Stardate 20011005.0533 (On Screen): I fully support the idea of the US making air drops of food and supplies into Afghanistan to help out refugees, but it is a policy fraught with danger. One danger is that the planes doing the air drops might be shot down, unless we were to neutralize Afghani air defenses at the same time. Another danger is that the food we drop might be taken by armed Taliban troops, doing the refugees no good. The third danger is that each air drop might start a riot on the ground as people rush to the packages and struggle to get some. If the air drops are plentiful and if numerous small packages (rather than a few really large ones) are dropped on a regular basis, that would diminish with time, but it's likely that there would actually be self-inflicted civilian casualties on the ground after the first few. Short of actually putting people on the ground to supervise distribution, which is impractical, I don't see any way to avoid that. That said, the propaganda value of such air drops would be enormous: with the Taliban every day releasing ever more shrill condemnations of the US and characterizing us as ever more demonic, the wordless act of dropping food (with a "USA" logo on it in red-white-blue) would speak far louder than all the press releases and religious exhortations Mullah Omar could issue in a century, not only to the people of Afghanistan, but to all the people of all the Islamic nations. It would say, "We're not fighting Islam, we're fighting a corrupt, brutal, incompetent regime and the terrorists it harbors." It would completely deflate the attempts of the Taliban to cast the struggle in religious terms. (And, sad to say, if Taliban troops were to seize the food then that would even further enhance the propaganda value.)
But there is one more danger: the kinds of planes which airdrop food must be different than those which might ultimately drop bombs. If Afghani refugees start to associate airdrops of food with overflights by American planes, they may flock towards the site of a bombing later and suffer far more casualties than they otherwise would. That is not too much of a danger for the most part; the food will most likely be dropped from C-5A's, and bombs will be dropped by other kinds of aircraft which look much different. On the other hand, if the US ever decides to start using fuel-air bombs, it may present a problem. Those are too large to be carried by more traditional bombers; in the Gulf War they were dropped out of the back of C-5A's. It may not be a problem: food drops will be relatively low altitude (which is why there's a danger from anti-aircraft artillery) and will use parachutes, whereas a fuel-air bomb is dropped from quite a high altitude and does not use a parachute. (discuss)
