Food for Afghanistan - E-mails Needed Now!

Dear Friends,

You may be aware that millions of Afghan civilians may soon die of
starvation unless the current bombing campaign stops so that food aid can be
trucked in before winter, which will begin in just a few weeks in
Afghanistan. (If you have not heard about this imminent crisis, please see
the article copied below, "Where Are You? Millions Face Death This Winter
in Afghanistan and We Can Prevent it").
Fortunately, the Friends Committee on National Legislation has
already set up a lobbying website to stop the bombing. It will only take a
few minutes. Just go to:
http://capwiz.com/fconl/issues/alert/?alertid=65204&type=PR&azip
and press the "Take Action Now" / "Go! " button to go directly to the form
letter e-mail to the President. (Because they are much quicker, e-mails are
currently preferred over letters.)
The Friends Committee is hoping that tens of thousands of e-mails
can be sent each day to stop the bombing. If you are on an e-mail list or a
listserve, or know of an organization or an individual who can host this
message on their website, please forward this message!
Time is short, but if enough of us take action, we can convince our
government to stop the bombing. Please don't pass on this one -- we must
not allow millions of innocent civilians to die in Afghanistan.


Where Are You?
Millions Face Death This Winter in Afghanistan and We Can Prevent it

(Published on November 5 on the Working For Change/Working Assets website:
http://www.workingforchange.com/article.cfm?ItemID=12276
and on Tuesday, November 6, on the Common Dreams website:
http://www.commondreams.org/views01/1106-10.htm )


Where Are You?
Millions Face Death This Winter in Afghanistan and We Can Prevent it

by Geov Parrish

Does anybody understand what the United States is on the verge of doing?

Experienced, respected food aid organizations warn that even before the
bombing of Afghanistan began on October 7, some 7,500,000 Afghans were --
through a gut-wrenching combination of poverty, drought, war, dislocation,
and repression -- at risk of starving to death this winter. When the bombing
began, almost all delivery of food from the outside world stopped. Now,
roads and bridges are destroyed, millions more people are dislocated, and
the snow is steadily approaching from higher elevations and from the north.

For weeks, aid organizations, along with voices from throughout the region,
have been begging the United States to call off its bombing campaign, at
least for long enough so that aid agencies can conduct the massive transfer
of food into and throughout Afghanistan that is necessary to prevent death
on a scale the world has not seen in a long, long time.

Seven and a half million people at risk of dying in a matter of months.
That's three times the number of people Pol Pot took years to kill.
Thirty-five times the number that died in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, combined.
If 5,000 died on September 11, we're talking the equivalent number of deaths
to ten World Trade Centers, every day, for 150 days. Slow, painful deaths.
Entirely avoidable deaths. Deaths whose sole cause is not the United States,
but most of which can still be prevented -- except that the United States is
refusing to allow them to be prevented.

It repulses me to say this, but I suspect a lot of Americans don't care.
They'd rather see the United States "get" Osama bin Laden (though there's no
actual evidence that we're any closer to that today than we were two months
ago, and probably the task is harder as he becomes more popular and
protected).

An apocalypse of this scale is simply unimaginable to most of us: no food,
in a country with no roads left, no vehicles, displaced people, lost
relatives, where the winters are too cold to walk or ride a donkey even to
an adjoining village where there might be food. It's a long way from driving
to the nearest Safeway or drive-thru lane when you're hungry. But a lot of
people in this country do not care that a staggering number of innocent peop
le are on the verge of being condemned to death, or that most of the world
will blame the United States, correctly.

We should care. If the object of this war was to thwart terrorism -- to
bring existing terrorists to justice, and to isolate them politically and
culturally so that others won't throw in their lot -- in less than a month,
the United States already has perpetrated one of the most abject failures in
military history.

It still does not know where any of Al-Qaeda's leadership even is. It is on
the verge of succeeding in its goal of creating a unified Afghanistan
government -- unfortunately, Afghans are uniting behind the Taliban, as
warlord after warlord sets aside long-standing differences to stand shoulder
to shoulder to fight the American invaders. Tens of thousands more young
Muslim men are lining up to cross the borders into Afghanistan to join them.
The ones that survive the experience will carry a lifetime of hate: living,
breathing proof that within a month, America bombed a country but lost its
war in spectacular fashion.

That's today. What will happen if millions of Afghans die this winter? How
much future terrorism will the dunderheads of the Bush Administration have
inspired then? If several million Islamic sisters and brothers starve to
death, innocent civilians trapped between winter and the rage of America,
how many of Islam's 1.2 billion adherents -- or the five billion other
people on earth -- are going to take George Bush's proclamations about
eradicating "terrorists" and "evildoers" to heart, and label him, and us, as
the prime examples?

In less than two months, the United States government has gone from the
moral high ground of being victimized by one of the most heinous crimes in
world history, to being within a week or two of quite visibly committing a
crime so much larger as to obliterate the world's memory of September 11.

Remarkably, almost nobody in the United States seems to have either noticed,
understood, or cared. While even progressives wring their hands over the
ambiguity of a war fought under the auspices of America's legitimate right
to defend itself, a situation is unfolding in which there is absolutely no
moral ambiguity at all, and for which many people will want to hold each of
us as accountable as the world held post-war Germans. Where were you? What
did you say? How could you allow this to happen? Or, a more likely reaction
in the Islamic world: Why should millions of you not die as well? America
will have set out to isolate one man, and instead killed millions and
isolated itself. And much of the world will not rest until we are brought to
our knees.

Seven and a half million people. The snowline is creeping down the
mountainsides. The food is almost gone. The infrastructure is in shambles.
There will be no "independent verification" of the body count. There wasn't
in the Holocaust or Rwanda or Cambodia, either. The judgment of the world
did not need one. The clock is ticking. Where were you?


Geov Parrish is a Seattle-based columnist and reporter for Seattle Weekly,
In These Times and Eat the State! He writes the weekdaily Straight Shot for
WorkingForChange.

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Additional Actions Which You Can Take:

1. Also contact your Congressmember(s):
http://www.fcnl.org/act_lam_current/lam1025_01.htm

2. Telephone and/or fax the President: The White House Comment Desk is
(202) 456-1111 and the fax number is (202) 456-2461.

3. Send a similar e-mail using the Working for Change website:
http://www.workingforchange.com/activism/action.cfm?ItemId=12227

4. Write a letter to the editor to your local paper.

5. Turn this e-mail into a flyer and distribute it to friends,
acquaintances, and the public.

6. Telephone others after you e-mail this message to them, to encourage
them to help out.