Help of the helpless?

No matter how much good work they do for people suffering from hunger, thirst, illness or cold, aid organizations behave not infrequently like a bunch of fire brigade volunteers. They jealously guard their precinct. It is almost as if they were saying: "That's my fire!"

The United States is now being criticized for dropping aid shipments over Afghanistan to show people there that the war is aimed at the ruling Taliban and at Osama bin Laden and not at the hard-pressed Afghan people.

Aid organizations angrily proclaim that this is mere propaganda. Aid must be provided without strings, and what is more, the drops are not reaching their targets precisely.

Aid organizations are accordingly preparing major missions of their own to Afghanistan, where they plan to do it all better. They would be well advised to use this preparatory stage to jettison a little of their self-righteousness and get back to the facts.

There is nothing reprehensible about a belligerent state trying to achieve its aims in a conflict partly by means of humanitarian aid. It is not illegitimate to supply aid by air drops, given that the Taliban have closed the borders and are keeping almost external aid out -- as aid organizations have for years experienced at first hand.

It is worth mentioning in this connection that Afghanistan's humanitarian disaster began well before the bombing. Last winter alone, thousands of Afghans died of hunger and cold.

They did so after 22 years of war and three years of drought, but in particular because the Taliban regime had already taken an entire nation hostage to its religious mania.

-- Sueddeutsche Zeitung, Germany