HUMAN WRONGS WATCH

Human Wrongs Watch

Rome – UN World Food Programme (WFP) announced a new food subsidy initiative geared towards providing Afghanistan’s urban poor with guaranteed access to provisions despite the threat of food insecurity across this country, which has been invaded and occupied by a U.S.-led military coalition nearly ten years ago.

A Jalalabad woman receives her first food voucher from WFP | Credit:UN

Some 18,000 households – or an estimated 114,000 individuals – consisting mainly of poor women and households headed by people with disabilities will benefit from the project, Rome-based WFP announced on Jan. 3. Each monthly voucher is worth $25 and can be exchanged for food items in participating local shops.

Human Wrongs Watch

By James Cogan – World Socialist Web Site*

January – The tenth year of the US and NATO occupation of Afghanistan was among the deadliest and most destructive of the entire conflict.

Displaced children in Jalozai Camp|Credit:UN

In 2011, over 140,000 US and foreign troops conducted intense operations in southern Afghanistan to try and crush the insurgency being fought by the Islamist Taliban and other resistance organisations, while the CIA continued its illegal drone strikes against alleged insurgent targets in the tribal border regions of north west Pakistan.

The killing of a British soldier on December 3 in an explosion in the southern province of Helmand brought the overall death toll among the US-led occupation forces in Afghanistan for 2011 to 566.

Only 2010 was more costly, the first year of the Obama administration’s “surge” that sent tens of thousands of additional troops into combat in some of the most volatile areas of the country. A total of 711 American and foreign personnel lost their lives that year.