The Exodus From Afghanistan
The Bush administration, fortunately, has announced that it will join
with other nations to provide food for the Afghans. Helping the refugees
and devising ways to get food aid to those too poor to flee are not only
the right things to do, they signal the Afghan people and the Islamic
world that America's quarrel is with terrorists, not Muslims. Pakistan is already host to 2.5 million Afghan refugees, and the United
Nations High Commissioner for Refugees is planning for 1.5 million more.
While the Soviet Union occupied Afghanistan, the West essentially paid for
the refugees' support. Today the burden falls disproportionately on
Pakistan, a country that cannot feed its own citizens. Pakistan has tried to discourage the new exodus by closing the border
and making its refugee camps as miserable as it can. It has allowed only a
few thousand in, while tens of thousands more are massing on the Afghan
side. These displaced Afghans are largely out of reach of international
help. To save them, Pakistan must be persuaded to open the border and set up
viable, internationally run refugee camps. The West must take the
financial burden off Pakistan and help it care for a group of people whose
stay might well be a long one. Those in danger of actual starvation are the ones still inside
Afghanistan, too poor to flee. War and a four-year drought have so
depleted food stocks that Afghans are eating animal fodder, locusts and
even poisonous grasses. A hard winter approaches, and there are no seeds
left to plant when spring comes. Before Sept. 11, the U.N.'s World Food
Program, working through 150 different nongovernmental groups, was feeding
3.8 million people inside Afghanistan. On Sept. 12 all foreign aid workers left Afghanistan. Now there is only
enough food left for those 3.8 million refugees for a maximum of three
weeks, according to the World Food Program. The U.N. secretary general,
Kofi Annan, said this week that 7.5 million Afghans, in the country and
outside, would need food from the international community over the next
six months. He has appealed for $584 million more in aid. The United States has said it will join the appeal, but has not yet
specified a donation. Yesterday Mr. Bush announced a $25 million gift for
general aid to the refugees. Washington has been the largest donor of food
for the Afghan people, and has continued sending food aid after Sept. 11.
Delivering food by truck to the parts of Afghanistan under Taliban control
is, for the moment, impossible, and flying low enough to carry out an
airlift is risky. But the hope is that the next time rural Afghans hear a
plane approaching, they will find the United States and its allies
dropping bags of wheat rather than the bombs that the Taliban says are
coming. 
refugee crisis is brewing in Afghanistan that dwarfs the 1999 departure of
800,000 Albanians from Kosovo in the wake of Slobodan Milosevic's spasm of
ethnic violence there. Millions of Afghans are fleeing their homes, partly
in disgust with the Taliban but mostly in fear that America is getting
ready to bomb their country. They are joining millions who have already
fled, victims of 22 years of war and drought.
Page Top