Edited by author 11-13-2001 04:38 PM
A Response to Brendan Nyhan's: Manufacturing Dissent: Chomsky Dissembles on Afghan Hunger

Brendan Nyhan's Spinsanity.org article of November 5 ("Manufacturing dissent: Chomsky dissembles on Afghan hunger") contains several factual and logical errors. Below is the text of a message I addressed to him to point out what I consider to be the most significant ones.

You correctly report Noam Chomsky's assertion that a recent US demand for the elimination of truck convoys carrying food aid from Pakistan amounted to a "demand to impose massive starvation on millions of people." In response to this you write that those truck convoys "would not have fed those millions of people in the first place, as Chomsky should know." First of all, your assertion is ambiguous--it could mean either, "would not have fed everybody," or "would not have fed anybody," so we can't even be sure what you claim Chomsky should know. But saying the truck convoys wouldn't have fed everybody is not sufficient reason to abandon them completely. So let's assume you meant, "would not have fed anybody."

Well, the only reason you offer for the US demand--the only reason you offer that the millions would not have been fed--is that the Taliban "were likely to divert the shipments." If the diversion of these shipments was merely likely, then you cannot be certain that hungry people would not have been fed. As Chomsky points out in his talk, the World Food Program resumed food shipments in early October, before the US airstrikes, but stopped again when the bombing began. And in your article, you quote Raymond C. Offenheiser, the president of Oxfam America, who calls for a halt in the US airstrikes and blames American bombing, not Taliban interference, for the difficulty in bringing aid to those in need. So it appears that these major aid agencies do not agree with your argument. You note that the Taliban have confiscated food supplies in Kandahar. But a food warehouse seized in Kabul at around the same time was returned to the World Food Program by Taliban authorities several days later. So we have evidence that the Taliban are not completely bent on stopping aid efforts, and that US actions have had the net effect of worsening the crisis.

You write that "Chomsky also fails to mention that the US has been working to bring in food aid from the countries north of Afghanistan, allowing access to areas held by the Northern Alliance, as well as dropping food from the air." Well, the US demand only affected shipments into areas controlled by the Taliban--it did nothing to stop shipments into areas held by the Northern Alliance. There was no need to restore access to that area--it was never cut off. Furthermore, the area held by the Northern Alliance is the region least in need of food aid in the whole country. Meanwhile, the area most in need of food, to the west of Mazar-i-Sharif, is still under Taliban control. If your prior assertion were correct, truck convoys into this Taliban-held area would be diverted, and would not feed the hungry. If your prior assertion is wrong, they might as well go through Pakistan instead. Bringing aid from the north is either unnecessary or useless, and is therefore hardly worth mentioning. And regarding US airdrops, Chomsky in fact mentions them several times in his speech, noting that, "...aid agencies leveled scathing condemnations of US airdrops, condemning them as propaganda tools which are probably doing more harm than good."

You write, "Clearly, the war has made such relief efforts more difficult, but it is extremely deceptive to depict a shutdown of truck convoys from Pakistan as a desire to 'impose massive starvation on millions of people.'" But your statement is irrelevant because Noam Chomsky makes no such depiction. He does not claim that anyone desires to starve millions of Afghans. He simply claims that we are knowingly taking actions that could result in further starvation, and that we are far less upset about this than we should be.

You write that Chomsky "harp[s] on the failure of the US press to cover these concerns." Please recall that Chomsky begins his discussion on the food crisis by saying, "According to the New York Times, there are seven to eight million people in Afghanistan on the verge of starvation." This is inconsistent with your statement, and there are many other examples. Chomsky does imply that US press coverage could be more prominent, but he doesn't claim the press has failed to cover the crisis. Rather, what Chomsky harps on is the lack of a widespread public outcry in response to such press coverage. Not the lack of reporting, but the lack of a public response. There's a difference.

You also quote Chomsky as saying, "You can't find a report in the New York Times," and then provide an excerpt meant to prove him wrong. But you have misquoted his words. If you listen to a recording of the speech, you will find that Chomsky did not say the words "you can't," which rather drastically changes the statement you originally set out to disprove. The Z Magazine transcript to which you link contains many such misquotes, several of which you duplicate. If you listen carefully to the recording you can find these errors yourself. (You can hear the relevant excerpt at: stream.realimpact.org/rihurl.ram?file=webactive/exile/dn20011023.ra&start="17:58.2"&end="18:50" )

Finally, you take issue with Chomsky's use of the phrase "silent genocide," first calling it inflammatory rhetoric, then arguing that it is neither genocide, nor silent. First of all, calling something inflammatory isn't an argument against it. As for your other points--you declare that genocide must be both deliberate and systematic, and we can certainly debate whether the Afghan food crisis amounts to genocide. But we cannot take seriously your implication that by "silent" Chomsky meant an absence of media coverage, since he himself cites numerous media stories and published statements from aid officials on the food crisis.

However, since you are concerned about the use of such inflammatory language, I would like to point out another recent instance that helps to explain what Chomsky might really mean by "silent genocide." On October 15, the South African web site News24.com quoted a human rights official who said, "...[T]he silent genocide of hunger is a crime against humanity in a world richer than ever before that could already easily feed the global population." It further quoted the official as saying that hunger is "neither fate nor an act of god, it is assassination. For every victim of hunger there is an assassin." These are the words of Jean Ziegler, UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food, speaking on the eve of World Food Day.

Chomsky uses the phrase "silent genocide" in a manner similar to Ziegler, who applies it to hunger in general, which is neither deliberate nor systematic, but merely negligent. Ziegler, like Chomsky, asserts that anyone who can prevent starvation but knowingly fails to do so, is guilty. The standard of guilt here is not malicious intent, as you argue, but negligence. So to prove that we are guilty of "silent genocide," as the term is understood by a prominent human rights official, Chomsky must simply show that we have taken actions that we knew in advance could result in further starvation. And that is pretty explicitly what Chomsky sets out to demonstrate. Or to use your own words, he must show that "the war has made such relief efforts more difficult," a fact which you readily concede.


Chris Williams can be contacted at chrswill@alum.mit.edu

Edited by author 11-15-2001 10:49 AM
My response to Chris:

On your first point, you're right that my logic is unclear. My meaning, however, is of course "would not have fed everybody". The purpose of this statement is to argue that the Pakistan convoys were not sufficient to feed "millions of people" and that therefore their cessation does not constitute a "demand to impose massive starvation on millions of people". I stand by my statement about Taliban diversion (there is other evidence of diversion beyond the Kabul example). However, did the shutdown make the hunger situation in southern Afghanistan worse, on balance? Of course. But the complicating factors I mention go unacknowledged by Chomsky; my point was to raise them, not to justify the US policy. As a side note, it appears that the US has allowed the route to reopen in the last few weeks.

I didn't explain this sufficiently, but my point on bringing food into Afghanistan via other routes was based on a) Northern Alliance advances and b) bringing food shipments across Taliban lines (admittedly unlikely given the Taliban's treatment of aid workers). On point a, see http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/nm/20011114/w...istan_aid_dc_3.html - it appears likely that the aid community will be able to re-establish a base in Mazar-i-Sharif and reach the area you refer to. This is of course partially 20/20 hindsight, but the point is that the US is not trying to impose starvation on millions of people.

I believe the evidence is against you on your claim that "[Chomsky] does not claim that anyone desires to starve millions of Afghans." Here's his statement in the MIT speech: "we are in the midst of apparently trying to murder 3 or 4 million people, not Taliban of course, their victims". Note "trying". There's clearly intentionality implied, if not "desire". Here's his statement in another interview (http://www.guerrillanews.com/counter_intelligence/208.html): "Well, I'm strongly opposed to policies that are aimed at killing, I don't know how many, it could turn out to be millions of Afghans, who have nothing to do with the Taliban. They're victims of the Taliban." Note "aimed".

I think you're also mistaken about Chomsky's take on the press coverage of the hunger problem. He references news that wasn't covered, news that was buried in other stories and how the news is presented differently in other countries.

You're absolutely right, however, about the transcript and the NY Times line. I was clearly mistaken to depend on it as an accurate representation of the speech - I've listened to it, but hadn't done a word-by-word check. An alert reader also pointed out that the transcript quote says "plans are being made, and programs implemented on the assumption that they may lead to the deaths of several million people in the next couple of months" but it's actually "couple of weeks" (even more overstated, in my opinion). I will append a retraction on this to the end of the post.

Finally, I certainly understand what Chomsky is trying to say with "silent genocide". I just think it's an inflammatory charge that he fails to prove. The burden is on him as the proponent of the charge, not me. If he cites news stories and then calls it "silent", it's not up to me to reconcile the two, but I'm well within my rights to point out the contradiction. And if he's making a case for a functional definition of genocide, he should offer an argument for the functional definition or proof of intentionality. He does neither.