The U.S. Is Starving Millions of Afghan Children
The U.S. Is Starving Millions of Afghan Children
The calamity in Afghanistan caused by Western sanctions amounts to mass torture.
When the United States withdrew its troops from Afghanistan in the summer of 2021, one of its parting acts was to obliterate a family of ten, including seven children, with a drone strike. No one was held accountable.
Now, Western sanctions push Afghanistan to the brink of total collapse:
While U.S. policy ostensibly targets the Taliban, the effect is to devastate the Afghan economy:
As the Taliban took over the country, the Biden administration froze Afghanistan’s $9.5 billion in foreign reserves and stopped sending the shipments of U.S. dollars upon which Afghanistan’s central bank relied.
With billions of dollars in state assets frozen abroad, Afghan banks have been paralyzed and the country faces a dire cash shortage that has crippled business, impeded humanitarian services, sent food and fuel prices soaring and triggered a widespread hunger crisis.
UN Secretary-General António Guterres warned that “virtually every man, woman and child in Afghanistan could face acute poverty.” He continued, “Babies being sold to feed their siblings. Freezing health facilities overflowing with malnourished children. People burning their possessions to keep warm. Livelihoods across the country have been lost.”
National security and foreign policy reporter Murtaza Hussain writes:
Sanctions are one of the bluntest coercive tools in the U.S. foreign policy toolkit — and happen be a favorite of policymakers, even as they rarely produce political results. Afghanistan is just one example of a mindlessly cruel sanctions regime that wreaks havoc on entire civilian populations without accountability.
America’s Afghanistan policy effectively constitutes mass torture:
UPDATE (2/11/22)
Biden has decided to continue starving Afghan children:
President Biden will start to clear a legal path for certain relatives of victims of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks to pursue $3.5 billion from assets that Afghanistan’s central bank had deposited in New York before the Taliban takeover, according to officials familiar with internal deliberations.
Even establishment defender Ezra Klein is appalled by the viciousness of U.S. policy:
Over 20 years, the United States built an aid-dependent economy in Afghanistan. When we left, we withdrew the aid on which it depended. When the Taliban took over, we turned the sanctions and financial weapons we’d wielded against them against the government and country they now controlled. We comfort ourselves by saying we are the largest donor to the Afghanistan relief effort, but we are also a major reason the crisis is dire in the first place, and we continue to be.