(3 of 3)
Since the U.S. runs second only to Israel as an object of radical Islamic hatred — and since much of the Arab press simply doesn't report pro-American news — Bush knew that a few bighearted photo ops weren't going to have a lasting effect. And the protests in Pakistan and Afghanistan did not abate. Neither did the flood of starving refugees coming over the border from Afghanistan. The situation in Pakistan was already unstable: President Pervez Musharraf was taking huge risks for supporting the U.S. against the Taliban, and as a result had limited American access to Pakistani military bases. But the refugees were making a tense situation even worse. Though the U.S. had lifted economic sanctions against Pakistan and promised $50 million in U.S. aid, the unrest continued. Last week large crowds moved through the streets of Peshawar and Rawalpindi, burning effigies of Bush. "We grossly underestimate the perils to Pakistan that this represents," says Central Asian scholar S. Frederick Starr. "If you attack, you activate the Afghan fifth column in Pakistan, you activate the Pakistani radical and terrorist organizations, you put the educated, globalist modernists in Pakistan extremely on the defensive, and you make almost inevitable a shift further in the direction of the conservative Islamic republic."
Then there was the plain fact that many Afghans are dying of starvation. On average in some villages, 6 out of every 10,000 people are dying each day. At that rate, the villages could lose 30% of their population within a year.
And so two weeks ago, a senior Administration official told TIME, the President asked National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice to tackle the hunger problem. After consulting with Jordan, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and other allies in the region, the Bush Administration decided that the most effective way to hold the coalition together would be a campaign to convince skeptical Muslims of America's compassion. "It's one thing to talk about it; it's another thing to do something about it," says a senior White House official.
By Tuesday of last week the Administration realized it could get the biggest p.r. lift by combining the U.S.'s existing $170 million-a-year Afghanistan aid program with a new $320 million package, and rolling it out all at once. "Wednesday we were still making sure we could move the money around and get something big," says an Administration official. "The public impact had to be large, so we went from numbers in the area of $100 million to $125 million, to — bam! — $320 million. Let's do it right." That figure is largely for effect — the U.S. is distributing only $25 million now, and holding the rest until after the start of the bombing.
It was enough money to pose a political problem for Bush. Conservatives are normally cool to foreign aid, especially humanitarian aid in war zones; they fear it will be siphoned off by enemies. To the rescue came Senator Joe Biden of Delaware, the Democratic chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Biden knew the G.O.P. would recoil at a large aid package, so he went to Bush with a plan. Early last week, Biden came out for an even larger package, one that purposely dwarfed the still unannounced White House proposal. That way, when Bush's plan leaked, it would look moderate by comparison.
It fell to Agency for International Development administrator Andrew Natsios to coordinate the operation. With help from the U.N., food and medicine could go into Afghanistan by truck from the south or donkeys from the north, but deep inside Taliban-controlled Afghanistan, where people were starving, only U.S. airdrops would work. The Pentagon immediately raised flags: "We have to make sure the food drops help starving people and don't fall into the Taliban's hands," a senior Pentagon officer said Saturday. "And we can't put our troops delivering the food at too great a risk." Pentagon experts charted routes for the planes to avoid Afghan antiaircraft batteries and planned to destroy those they couldn't avoid. Said an official as the plan was coming together: "It is not a simple operation."
Airlift experts expect it may take weeks to drop the food and medicine in all the right places in Afghanistan, and Washington will want as many Pakistanis and Muslims as possible to hear about the airlift over the coming days and weeks. The U.S. will also fight over the airwaves. The Voice of America beams into Afghanistan, offering programming in Pashtu, Dari and other tongues. At the State Department, the new Under Secretary for Public Diplomacy, Charlotte Beers, a legendary figure in New York advertising, will use her expertise in "branding" to help sell the American effort.
The joint humanitarian and p.r. campaign is likely to be carried out, U.S. officials say, at the same time that air strikes on Taliban positions begin — if not in the same hour, then at least within the same news cycle. Several well-placed officials told TIME that U.S. special forces are ready to move on al-Qaeda at any time; all they need is a solid sighting of bin Laden. "They're waiting for the right moment inside Afghanistan," said a senior U.S. official. "There is no other constraint."
Bush's gambit — filling the skies with bullets and bread — is also a gamble, Pentagon officials concede. The humanitarian mission will to some degree complicate war planning. What the brass calls "deconfliction" — making sure warplanes and relief planes don't confuse one another — is now a major focus of Pentagon strategy. "Trying to fight and trying to feed at the same time is something new for us," says an Air Force general. "We're not sure precisely how it's going to work out."
On the ground in Afghanistan there is some latent, if wary, gratitude for American aid over the years, but no one expects to build a foundation for the Taliban's downfall on a couple of million rice cakes. Abroad, the U.S. may have better luck. At the very least, pictures of U.S. humanitarian airdrops will help steady coalition partners and turn Bush's compassionate words into deeds. The drops won't convince the die-hard militants, but among the pious middle classes across the Islamic world, they may strike a chord. A war in which American G.I.s try to kill one group of Afghans while feeding another group will create some troubling juxtapositions. But there is a critical difference between the two operations. Even if winds over the Afghan mountains blow the rations out of reach of starving Afghans, the image of the U.S. trying to help will be broadcast around the world. But in the shooting war, the Pentagon won't be able to craft images quite so neatly. Only results — the capture or killing of bin Laden and his network — will count.
Reported by Massimo Calabresi, James Carney, Matthew Cooper and Mark Thompson/Washington