wow:

On the surface it sounds very good, but the reality may be something else.

1. The Taliban will merely tell the recipients that the USA is paying them tribute in the form of food, etc., for the people of Aghansitan, which will further entrench them in power.

2. In the region Afghanistan has the lowest literacy rate (somewhere around 1/3 as opposed to 42 percent for Pakistan and almost 100 percent in the other countries thereabouts. Even Iran has 73 percent literacy. But that literacy is probably concentrated in the cities. Out in the country I would expect literacy to be so small that even widely distributed leaflets would only be evaluated in terms of their suitability for toilet tissue.

3. Laptop computers will only last as long as the batteries, and there are no 7-11s to buy more. Hell, there isn't electricity service in most of the country. And the Taliban will merely enforce a death penalty for possession of anything like that, saying it's an attempt to proselytize the people away from the Islamic faith and that the stuff is the work of the devil.

4. Though probably impossible to quantify, one has to accept the reality that the Afghanis may not want a world of TVs, department stores, swimming pools, autombiles. I like my lifestyle, and I wouldn't like theirs at all, but they may very well not seek to attain the material things that predominate elsewhere.

Notwithstanding, I think the risk is worth taking, particularly with food and medicine. I was horrified to see that the infant mortality rate is 16.7 percent. ONE in six dies during infancy. And one woman in 60 dies in childbirth. One child in four lives beyond the age of five in Afhanistan. That's abysmal. One website I looked at implied that there are, in the entire country, no reliable sources of safe water, including in the major cities, of which there are about six.

Certainly anything we can do to help their plight is humanitarian in nature, but I fear that the Taliban will turn our own good works against us.

TdE


TEd