Charity and Chaos; An insurgency was bleeding Aceh before the tsunami hit. Food aid can't fix that.

Byline: George Wehrfritz and Joe Cochrane (With Eve Conant in Washington and Paul Dillon and Eric Unmacht in Banda Aceh Graphic by Andrew Romano)

The American Seahawk chopper descends toward a one-lane road near the ruined village of Lam No. Before the skids have even touched the pavement, a mob rushes toward the craft in hopes of grabbing food, drinks and medicine. The throng is mostly children. Navy airmen and an accompanying NEWSWEEK correspondent aboard the chopper offload bundles of wheat, protein biscuits and strawberry yogurt as rotor blades whirl overhead. In less than two minutes, the helicopter is again aloft. "They're all so hungry," shouts 22-year-old Nathan Minear, an aviation warfare systems operator from Washington state, as the chopper roars away.

Minear's mission--in the disputed Indonesian province of Aceh--is purely humanitarian. But the mammoth international relief effort, including the largest American military deployment in Southeast Asia since Vietnam, entails far more complex tasks than airlifting food to displaced people. The tsunami took its worst toll in Aceh: more than 100,000 dead, more than 500,000 homeless. Yet government agencies and relief organizations answering Indonesia's S.O.S. are also landing smack in the middle of a low-grade civil war. Will the rescue teams simply feed and treat survivors, then leave? Or will the international community become embroiled in the volatile politics of the conflict? Diplomats face similar questions in hard-hit Sri Lanka, where the tsunami wrecked areas under the control of the Tamil Tigers, regarded as a terrorist organization by the U.S.…