'If it were not for the missiles sent into Kandahar and Kunduz, the children wouldn't have had to take to the roads'
by Natasha Walter

There was a time when everyone agreed that it was harrowing just to watch the news. When everyone talked about how they cried when they saw the pictures, how they were having nightmares, how they couldn't stand to think about the grief of the people they saw on television.

It was, indeed, a traumatic time, and the grief then was genuine. But now it's not so fashionable to say how disturbing you find the news, even if you have rarely seen anything so tragic as, for instance, that man on television last night holding two starving babies for whom their mother had no milk, or the little girl walking barefoot in the dust of a refugee camp that holds tens of thousands of desperate people. Why aren't we talking about how we cry when we see these people? Why don't we say that they haunt our dreams?

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by William Pfaff

It is possible to be optimistic, if cautiously so, about the damaging consequences that the Talibans' humiliating defeat will have for the reputation and influence of the Islamic fundamentalist movement elsewhere in the Muslim world. Osama bin Laden's followers succeeded in bringing down the World Trade towers in New York and attacking the Pentagon, but in Afghanistan, where it counts, the rout of the Taliban was greeted with popular rejoicing. Not even the Talibans' Pashtun constituency would fight for bin Laden.

Looking to the future, the important question is what this victory will do to the United States, which, unlike Islamic fundamentalists of any stripe, has global power and conceives itself as possessing a global destiny.

It is an important question because even before Sept. 11 an important American debate was under way between those who believe that the United States, at the peak of its power, should impose what they expect to become a Pax Americana, and other Americans who believe that such an undertaking would prove a rash and dangerous overreaching.

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The Afghan War Has Increased Hunger and Banditry But Will Not Reduce the Terror Threat
by Seumas Milne

Ten days after victory was declared in the Afghan war, real life continues to make a mockery of such triumphalism in the cruelest way. As American B-52 bombers pound Taliban diehards around Kandahar and Kunduz, tens of thousands of refugees are streaming towards the Pakistani border and chaotic insecurity across the country is hampering attempts to tackle a fast-deteriorating humanitarian crisis.

Aid agencies confirm that six weeks of US bombing - which even the British government concedes has killed hundreds of civilians - has sharply exacerbated what was already a dire situation and Oxfam warned yesterday they were "operating on a precipice". More than 100,000 people are now living in tents in the Kandahar area alone and the charity has been asked by Pakistan to gear up camps across the border to receive similar numbers in the next few days. After an aid convoy was hijacked by local warlords on the Kabul-Bamiyan road on Tuesday, Oxfam and and other agencies argue that only a UN protection force can now prevent widespread starvation outside the main towns and distribution centers.

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by Holly Yasui

The days are getting shorter. As I hurry home at dusk, chilled by the wind blowing gritty dust across the arroyos, I chide myself. I grew up in Colorado, where water left by a window freezes overnight in winter, and I went to school in Wisconsin, where we routinely brought the car battery indoors when temperatures dropped 30ş below zero.

I get cold here in Mexico because my house isn't centrally heated and I don't have real winter clothes. But I do have a home, extra blankets, a stove on which to prepare hot food. Thousands of Afghan refugees don't. Millions in Afghanistan - many too weak or sick to flee - face nights ten times colder than ours, without food or medicine, while their houses tremble with the thunder of bombs: carpet-bombing from B52s that cut swaths of hell on earth, cluster bombs that leave explosives strewn across the desolate countryside, “daisy-cutters,” megatons of ordnance gouging out huge craters in which nothing can survive or regenerate for decades.

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Nobel Prize winner Joseph Stiglitz and internationally acclaimed economist Paul Krugman decry undemocratic, unsound, and unethical corporate agenda
by James L. Phelan

It seems critics of corporate-led globalization have some new allies.

Recent Nobel Prize winner Joseph Stiglitz, along with well-known economist Paul Krugman, have of late made a flurry of public statements critical of the policies and processes of the World Trade Organization (WTO), the World Bank / IMF, and the proposed Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) — while leaving plenty of harsh words for the blatantly pro-corporate actions of the Bush Administration. Both economists point to the disruptive and distorting influence of large corporate entities through their dominance over both domestic and international institutions.

Stiglitz and Krugman have begun to voice their indignation more frequently in the press, raising many of the same concerns that social justice and environmental advocates have long made about the disproportionate influence of big business and the hypocrisy of "free market" dogma.

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