Military strikes include food drops to Afghan people

WASHINGTON -- The U.S. military strikes Sunday in Afghanistan included airdrops of food, medicine and other humanitarian supplies. \nDefense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said plans called for two C-17 cargo planes to drop 37,500 food packets to starving Afghans on the first day of airstrikes. The humanitarian aid is meant to underscore the Bush administration's message that the strikes are meant to harm terrorists, not ordinary Afghans. \n"To say that these attacks are in any way against Afghanistan or the Afghan people is flat wrong," Rumsfeld said. \nThe military also dropped leaflets and made radio broadcasts into Afghanistan to explain the U.S. action, he said. \nThe airdrops are delivering "humanitarian daily rations," plastic pouches of food enriched with vitamins and minerals to boost refugees weakened by hunger and travel. The drops will be focused on areas inside Afghanistan, not refugee camps in Pakistan and other border countries, Pentagon officials have said. \nThe food, wrapped so that one packet has enough for one person for one day, does not contain any animal products so as not to violate any religious or cultural practices. Muslims, for example, do not eat pork. \nThe yellow plastic packets are about the size and weight of a hardcover book. They have a picture of a smiling person eating from a pouch, a stencil of an American flag, a notation that they were made by Rightaway Foods of McAllen, Texas, and this greeting in English: "This food is a gift from the United States of America." \nInside are several smaller packets with food such as peanut butter, strawberry jam, crackers, a fruit pastry, and entrees such as beans with tomato sauce and bean and potato vinaigrette. \nThe packets provide at least 2,200 calories per day. The United States has a stockpile of about 2 million of them. \nThe packets are also designed to flutter to the ground rather than drop straight down to minimize the possibility that they could hit and injure someone. \nAfghanistan is among the world's poorest countries and has the lowest per-person food intake in the world, said Andrew Natsios, administrator of the U.S. Agency for International Development.\nAfghanistan also has the world's highest rate of women who die in childbirth, and one-fourth of Afghan children die before reaching age 5, Natsios said.