Shortly after the U.S. attacked Afghanistan for supposedly sheltering Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda, our TV screens were filled with images of planes dropping food rations into the bombarded country. The little yellow packets were shoved out of cargo holds by the thousands. You could almost hear the government patting itself on the back as it said, “See, we're actually helping the starving people of Afghanistan.”

   Trouble is, those food drops were a complete disaster. News reports mentioned some of the problems with the humanitarian effort, but there's a lot they either didn't tell us or got wrong. A nonprofit aid organization called Partners International Foundation decided to see what was going on. These guys aren't granola-crunching flower-children – they used to be in Special Forces units of the U.S. military. And they didn't content themselves to sit in an office interviewing people by phone. They went into Afghanistan during the heaviest part of the war to find out what was happening for themselves.

   Here's what they discovered:
•    You know those little packets in vitamin bottles and clothes that are supposed to keep them fresh? Well, many of the little meal packs dropped on Afghanistan contained one of those packets (called a desiccant) to keep the food fresh. Unfortunately, the Afghans aren't familiar with desiccants so they tore them open and ate the powder. Some thought it was medicine, so they noshed it straight. Others figured it was a funky American spice, so they sprinkled it on their beans, rice, or pasta. Lots of Afghans got sick, though we don't know if any deaths occurred. In fact, it's hard to say whether people got sick from chowing down on desiccant or because the food in the packets was usually spoiled.

•    You see, these plastic-wrapped meals weren't made to be dropped from 25,000 to 40,000 feet. As they freefall, the air pressure causes them to expand like balloons, and the cold at those altitudes makes the outer plastic brittle. If they haven't already split during their plummet, they probably will when they hit the ground. Some burst wide open, while others got small tears, letting in water, dirt, and debris. Even in meals where the outer wrapping didn't split, the wrapping of individual pieces of food inside the meal packet was often torn. In all, the team found that over 90% of the meal packets had been damaged and were contaminated by fungus or bacteria. “They emitted a gaseous odor and foul smell,” according to the report. But because the Afghans were so hungry, or because they thought that's how American kibble is supposed to smell, they wolfed down the food anyway. When large numbers of people got sick, the Taliban said that the U.S. was poisoning them. The government countered that the Taliban must've been tainting the food packs to frame the U.S. Neither side was apparently right.

• Even if the food hadn't gone rotten, it wasn't appropriate for the Afghan culture. The locals eat rice, bread, and a little meat. Who knows what they made of the pasta, peanut butter, and pastries in the packets? It was kind of like serving goat meat, fried crickets, and unidentifiable glop to Americans. While any food is welcome in an emergency, that strange foreign grub wasn't suitable for the goal of feeding people long-term.

• Another problem is that the food was distributed haphazardly. Sometimes the packets wouldn't be noticed for days or weeks, giving them plenty of time to go rotten. When dropped in remote locations, they were often hoarded or sold by the few people who happened to find them.

• Remember that urban legend about dropping a penny from the Empire State Building and killing someone on the sidewalk below? Same principal for the food drops. Each plane would dump 35,000 of these little projectiles, which reached speeds of up to 100 miles per hour. The team didn't report on anyone hurt by plummeting packets, but they did see several huts with holes in their roofs caused by falling food.

• But even if an Afghan didn't get conked on the head, they still had to be careful of packets on the ground. Why? Thanks to its war with the Soviet Union, Afghanistan is littered with unexploded mines and bombs. Go after a food packet in a field, and it may be the last thing you ever do. To make matters worse, some geniuses chose yellow plastic to wrap some of the meals. It just so happens that the bomblets from the U.S.'s cluster bombs are the same shade of yellow. Meal packets and unexploded bomblets look unbelievably similar. Thus, Afghanis were introduced to a new form of Russian roulette.

• As lame as the attempts were, they must have had something going for them, right? At the very least, they must've been a cheap way to feed people. Wrong again. A bag of rice that can feed a family for a month costs $50, including delivery by land into Afghanistan. Using food drops, it cost over $145 to feed a family for a month.

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