{"id":205095,"date":"2022-02-14T12:00:17","date_gmt":"2022-02-14T12:00:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=205095"},"modified":"2022-02-14T03:55:46","modified_gmt":"2022-02-14T03:55:46","slug":"the-terrible-fate-facing-the-afghan-people","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2022\/02\/the-terrible-fate-facing-the-afghan-people\/","title":{"rendered":"The Terrible Fate Facing the Afghan People"},"content":{"rendered":"

11 Feb 2022 – <\/em>On 8 Feb 2022, UNICEF (the United Nations Children\u2019s Fund) Afghanistan sent out<\/a> a bleak set of tweets. One of the tweets, which included a photograph of a child lying in a hospital bed with her mother seated beside her, said<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\u201cHaving recently recovered from acute watery diarrhea, two years old Soria is back in hospital, this time suffering from edema and wasting. Her mother has been by her bedside for the past two weeks anxiously waiting for Soria to recover.\u201d<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The series of tweets<\/a> by UNICEF Afghanistan show that Soria is not alone in her suffering. \u201cOne in three adolescent girls suffers from anemia\u201d in Afghanistan, with the country struggling<\/a> with \u201cone of the world\u2019s highest rates of stunting in children under five: 41 percent,\u201d according to UNICEF.<\/p>\n

The story of Soria is one among millions; in Uruzgan Province, in southern Afghanistan, measles cases are rising<\/a> due to lack of vaccines. The thread<\/a> to the tweet about Soria from UNICEF Afghanistan was a further bleak reminder about the severity of the situation in the country and its impact on the lives of the children: \u201cwithout urgent action, 1 million children could die from severe acute malnutrition.\u201d UNICEF is now distributing<\/a> \u201chigh energy peanut paste\u201d to stave off catastrophe.<\/p>\n

The United Nations has, meanwhile, warned<\/a> that approximately 23 million Afghans\u2014about half the total population of the country\u2014are \u201cfacing a record level of acute hunger.\u201d In early September, not even a month after the Taliban came to power in Kabul, the UN Development Program noted<\/a> that \u201cA 10-13 percent reduction in GDP could, in the worst-case scenario, bring Afghanistan to the precipice of near universal poverty\u2014a 97 percent poverty rate by mid-2022.\u201d<\/p>\n

The World Bank has not provided<\/a> a firm calculation of how much of Afghanistan\u2019s GDP has declined, but other indicators show that the threshold<\/a> of the \u201cworst-case scenario\u201d has likely already passed.<\/p>\n

When the West fled the country at the end of August 2021, a large part<\/a> of the foreign funding, which Afghanistan\u2019s GDP is dependent on, also vanished with the troops: 43 percent of Afghanistan\u2019s GDP and 75 percent of its public funding, which came from aid agencies, dried<\/a> up overnight.<\/p>\n

Ahmad Raza Khan, the chief collector (customs) in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa in Pakistan, says<\/a> that exports from his country to Afghanistan have dropped by 25 percent; the State Bank of Pakistan, he says, \u201cintroduced a new policy of exports to Afghanistan on December 13\u201d that requires Afghan traders to show that they have U.S. dollars on them to buy goods from Pakistan before entering the country, which is near impossible to show for many of the traders since the Taliban has banned<\/a> the \u201cuse of foreign currency\u201d in the country. It is likely that Afghanistan is not very far away from near universal poverty with the way things stand there presently.<\/p>\n

On January 26, 2022, UN Secretary-General Ant\u00f3nio Guterres said<\/a> that \u201cAfghanistan is hanging by a thread,\u201d<\/em> while pointing to the 30 percent \u201ccontraction\u201d of its GDP.<\/p>\n

Sanctions and Dollars<\/strong><\/p>\n

On February 7, 2022, Taliban spokesperson Suhail Shaheen told<\/a> Sky News that this perilous situation, which is leading to starvation and illness among children in Afghanistan, \u201cis not the result of our [Taliban] activities. It is the result of the sanctions imposed on Afghanistan.\u201d<\/p>\n

On this point, Shaheen is correct. In August 2021, the U.S. government froze<\/a> the $9.5 billion that Afghanistan\u2019s central bank (Da Afghanistan Bank) held in the New York Federal Reserve. Meanwhile, family members of the victims who died in the 9\/11 attacks had sued \u201ca list of targets<\/a>,\u201d including the Taliban, for their losses and a U.S. court later ruled<\/a> that the plaintiffs be paid \u201cdamages\u201d that now amount to $7 billion. Now that the Taliban is in power in Afghanistan, the Biden administration seems to be moving forward<\/a> \u201cto clear a legal path\u201d to stake a claim on $3.5 billion out of the money deposited in the Federal Reserve for the families of the September 11 victims.<\/p>\n

The European Union followed suit, cutting<\/a> off $1.4 billion in government assistance and development aid to Afghanistan, which was supposed to have been paid between 2021 and 2025. Because of the loss of this funding from Europe, Afghanistan had to shut<\/a> down \u201cat least 2,000 health facilities serving around 30 million Afghans.\u201d It should be noted here that the total population of Afghanistan is approximately 40 million<\/a>, which means that most Afghans have lost access to health care due to that decision.<\/p>\n

During the entire 20-year period of the U.S. occupation of Afghanistan, the Ministry of Public Health had come to rely<\/a> on a combination of donor funds and assistance from nongovernmental organizations (NGOs). It was as a result of these funds that Afghanistan saw a decline<\/a> in infant mortality and maternal mortality rates during the Afghanistan Mortality Survey 2010. Nonetheless, the entire public health care system, particularly outside Kabul, struggled during the U.S. occupation. \u201cMany primary healthcare facilities were non-functional due to insecurity, lack of infrastructure, shortages of staff, severe weather, migrations and poor patient flow,\u201d wrote<\/a> health care professionals from Afghanistan and Pakistan, based on their analysis of how the conflict in Afghanistan affected the \u201cmaternal and child health service delivery.\u201d<\/p>\n

Walk Along Shaheed Mazari Road<\/strong><\/p>\n

On February 8, 2022, an Afghan friend who works along Shaheed Mazari Road in Kabul took me for a virtual walk\u2014using the video option on his phone\u2014to this busy part of the city. He wanted to show me that in the capital at least the shops had goods in them, but that the people simply did not have money to make purchases. We had been discussing how the International Labor Organization now estimates<\/a> that nearly a million people will be pushed out of their jobs by the middle of the year, many of them women who are suffering from the Taliban\u2019s restrictions on women working. Afghanistan, he tells me, is being destroyed by a combination of the lack of employment and the lack of cash in the country due to the sanctions imposed by the West.<\/p>\n

We discuss the Taliban personnel in charge of finances, people such as Finance Minister Mullah Hidayatullah Badri and the governor of the Afghanistan central bank Shakir Jalali. Badri (or Gul Agha) is the money man for the Taliban, while Jalali is an expert in Islamic banking. There is no doubt that Badri is a resourceful person, who developed the Taliban\u2019s financial infrastructure and learned about international finance in the illicit markets. \u201cEven the smartest and most knowledgeable person would not be able to do anything if the sanctions remain,\u201d my friend said. He would know. He used to work in Da Afghanistan Bank.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhy can\u2019t the World Bank\u2019s Afghanistan Reconstruction Trust Fund (ARTF) be used to rush money to the banks?\u201d he asked. This fund<\/a>, a partnership between the World Bank and other donors, which was created in 2002, has<\/a> $1.5 billion in funds. If you visit the ARTF website, you will receive a bleak update<\/a>: \u201cThe World Bank has paused disbursements in our operations in Afghanistan.\u201d I tell my friend that I don\u2019t think the World Bank will unfreeze these assets soon. \u201cWell, then we will starve,\u201d he says, as he walks past children sitting on the side of the street.<\/p>\n

_______________________________________________<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a> <\/em>Vijay Prashad is an Indian historian, editor and journalist. He is a writing fellow and chief correspondent at<\/em> Globetrotter. He is the director of <\/em>Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research<\/a><\/em> and a senior non-resident fellow at <\/em>Chongyang Institute for Financial Studies<\/a><\/em>, Renmin University of China. He has written more than 20 books, including <\/em>The Darker Nations<\/a> and <\/em>The Poorer Nations<\/a>. His latest book is <\/em>Washington Bullets<\/a>, with an introduction by Evo Morales Ayma.<\/em><\/p>\n

This article was produced by <\/em>Globetrotter<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

11 Feb 2022 – When the West fled the country at the end of August 2021, a large part of the foreign funding, which Afghanistan\u2019s GDP is dependent on, also vanished with the troops: 43 percent of Afghanistan\u2019s GDP and 75 percent of its public funding, which came from aid agencies, dried up overnight.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":186469,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[219],"tags":[93,94,1268,86,539,124,70],"class_list":["post-205095","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-central-asia-2","tag-afghanistan","tag-central-asia","tag-european-union","tag-occupation","tag-unicef","tag-united-nations","tag-usa"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/205095","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=205095"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/205095\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/186469"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=205095"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=205095"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=205095"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}