SINCE the Taliban seized control of Afghanistan in August last year amid a chaotic US military withdrawal, the war-battered country has slid deeper into disaster, sparking fresh waves of displacement and raising the specter of mass hunger.
Deprived of billions of dollars in aid, loans and assets by an international community reluctant to recognize the new, ultraconservative government in Kabul, Afghanistan is fast becoming the world’s worst and most complex humanitarian emergency.
Afghans who are unable, or unwilling, to join the tide of refugees are left to scrape by amid the bleakest winter in recent memory, enduring chronic shortages of food, fuel and medicine.
But even the 5.7 million Afghans who have fled to five neighboring countries (Iran, Pakistan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan) still need vital relief.
The gloom deepened when at least 22 people died and hundreds of buildings were damaged after twin earthquakes struck the isolated western province of Badghis on Jan. 17.
In response to the deteriorating situation from every perspective, the UN launched a $5 billion aid appeal on Jan. 11 — the largest ever for a country experiencing a humanitarian crisis — to help shore up basic services during the bitterly cold winter.
In an urgent plea on Jan. 13, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres warned of “a nightmare unfolding” in Afghanistan unless further funding is released. “Virtually every man, woman and child could face acute poverty,” he said.
Many in the international community have been reluctant to send aid to Afghanistan, fearing it might empower the Taliban, a group whose extreme interpretation of Islam denies girls an education, bars women from the workplace, and limits freedom of expression.
When the Taliban toppled the UN-backed government of Ashraf Ghani last summer, it lost access to billions of dollars in financing from the World Bank and the IMF, saw its assets frozen, and development aid abruptly suspended.
Additionally, the administration of President Joe Biden froze $7 billion in Afghan foreign reserves held in New York.
Despite 20 years of Western intervention, successive Afghan governments had failed to diversify the economy beyond rudimentary agriculture. In fact, almost 80 percent of the previous government’s budget came from the US and other foreign donors. Denied this assistance, the nation’s economy now teeters on the brink of collapse.
Policymakers around the world have been left wondering how to address the unfolding emergency without giving the Taliban the oxygen of legitimacy. As such, Washington has sought to bypass the group by directly channeling funds though UN agencies.
On Jan. 11, the United States Agency for International Development announced more than $308 million in additional assistance, bringing total US humanitarian spending on Afghanistan and Afghan refugees in the region to nearly $782 million since Oct. 2020.
Campaigners caution that increasing aid contributions is not a sustainable solution, and that Afghans will only achieve lasting security and financial independence when they regain access to their bank accounts and hard currency.
Masuda Sultan is an Afghan women’s rights activist and a co-founder of Unfreeze Afghanistan, an advocacy group established in Sept. 2021 to lobby policymakers on behalf of ordinary Afghans deprived of their savings under the sanctions regime.
She acknowledges that there has been some progress. “The UN announced its largest humanitarian funding appeal in its history, and last week the US announced $308 million in additional humanitarian aid on top of the $474 already committed,” Sultan told Arab News.
“But without addressing the underlying economic freeze related to the banking sector, which is a result of sanctions, the needs of the Afghan people can never be met. In fact, the number of people needing emergency humanitarian assistance will just grow.”
Cheryl Benard, another of Unfreeze Afghanistan’s co-founders and the president of ARCH International, an organization in Washington dedicated to the preservation of cultural heritage in conflict zones, said giving Afghans access to their savings would prevent a currency collapse and allow them to develop their communities independently.
“The bottom line is this is a post-conflict country,” Benard told Arab News. “In Germany (after the Second World War), we had the Marshall Plan and it helped them become a normal country again and rebuild their livelihoods.
“In the case of Afghanistan, they have the money themselves, $9 billion, and we are holding it back and are instead raising new donor funds. But this was exactly what ruined the Afghan experiment for the past 20 years: We kept them dependent on foreign experts and foreign funding. What they need now is to get on their own feet — and they want to.”
- Arab News
