The good guy is the one handing out the food

The third world food crisis isn't just a humanitarian problem in Afghanistan, it's also a security problem. Carlotta Gall reminds us of how quickly people's behaviour can change when their family's lives are on the line:

Hajji Hayatullah described how one customer came to his shop and asked the shopkeeper to load a sack of flour onto his bicycle. “Then he said: ‘Don’t ask me to pay. All my life I did not take bribes, I did not take anything from anyone, and now I am forced to take it without paying. My children have not eaten,’ ” the shopkeeper recalled the man saying.

“He said, ‘I will return it if God gives me money,’ ” he continued.

The episode was unusual because the man was a respectable, educated person and it is deeply shameful in Afghan culture to take something like that, the shopkeeper said. “I realized he had a real problem,” he said.

“Things like this will get worse and worse, because what do you do if you have no money and have a wife and children?” he said.

I hope the folks at CEFCOM are tracking this and planning the hell out of the possibilities. Because, although a food crisis isn't strictly in the CF's lane over there, it will affect their mission to help provide security.

Smarter people than me will have already said it, I'm sure, but for what it's worth: we need to get a pile of food into the country ASAP, and we need to have joint patrols with ANA and ANP and Canadian Forces handing it out in villages all over Kandahar. Nothing says "good guys" like food to a hungry person.