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U.N. Fears Afghan Food Shortages
September 18, 2001
MSNBC Staff & Wire Reports

Official says more assistance needed before winter season

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan
The United Nations, which evacuated international staff from Afghanistan last week, said on Tuesday it fears the mounting crisis triggered by last week’s terrorist attack on the United States will spark widespread food shortages and large population movements.

Afghan refugee children lie on a cart while begging on a road near the Pakistani city of Peshawar on Tuesday. Pakistan officials fear a flood of new refugees in the coming days.

THE AGENCIES, which withdrew their own foreign staff because potential U.S. attacks on Afghanistan could trigger reprisals, expressed concern both for those who would remain in the country and for those who would try to flee over the borders.

“The situation is developing very rapidly right now. We are therefore prioritizing assistance for the internally displaced people,” said Stephanie Bunker, spokeswoman for UN Office for Coordination of Humanitarian Activities for Afghanistan.

“We have to scale up assistance before winters that start in November,” she told Reuters.

UN international staff and almost all expatriate staff of non-governmental organizations left Afghanistan after Washington identified Saudi-born militant Osama bin Laden, who is sheltered by Afghanistan’s ruling Taliban, as the prime suspect for last week’s attacks in New York and Washington.

A spokesman for the United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR), Yusuf Hassan, told MSNBC.com that the organization’s staff reported that nearly half the population of Kandahar — a city of roughly 200,000 — had left town by Monday.

Kandahar, in southern Afghanistan, is the Taliban’s spiritual capital and a likely target of U.S. retaliation on the Islamic government for harboring Bin Laden.
(MSNBC Source)

It’s amazing that not 4 days since the media went on the air spouting about how the USA should have expected such an attack as we witnessed last Tuesday (and those of us who can think did realize the terrible possibilities), the media is back again, apparently amazed that there will be hardship in a nation that is at war on its home soil.

I’ve got a great big scoop for MSNBC and their edited news flashes. People are also going to die, and the death toll will include the elderly, men, women, and children, none of whom the Taliban -- who happens to control 95% of Afghanistan, and 0% of bin Laden (their current leader) -- gives a crap about.

Welcome to the foothills of war,
Dan