While the rest of the world is busy worrying about Omicron, Afghans are literally starving to death. But no one seems to care now that the US and its allies have left. We look at why this is happening—and whether they will receive assistance in time.
Editor’s note: We will not issue a trigger warning for the suffering of millions—which is atrociously privileged. But we’re readying you for the tough bits in the first section. At least one image—of a starving child—will be hard to see.
Researched by: Vagda Galhotra and Ankita Ghosh
Bad, really, really bad. Here are some quick stats:
Beyond the stats, here are some examples of how dire the situation is—especially for children.
One: Parents are selling their children to save the rest of their family—little girls as young as 6 and 7, but also boys like 8-year old Salahuddin: “I don't want to sell my son, but I have to. No mother can do this to her child, but when you have no other choice, you have to make a decision against your will.”
Two: Malnutrition wards at hospitals are overflowing with mothers desperate to save their infants. This is 3-year-old Kamila:
Three: Hunger is threatening the lives of newly born babies, as well:
“Pregnant women across Afghanistan are increasingly malnourished, and their bodies, unable to carry their babies to full term, give birth prematurely. Meagre diets then leave new mothers unable to breast-feed. ‘A lot of babies are premature,’ Abdul Jabad, a pediatrician in his late twenties, told me. ‘Some survive. Some not.’”
About a third of the children who arrive at Jabad’s unit do not survive.
Four: Most of the healthcare has broken down since the World Bank stopped funding Afghanistan’s healthcare system. Only 17% of the 2,300 health facilities are functional. And fewer than one in five hospitals are still open. Doctors in remote areas are unable to provide basic medicines—“even something as simple as paracetamol for the gravely ill who have walked 12 hours to seek treatment.” And frequent power cuts are killing babies in incubators and patients in surgery:
“The other day, we were in the operating theatre and the electricity was cut off. Everything stopped. I ran and shouted for help. Someone had fuel in their car and gave it to us so we could run the generator.”
Big point to note: The Taliban government continues to deny the colossal tragedy unfolding across the country. A spokesperson told the New Yorker:
“There are some rumors and propaganda that the country is going through a crisis, and it is not correct. We have resources and ongoing works, revenue collection which is enough for our government.”
The reasons are fairly straightforward.
One: Almost 80% of the former Afghanistan government’s budget was funded by international development aid. It dried up the moment the Taliban took over. On top of that, the US has frozen $9.5 billion in bank assets to sanction the Taliban—which itself is broke and disorganised—and unable to even care for their own:
“Taliban-run ministries have done little policymaking in the four months since taking power. Many of the fighters that make up their rank-and-file remain unpaid and are sometimes so poor they rely on non-Taliban assistance for food, housing and clothes.”
Key point to note: A great part of the blame for this overnight collapse lies with the US:
“One of the largest blunders of the two-decade-long US-led effort in Afghanistan was a failure to build a self-sustaining economy, which has now resulted in financial free fall—unpaid workers, starving families. The country’s government remains chronically aid-dependent and unable to generate significant tax revenue… ‘The international community, the last twenty or thirty years, has done a disastrous job here.’”
Two: The entire economy has shrunk by at least a third in 2021. Plus this: The national currency has lost more than 25% of its value. Add to that rapid inflation—which means people simply can’t afford basic necessities like food.
Three: The Americans left behind a broken system of governance, as Western officials admit: “The whole state was run on corruption. That’s why it fell apart.” Afghanistan comes in at #15 on the list of most corrupt nations in the world. But the ruling Afghans did little to help themselves: “Even until the end, people thought, the US is not going to abandon Afghanistan, so, you know, we will not fix it now—we will fix it the next year, or maybe the year after.” And those who did grow fat off the land moved their money abroad—rather than reinvest it in the country.
Four: To add to their woes, Afghans are also facing one of the worst droughts in decades—“which has withered fields, starved farm animals and dried irrigation channels.” And the country has lost 40% of its harvest this year. Afghanistan’s wheat harvest is expected to be 25% lower than average. Many in rural areas (where 70% of the population lives) have given up cultivating their land.
Afghanistan needs $220 million a month to ward off starvation—and the money has to arrive soon to ward off absolute catastrophe. But Western nations—especially the US—are still trying to balance the tradeoff between saving the Afghan people and “helping” the Taliban:
“Since the Taliban seized power, the United States and other Western donors have grappled with delicate questions over how to avert a humanitarian catastrophe in Afghanistan without granting the new regime legitimacy by removing sanctions or putting money directly into the Taliban’s hands.”
A small stream of foreign aid: One solution has been to release humanitarian assistance without removing the economic sanctions:
Why this matters: Setting aside the sheer scale of the human tragedy, the world has plenty of selfish reasons to step up and do the right thing. The head of the UN’s food program points out the value of releasing Afghan funds:
“If you unfreeze the money, then you can put liquidity back into the marketplace, and the economy will start to come back up. If you don’t, we’re not going to need to feed twenty-two or twenty-three million people per month—we are going to need to be feeding thirty-five million people. . . . This country will absolutely collapse.”
An Afghanistan in chaos is a recipe for worldwide disaster, as one global security expert notes:
“The West wants to punish the Taliban, but the economic chokehold is self-defeating. History shows that ignoring Afghanistan allows problems to fester and grow. Migration, terrorism, drugs: All of these issues could destabilize the region and spill over into Europe."
Also this: The Taliban are fighting an internal battle against the Islamic State Khorasan or Isis-K, an offshoot of the extremist group. If Afghanistan collapses, the biggest winner will be the Islamic State—which is more extreme than the Taliban and invested in jihad.
The bottomline: is best summed up by Afghan professor Obaidullah Baheer, who says: “Poor people didn’t make the Taliban come or go, but they pay the price… This is not about politics, it’s about stopping obscene levels of suffering.”
New Yorker has the best overview of the crisis in Afghanistan—while CNN has a powerful report on its starving children. For more on the dire food shortages, read New York Times and The Guardian. The Conversation and Foreign Affairs make a strong case for cutting a deal with the Taliban. We have done various explainers on Afghanistan in the past—focusing on where the US went wrong, the current Taliban government, and a historical guide to the Taliban.
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