Massive food aid as a tool of diplomacy

If the thousands of tons of food aid in the pipeline can be successfully delivered, most of the millions of Afghans facing famine just weeks ago should have the food they need to get through the winter.

No one claims the crisis is over yet. Poor security conditions could still make the tons of food impossible to deliver safely.

Yet the US-led war that is now in its second month of hitting Taliban and Al Qaeda forces has also quickly moved Afghanistan up on the world's to-do list. Now with food - a majority of which is from the United States - pouring in, aid workers are increasingly confident that an announced humanitarian disaster can be averted.

Despite this heartening turn for the Afghan people, however, what looks less clear is how successful the US has been at translating a massive humanitarian effort into a diplomatic win - particularly among the broader Muslim population it wants to reach.

Since the beginning of the bombing campaign, the US has stressed that this is not America against Islam. The food aid, which has been falling from US transport planes in shoe-box-sized packets, was supposed to prove that. But just as the lack of broad and lasting recognition of US efforts on behalf of Muslims in Bosnia and elsewhere demonstrates, turning aid into long-term goodwill is no easy task.

"The whole [relief] program is a message - that we care about the Afghan people, that they are not our enemy," says Andrew Natsios, administrator of the US Agency for International Development (USAID) here. "Does that mean we are loved in every country? No, but people are not that angry."

Mr. Natsios, who has appeared twice on the pan-Arab news channel Al Jazeera since the intense US aid effort began, notes that anti-US demonstrations in Muslim countries have dropped off to nearly nothing.

The US acknowledges that the food drops, which began with such fanfare, were never a serious answer to Afghanistan's pending famine: They constitute only a quarter of 1 percent of estimated needs. But they were meant to give high profile to America's humanitarian take on the war.

Yet many independent aid organizations oppose the food drops by the US military because they risk confusing the war with humanitarian assistance - thus making vital on-the-ground assistance work more dangerous.

"From the military's point of view, I suppose this is fairly effective, because it helps make the argument, 'We're the good guys,' " says Frances Stevenson, a humanitarian assistance analyst at the Overseas Development Institute in London. "But from the humanitarian point of view, it's dangerous, because it damages the neutrality of assistance and can make workers look like one of the parties of the war."

But since the food drops began in October, the war has evolved to allow more effective and much more massive food deliveries by truck. Over the past month, the United Nations' World Food Program (WFP) hit its goal of delivering about 52,000 tons of food inside Afghanistan.

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