced with a flourish that deliveries of wheat flour to Afghanistan, suspended following President Bush's threat to attack the country, had been resumed.
The aim: to truck hundreds and hundreds of consignments of flour into the country in a sort of Dunkirk rescue operation so that 150,000 tons would be in warehouses across the country ready for distribution to the starving once winter makes roads impassable in mid-November.
Last night, however, Khaled Mansour spokesman of WFP, told reporters the World Food Programme had temporarily suspended food deliveries into Afghanistan.
"An aid food truck convoy on the way to Kabul was recalled by the local transporter company after they had reached Jalalabad," a town a short distance inside the country from Pakistan.
The WFP's convoys are trucked in by commercial carrieers. While 400 tons has safely arrived in the "hunger belt", the hill country of northern Afghanistan, the fate of a convoy carrying 425 tons to Herat in the north-west was unknown.
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US food drops put Afghan refugees at risk from mines
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