War On All Fronts

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By Tuesday of last week the Administration realized it could get the biggest p.r. lift by combining the U.S.'s existing $170 million-a-year Afghanistan aid program with a new $320 million package, and rolling it out all at once. "Wednesday we were still making sure we could move the money around and get something big," says an Administration official. "The public impact had to be large, so we went from numbers in the area of $100 million to $125 million, to--bam!--$320 million. Let's do it right." That figure is largely for effect--the U.S. is distributing only $25 million now, and holding the rest until after the start of the bombing.

It was enough money to pose a political problem for Bush. Conservatives are normally cool to foreign aid, especially humanitarian aid in war zones; they fear it will be siphoned off by enemies. To the rescue came Senator Joe Biden of Delaware, the Democratic chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Biden knew the G.O.P. would recoil at a large aid package, so he went to Bush with a plan. Early last week, Biden came out for an even larger package, one that purposely dwarfed the still unannounced White House proposal. That way, when Bush's plan leaked, it would look moderate by comparison.

It fell to Agency for International Development administrator Andrew Natsios to coordinate the operation. With help from the U.N., food and medicine could go into Afghanistan by truck from the south or donkeys from the north, but deep inside Taliban-controlled Afghanistan, where people were starving, only U.S. airdrops would work. The Pentagon immediately raised flags: "We have to make sure the food drops help starving people and don't fall into the Taliban's hands," a senior Pentagon officer said Saturday. "And we can't put our troops delivering the food at too great a risk." Pentagon experts charted routes for the planes to avoid Afghan antiaircraft batteries and planned to destroy those they couldn't avoid. Said an official as the plan was coming together: "It is not a simple operation."

Airlift experts expect it may take weeks to drop the food and medicine in all the right places in Afghanistan, and Washington will want as many Pakistanis and Muslims as possible to hear about the airlift over the coming days and weeks. The U.S. will also fight over the airwaves. The Voice of America beams into Afghanistan, offering programming in Pashtu, Dari and other tongues. At the State Department, the new Under Secretary for Public Diplomacy, Charlotte Beers, a legendary figure in New York advertising, will use her expertise in "branding" to help sell the American effort.

The joint humanitarian and p.r. campaign is likely to be carried out, U.S. officials say, at the same time that air strikes on Taliban positions begin--if not in the same hour, then at least within the same news cycle. Several well-placed officials told TIME that U.S. special forces are ready to move on al-Qaeda at any time; all they need is a solid sighting of bin Laden. "They're waiting for the right moment inside Afghanistan," said a senior U.S. official. "There is no other constraint."