Bush Promises $320 Million to Aid Afghans

Drawing a clear line between Afghanistan’s Taliban rulers and its people, President Bush on Thursday promised $320 million worth of food and medicine to a population ravaged by famine and under threat of U.S. military attack.

The aid--to be distributed by the United Nations and private aid organizations and, perhaps, airdropped by the U.S. military into remote Afghan areas--is a tangible demonstration of Bush’s frequently stated pledge that the war on terrorism will not evolve into a war on Muslims.

“There’s no question that we’re an angry people about what happened to our country,” Bush said. “But in our anger, we must never forget we’re a compassionate people as well. We will fight evil, but in order to overcome evil, the great goodness of America must come forth and shine forth, and one way to do so is to help the poor souls in Afghanistan.”

The aid package and Bush’s remarks are the latest examples of the administration’s attempt to temper anti-American attitudes in the Islamic world as the war on terrorism gears up.

James Zogby, president of the Arab-American Institute, praised Bush for making this effort. But he cautioned that the administration carries a heavy burden with Arab public opinion because of its staunch support for Israel, a problem that he said cannot be washed away by giving food to Afghans.

Although Bush has vowed to crush the Taliban unless it quickly reverses course and hands over suspected terrorist mastermind Osama bin Laden and his network, the president said the United States has no quarrel with the Afghan people, whom he described as victims of an oppressive government, drought and more than 22 years of civil war.

The aid package includes $295 million in new appropriations, plus a $25-million emergency allocation that Bush announced last week. The food will be sent to refugee camps, mostly in Pakistan, and to areas inside Afghanistan that aid agencies can reach.

Also, Pentagon officials said the military is planning to parachute emergency food supplies to thousands of displaced people in remote areas. “We’re just a small part of the effort to provide relief to the Afghan people,” Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman said.

Andrew Natsios, administrator of the U.S. Agency for International Development, said that even before the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks focused American anger on Bin Laden and--by extension--the Taliban regime, Afghanistan ranked at the top of the world’s “misery index.”

“A quarter of the children in Afghanistan will die before they’re 5 years old,” Natsios said. “It has the highest maternal mortality rate in the world. It has the lowest per-person caloric intake in the world. And it has the highest number of amputees in the world, per capita.”

He said U.S. humanitarian assistance to Afghanistan totaled $183 million during the fiscal year that ended Sunday.

Although some of the supplies are earmarked for refugee camps across the border from Afghanistan, Natsios said the U.S. program also aims to help people who remain in Afghanistan to discourage them from migrating.

The U.N. refugee agency said tens of thousands of refugees have flooded into Pakistan since the terrorist attacks.

Lionel Rosenblatt, president emeritus of Refugees International, a Washington-based advocacy group, termed Bush’s initiative “certainly adequate, in terms of the dollar amount.”

But Rosenblatt questioned the Pentagon’s plan for airdrops. “They do not always get to the target population,” he said. “We think it’s dramatic but it should be the delivery method of last resort.”

In Brussels, meanwhile, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization granted the United States open access to the airfields and seaports of member nations and agreed to deploy ships and early-warning radar planes in the war against terrorism. Representatives of the alliance’s 19 member nations also promised to replenish NATO’s manpower if U.S. troops are pulled from Europe for duty against terrorist targets.

Although the actions were the logical consequence of NATO’s earlier decision to declare the terrorist attacks on the United States to be an assault on every member of the alliance, State Department spokesman Richard Boucher called the steps “truly historic.”

“We’re very gratified that our NATO allies rallied quickly and unanimously . . . in agreeing to these political and military measures in our fight against global terrorism,” Boucher said.

Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, on a brief tour of the Middle East and Central Asia, met Oman’s ruler, Sultan Kaboos ibn Said, and Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak on Thursday. He visits Uzbekistan today and stops in Turkey before heading home. All five countries on his schedule, which began with Saudi Arabia, have mostly Muslim populations.

The trip, which Rumsfeld said is designed for “consultations,” has produced few announced results so far. Mubarak said Thursday that Egypt would not commit its troops to fight a Muslim country.

Rumsfeld said he was not worried by Mubarak’s statement, adding that he appreciated the delicate situation that regional leaders face.

“We recognize that each country has a distinctive situation and a different perspective,” Rumsfeld said. “We want to cooperate with countries in ways that they want to cooperate with us.”

Hours before Rumsfeld arrived in Cairo, top officials of the Cairo-based Arab League told reporters that the year-old Palestinian uprising against Israel is one of the “major components” behind the anger in the Arab world at U.S. policy.

“It’s important that in any attempt to deal with the instability in the region, the violence in the region, the long-standing grievances, the sense of injustice, that you address the Palestinian question and resolve it in a just and equitable way,” said Hanan Ashrawi, the league’s director of information.

On Capitol Hill, legislation to suspend economic and military sanctions against Pakistan moved forward with unanimous approval from the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. The sanctions were imposed after Pakistan tested a nuclear weapon in 1998 and were tightened after a military coup in 1999 toppled the country’s democratically elected government.

“Pakistan has chosen to be on the side against terrorism,” said Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr. (D-Del.), committee chairman. “We need to assist that important front-line state.”

But senators warned that Pakistan must move ahead with plans to hold democratic elections soon and must act to prevent the spread of weapons of mass destruction. “We did not write these sanctions out of law,” Biden said, stressing that they were only suspended.

Sen. Sam Brownback (R-Kan.), a member of the Foreign Relations panel, said Congress should consider authorizing Bush to lift a prohibition on direct assistance to the government of Azerbaijan, a former Soviet republic in the Caucasus, to clear the way for U.S. troops to use facilities there.

Leaders of the Armenian American community immediately vowed to oppose Brownback’s plan. Armenia and Azerbaijan are engaged in a long-running territorial dispute.

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Kempster reported from Washington, Miller from Cairo. Times staff writers Nick Anderson and Esther Schrader in Washington contributed to this report.