November 23, 2001	Friday	Ramazan 7, 1422

WASHINGTON: Why is the US so happy that Afghans can now fly kites, shave their beards and wear short skirts when so few Americans seemed to care about their plight before Sept 11? What about the millions of Afghans who are in danger of starvation this winter? Are they, too, flying kites amid the land mines and unexploded cluster bombs?

Why does Prime Minister Tony Blair get a warm embrace for helping the US wage war, but when Gordon Brown, Britain’s chancellor of the exchequer, asks the US to do more to help the world’s poor, he is given a cold shoulder?

Why are atrocities committed by the Northern Alliance more acceptable than those committed by the Taliban? The answers would not have anything to do with America’s selfish, short-sighted national interest, would it? Why is it so difficult to invest in something that could help prevent war and so easy to spend that much and more to wage war?

US aid contributions to the World Bank total about 0.1 per cent of the nation’s gross domestic product, the lowest among the G7 major industrial countries. And yet, America lectures the world about combating terrorism - you are either with us or against us, says President Bush - even though others have been fighting harder and longer, frequently without US support.

At the World Bank meeting in Ottawa, UK’s Brown proposed a $50 billion increase in aid provided annually to developing countries to reach a UN goal of halving global poverty by 2015.

Half of the world’s population lives on less than $2 a day, while the richest 20 per cent consumes more than 80 percent of the world’s resources, according to United Nations Development Programme statistics. America professes to care about this inequity. But when it comes to putting its money where our mouth is, it says, “Go fly a kite.”

If the US has no permanent values - if it shows concern for others only when there is something in it for it, if friends and freedoms are made and discarded as matters of convenience - how can the US expect to win a so-called war of “good vs. evil”? Here is a fact: Beards can grow back. —Dawn/LAT-WP News Service (c) The Washington Post.