Fighter jets to escort aid planes

US transport planes airdropping relief supplies into Afghanistan will fly with fighter escorts.

Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld revealed the airdrop plans in Cairo, Egypt, after President George Bush announced at the State Department the $320m (£217m) effort.

He called it a compassionate effort to prove to the ‘‘poor souls in Afghanistan’’ that the United States is not against them but only their rulers and terrorists they are sheltering.

In expanding on Rumsfeld’s announcement, Pentagon spokesman Rear Admiral Craig Quigley said a major danger for the relief flights is that they could draw anti-aircraft fire from Afghanistan’s ruling Taliban militia. Afghanistan also has frequent storms that kick up blinding clouds of dust or snow.

Airdrops would be ‘‘a particularly dangerous undertaking,’’ Quigley said. ‘‘You’d have to be smart in your planning. Generally speaking, we know that the Taliban have anti-air capabilities.’’

Among them are thought to be some US-supplied shoulder-fired Stinger missiles left over from the 10-year war against the Soviet Union that ended in 1989.

An alternative to airdrops would be for the military to help deliver food over land, Quigley said. The food convoys could move under armed escort, he said.

Having the US military deliver some of the aid would bolster Bush’s statements that America has no quarrel with Muslims or Afghans, just terrorists and governments that shelter them.

The military’s rule would be to deliver ‘‘humanitarian daily rations,’’ plastic pouches of food with added vitamins and minerals to aid refugees weakened by starvation and travel. The air drops will be focused on areas inside Afghanistan, not refugee camps in Pakistan and other bordering countries, Quigley said.

The food, wrapped so that one packet has enough for one person for one day, is rice-based and does not contain any animal products so as not to violate anyone’s religious or cultural practices. Muslims, for example, do not eat pork.

The yellow plastic packets have a picture of a smiling person eating from a pouch, a stencil of an American flag and the greeting in English, ‘‘This food is a gift from the United States of America.’’

The United States has a stockpile of about 2 million of the pouches, Quigley said.

The United States would try to prevent the Taliban from taking the food supplies, Quigley said.

Afghanistan is among the world’s poorest countries. The country has the world’s highest rate of women dying in childbirth, and a quarter of children die before reaching age 5, said Andrew Natsios, administrator of the US Agency for International Development.

‘‘It has the lowest per-person caloric intake in the world, and it has the highest number of amputees in the world per capita,’’ Natsios said.

‘‘So people are weakened. There’s been four years of drought, 22 years of civil war. They’re not in good shape.’’

Quigley said the military had learned from past airdrops to refugees in Iraq, Bosnia, Kosovo and Somalia. A 1994 airdrop of food to Rwandan refugees in what was then Zaire drew criticism because the crates landed nearly a mile away from their targets.