By Mordecai Briemberg

The war against the Afghan people began weeks ago, before the bombing. And when the bombing stops, the war still may be going on.

For it is not only bombs and missiles that kill the women, the children, the elderly, and all those without guns. Famine kills them. Disease kills them. Winter snows and shattered shelters kill them. According to the United Nations, 3.8 million Afghans were completely relying on food aid to survive - before September 11. Within one day of the September 11 terrorist attack, George Bush declared "war" and targeted Afghanistan as his first enemy. Immediately food aid shipments to Afghanistan were cut off.

The U.N. estimates that 5.5 million Afghans will not survive unless they have received food shipments to carry them through the winter. That food must arrive before the end of the first week of November. After then the Afghan winter is so extreme that food transport is impossible, according to experienced aid workers.

Without more than 500,000 tons of food before November 7 - as well as tarpaulins, warm clothes, medicines, sanitation equipment, water supply - the U.S., U.K., Canadian ... war will result in genocide, even if all the bombs are as "smart" as they tell us.

Before September 11, there were over a million displaced people inside Afghanistan, not counting more than three million refugees living miserably in bordering countries. Immediately after Bush's declaration of war, uncounted new thousands of Afghan s began wandering across the land-mined landscape, desperately seeking some refuge, only to find the borders already sealed by neighbouring Pakistan and Iran, in accord with U.S. wishes. They wander without shelter, searching for food.

As a pure public relations manoeuvre the U.S. announced that with its bombs and missiles it also was dropping ration packets: a daily packet (with English/French instructions!) for less than 40,000 people when nearly 6 million are on the verge of starvation; a daily packet scattered over land-mined areas to desperate, displaced people.

The respected international relief agency, Doctors Without Borders, denounced this gimmick as deceitful and totally impractical. "What sense is there in shooting with one hand, and giving medicine with the other?"

With malnutrition, diseases multiply. This in a country with barely any medicines or hospitals. Reports in the London Daily Telegraph (Oct. 4) speak of people now dying from a contagious virus, similar to Ebola: CrimeanÐCongo Heamorrhagic Fever.

When we oppose war we need to oppose all the deadly weapons the U.S. and our government use: hunger and disease and, of course, bombs.

But who here is counting the deaths by starvation, disease and dislocation that this war already has caused? Where in Canada is there grieving? Where has the Canadian flag been lowered to symbolize our respect for Afghan humanity?

Were our tears for the innocent Americans murdered on September 11 more a sign of shock and fear for ourselves than of grief for human lives stolen?

Were those tears just the first float in a war parade than could massacre millions, not an expression of a sorrow that searches for solutions?

Those who have declared this "war against terrorism" tell us frankly that they plan to wage it "for years" attacking an expanding number of countries. Sometimes killing on camera; sometimes killing out of sight.

We have seen the war against the people of Iraq go on for more than ten years, killing 200,000 on prime time TV in 43 days of bombing and then killing over one million more since then by preventing the restoration of water sanitation equipment, hospital facilities and agricultural production.

War by sanctions has killed innocent Iraqis with malnutrition and disease: invisible to "us", but deadly, low-tech biological warfare against "them".

There is an alternative to war. We could flood Afghanistan with food and medical supplies. Life for the Afghan people would be the quickest and the only moral way to end Taliban dictatorship, a dictatorship - let us not forget - that was cultivated and sustained by the U.S. and its ally Pakistan in the first place.