According to the Congressional Research Service, the US and international donors supported more than half of the Afghan government’s $6 billion annual budget and as much as 80 percent of its total expenditures. (The total US cost of the war is estimated at $2.3 trillion, according to Brown University’s Cost of War Project.) That funded Afghan’s security services, governance and development programs, and more. Over 20 years, the United States set aside nearly $150 billion for Afghanistan reconstruction, according to the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR). “There’s no strategic plan agreed by international community to save these needy people, to get Afghanistan out of international crisis,” Sadaat added. “But tomorrow, there’s again a question mark: What will they eat? What will they live with?” “It will save lives for today,” said Sayed Hameed Sadaat, who worked in policy and planning in Afghanistan’s Office of the President, until the government’s collapse last August. But it does not offer Afghanistan a real pathway out of this crisis. That leaves humanitarian assistance to mitigate the disaster. “The people who are suffering are ordinary Afghans.”Īn Afghan man shows the scars on his abdomen, from selling his kidney to save his family from starvation, at his home in Injil, Afghanistan, in February 2022. It’s a “tug of war in some ways,” said Madiha Afzal, a foreign policy fellow at the Brookings Institution. And the world is struggling to figure out what happens to a country that was suddenly cut out of the global system after two straight decades of international intervention. The Taliban can blame the West for sanctions and blocking the central bank reserves. The West can blame the Taliban for failing to take reasonable steps that would ease Afghanistan’s isolation. So far, the Taliban are unwilling, or unable, to change. A US drone strike killed al-Qaeda’s top leader in central Kabul, affirming the still-very-close relationship between the two groups. The Taliban have crushed any hope that they might emerge as a new and more moderate group, instead targeting minorities, banning girls from high school, and requiring women to wear the burqa in public. They lack resources, but also the technical know-how - and many who have it are sidelined or have left. The Taliban have also struggled to govern Afghanistan.
Afghanistan economic freefall. it needs free#
And one of the toughest measures remains in place: The US continues to block Afghanistan’s central bank from accessing about $7 billion of its own assets, funds necessary to triage an economy in free fall. The US Treasury Department has made substantial exceptions to Afghan sanctions in the months after the withdrawal, but they continue to have a chilling effect. It can be told in decades of international intervention, or in the decades of US foreign policy failures, or it can begin in the immediate aftermath of the Taliban’s takeover, when development assistance disappeared and members of the Taliban went from being heavily sanctioned terrorists to the heavily sanctioned leaders of the de facto government. Paula Bronstein/Getty ImagesĪfghanistan’s predicament is a long story, and a short one. “The last frontier should be humanitarian agencies -but we’re increasingly having to do more and more and more because there’s nowhere else for people to turn.”Īfghan women stand in line to receive oil, lentils, salt, flour, and rice distributed by the World Food Program to vulnerable families in Herat, Afghanistan, in December 2021.
“Every single possible coping mechanism and social safety net has been ripped from underneath them,” said Athena Rayburn, Save the Children’s Director of Advocacy, Communications and Media in Kabul. In Afghanistan, it is serving as the replacement for an economy that cannot function. But this kind of relief is supposed to be an emergency measure. Humanitarian assistance is staving off the worst of the crisis. According to the World Food Program, 92 percent of households reported having debt 88 percent said buying food forced them to borrow. In March, the United Nations said almost 95 percent of Afghans aren’t getting enough to eat, what a UN official called “a figure so high that it is almost inconceivable.” Nearly 4 million children are acutely malnourished. More than 18 million Afghans are facing acute food insecurity, about half of the country’s entire population. Sardar Shafaq/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images An elder reacts to the devastation outside his home in the Khost province of Afghanistan, after a 5.9 magnitude earthquake struck at noon on June 22.
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