23 million people are at risk of starvation, most of them children. Afghanistan is facing the worst humanitarian crisis of the present. ”Something like that was the news that recently appeared in the media in an increasingly urgent tone about the battered country in the Hindu Kush. The numbers came from the United Nations and aid agencies. According to the appeal, Afghanistan urgently needs food if the worst is to be avoided, especially the death of mothers, children and the elderly. But how can we help without involving the Taliban or even giving the new government some kind of legitimation?
The World Bank has now released the frozen funds of the Afghanistan Reconstruction Trust Fund (ARTF), which was intended to rebuild the country that was devastated by decades of war and completely impoverished before the Taliban came to power. The money – around 247 million euros – is to go to the World Food Program and UNICEF.
A million vaccinations
According to the World Bank, these funds should make it possible to provide medical care to 12.5 million people, vaccinate a million and provide targeted nutritional support to nearly 840,000 mothers and children. This sum is more than a drop in the ocean, but not enough to help the politically isolated and economically ruined country back on its feet. The assumption that humanitarian aid could save Afghanistan in its current state is as naive as trying to put out a major fire with a few buckets of water.
The freezing of state funds, the previous almost cessation of humanitarian aid and sanctions against the Taliban have caused the country’s economy to collapse. Only three percent of 31 million Afghans still have a secure income. Because the Taliban are insolvent, most banks are closed or without deposits, because the new rulers can no longer pay for imported products such as food, electricity and pharmaceuticals, everything is missing. There are severely malnourished children in hospitals across the country. On the land, which has already been plagued by years of drought, the farmers scrape the last remains of wheat from the pantries in order to survive.
Distress and bitter poverty in Afghanistan did not start with the Taliban. Even before that, it was an existential question for millions that aid and donor organizations intervene to save people’s lives. The previous government under Ashraf Ghani invested the money with which the West supported its state in much, but only rarely in poverty reduction. Even during the so-called anti-terror war of the Americans and their allies, the number of those who were dependent on aid rose every year. And the arm of the aid organizations did not reach by far in every valley of Kandahar. The devastating alliance of climate change and droughts, bombs and drone attacks by the US Army and the Afghan military, as well as the terror of the Taliban and the Islamic State (IS) have made people flee in droves from their home provinces, the farmers the harvest, the shepherds that Cattle taken. Many institutions, such as the central bank, were already at their financial limits before the Taliban. Government and other public sector workers had not received their salaries in months when the Taliban captured Kabul on August 16
It was a catastrophe with an announcement, even if the takeover of government by the Taliban and the accompanying refugee movements in the country and to neighboring countries, which then closed their borders, made the hardship worse. The allegedly surprising advance of the Taliban can serve as an explanation for why, in all the months of negotiations between US emissaries and the Taliban leadership in Doha, there was insufficient discussion of how to feed the people and stabilize the economy. On the other hand, the Taliban’s penchant for a religious understanding of the state and their lack of experience with possible government responsibility were sufficiently well known.
It is said that the strategy of the US special envoy for Afghanistan, Zalmay Khalizads, who recently resigned from his post, was driven by the desired withdrawal of the American troops. In contact with the Taliban leadership, he was the only one who decided to withdraw. This is how a paper by the Afghanistan Analysts Network Kabul / Berlin think tank describes it.
Aid to the Taliban
This almost unconditional surrender had fueled the Taliban’s triumphant advance. On the one hand, America would have taken itself off the battlefield, on the other hand, it would have refused further assistance to the Afghan National Army.
It is not surprising that the decision to freeze the country’s state reserves of $ 9.5 billion and thereby damage the Taliban economically came from the Americans. But this act cannot be interpreted as a sanction alone. On the one hand, it was money from the central bank of a state that no longer existed. On the other hand, most of it came from countries in the west, which provided 75 percent of the Afghan state budget. To fly this money back to Kabul in bundles and hand it over to the Taliban may actually seem like an absurd idea. The USA and the states involved in two decades of military presence are clearly finding it difficult to admit their share of responsibility for the plight of so many people and to act accordingly. Apparently, the withholding of finances is not intended to give a bargaining chip out of hand that is suitable to induce the Taliban to make concessions on basic human rights. On the other hand, it seems morally questionable to hold 31 million people jointly liable for the current Afghan leadership. In a broadcast on Deutschlandfunk Former Interior Minister Thomas de Maizière recently defended the two decades of cooperation between NATO and the USA with warlords and highly corrupt politicians. In the absence of other alternatives, it was the only option. So if you replace your collaboration with the good villains with one with the bad ones, does that make such a difference? What if it can also be assumed that hunger in Afghanistan will soon claim more victims than the war claimed?
The question to be clarified is: How does the money get to a country without banks? Even if it were not spent in Afghanistan but in neighboring countries – for food, medicines, medical equipment, vaccines – these goods would have to be brought to Afghanistan. And then there are customs duties that go to the Ministry of Finance in Kabul. If, on the other hand, the money is spent in the country, the smooth dollar bills have to be exchanged for wrinkled Afghani bills at an exchange rate that suits them, according to the Taliban’s will. The big hit among the ideas of how to get the money to the people is the “currency swap”, which works like this: Afghan business people who can no longer bring their income to the bank hoard it and exchange it with the aid organizations for dollars which in turn enable them to pay for imported goods. The aid organizations bypass the exchange rate, but have to bring the money into the country in cash. Sounds a bit like a Wild West solution, but if it helps against hunger!
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