Anna Cataldi and Professor Barnett Rubin addressed the UN on October 10-three days into the American-led attack on Afghan sites occupied by the Taliban regime, and one day after four UN workers were killed in Kabul-and said the situation was dire in Afghanistan even before the war and is worsening everyday.

As the winter approaches, the people of Afghanistan (a country with one of the highest hunger-rates in the world) will face massive starvation and the US air drops won't do much. Food is usually trucked in by the UN, but the roads are bad now because of the bombing. Secretary General Kofi A. Annan has said, "We are continuing our attempts to get trucks in but it is much more difficult because as you can understand, in this situation not many truck drivers want to drive in there."

Afghanistan suffered a Soviet invasion and occupation from 1979 to 1989 which brought on a large refugee flow and a scourge of land mines. The Soviet-backed Afghan regime collapsed in 1992 after a civil war which left its capital, Kabul, decimated. In 1994 the Taliban took over and later became the harborer of terror mastermind, Osama bin Laden.

Cataldi is an Italian author and journalist who was appointed the UN Messenger of Peace in 1998. She is the author of "Letters from Sarajevo," a chronicle of the impact of war on the children of Bosnia. Cataldi traveled to many conflict zones where the UN is engaged, including the Balkans, Central Africa and Afghanistan.

Cataldi said she had originally prepared a statement about what impact another war in Afghanistan would have in that country, but when the US-led strikes began, her speech became obsolete.

Wearing a black jacket with black pants, sporting short hair and wearing a green blouse, Cataldi leaned against the podium frequently, shaking her head and taking deep breaths.

"I'll just try to be as brief as I can," she said. "Since 1996 I've traveled four times to Afghanistan, twice as a journalist and twice as a UN peace messenger." Her focus, she said, was on civilian life. She said she's been to "each corner" of the country and witnessed the dire humanitarian needs before the Taliban took over in 1994. In 1995, Cataldi said, she went to Afghanistan to write a report for Amnesty International about Afghan women.

"The women were submitted to many forms of abuse," she said. "They were raped, abducted and physically mutilated. Some were publicly executed. I would just like to say how terrible the situation has been there in the past year."

Cataldi said her "heart goes out to the people" in light of the recent events because of what they're going to endure. She paints a horrible picture of the city of Kabul five years ago.

"My first impact in Kabul in March 1996 was when I published an essay," she said. "I found out that 70 percent of the buildings in the city have been destroyed. Eighty percent of the city's population suffers malnutrition. Another 22 square kilometers in Kabul alone is virtually all mine field. Roughly ten people a day, mostly children, are injured by land mines. There are five to six amputations a day in Kabul hospital. There's been no electricity, no drinking water for three years."

She said one child in five dies in its first year. One third of women are widows. "And in a culture that forbids women to work," she said, "that leaves them with no means whatsoever of supporting themselves or their children."

One million people live without shelter, she said, and as the winter approaches, they are sustained by tea and a small amount of bread provided by humanitarian organizations.

"The situation is deteriorating further because of the earthquake and recently because of the worst drought in a century," she said.

Cataldi said she returned to Afghanistan last year to see the impact of the drought. One thousand people a day, she said, lay down on the bare ground in front of the government building, waiting for help. People, she said, were starving to death and claimed to be reminded of Somalia in 1992. She said she was told that in the last three weeks there have been absolutely nothing to eat except for the skin of dead animals.

Cataldi said that lurking in the back of everyone's mind are the land mines. "They call land mines, 'The Eternal Sentinel,' " she said. "They say, 'In a country where there are 20 million people, there are more than 20 million mines and unexploded weapons. Each one of us will meet his weapon.' "

Meanwhile, she said, the budget for UN land mine clearing was cut in half. Incidentally, the Kabul central office for land mine clearing was destroyed in recent air strikes a raid that killed four UN workers.

Professor Rubin said the situations Cataldi described was before the Taliban came even in to power. "So the Taliban did not cause all of this," he said. "A lot of what she was describing subsequently which is post-Taliban which was, of course, before this war started."

Rubin is the Director of Studies at New York University's Center on International Cooperation. He is also the former Director of the Center for Preventative Action at the Council on Foreign Relations and the author of several books including, "The Search for Peace in Afghanistan" and "The Fragmentation of Afghanistan."

Dressed in a dark suit, blue shirt, green tie, gray hair beard and glasses, Rubin didn't lean on the podium, opting to shift back and forth as he spoke. "If you add all the things up," Rubin said, concerning Cataldi, "and realize that in this situation she was describing millions of more people are now on the move. The ones we see on television, the refugees, those are the better off people because those are the ones who have the resources to get out of the country and earn a place where they might receive some assistance."

But, Rubin said, there are millions of people in Afghanistan who are internally displaced or in isolated places-particularly people in central highlands who "are already on the brink of starvation" and completely dependent on the World Food Program for food.

"That area is pretty much inaccessible by road by now," Rubin said. "We really have no information about what is happening there. It was an area where even in times of peace, tens of thousands of people died of starvation because of drought, a drought smaller than the one we have now, in the early 1970s."

Rubin said that combined with the current situation, it is realistic to expect a winter of "chaos, fighting and massive famine" if the Taliban is disintegrated and not replaced by a stable government once the war ends. "It wouldn't be surprising if hundreds of thousands of people died," he said.

The myriad of humanitarian issues won't be solved without a political successor to the Taliban, Rubin said. The UN must be the organization to build the new government and not the US.

"I've have people from the Northern Alliance tell me in recent days that they are terrified of a premature collapse of the Taliban," Rubin said. "It's unusual for people in a war to be terrified that their opponent might collapse, but they know that they do not have the capacity to govern the country."

The Northern Alliance, Rubin said, claims that they acknowledged the danger of factional fighting if they were to march victoriously into Kabul. Rubin said the Northern Alliance wants action by the UN. Any action by the UN, said Rubin, would probably be initiated by the US.

"There is an urgent need for high-level political leadership to provide incentives and pressure for the various Afghan groups who are in favor of the Northern Alliance," Rubin said, "to consolidate their efforts and put forth an alternative."

Rubin called on a UN mandate to help with a new transitional government. The US can't set up a government, Rubin said, because Afghanistan doesn't want to have a "puppet," government. The UN will be seen as a more fair organization.

"Everyone says that Afghan's people suffer from xenophobia but I've been working there for years. They like foreigners. They just don't like invaders," Rubin said, citing that Osama bin Laden and the Taliban are invaders to Afghanistan.