The U.S. Is Starving Millions of Afghan Children
The calamity in Afghanistan caused by Western sanctions amounts to mass torture.
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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.
The Associated Press @AP
BREAKING: President Biden is expected to issue an executive order to move some $7 billion of the Afghan central bank’s assets frozen in the U.S. banking system to fund humanitarian relief in Afghanistan and compensate Sept. 11 victims, source tells @AP https://t.co/pSimEOz9vR
The New York Times @nytimes
Breaking News: President Biden is moving to split $7 billion in frozen Afghan central bank assets between 9/11 victims’ families and humanitarian aid in Afghanistan. The highly unusual set of moves is expected to be announced on Friday. https://t.co/tMqWbm9oBx
Secretary Antony Blinken @SecBlinken
The President today signed an Executive Order as part of an effort to set aside $3.5 billion U.S.-based Afghan central bank assets for the benefit the Afghan people. The United States stands with the people of Afghanistan.
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.
One thing to remember and emphasize about the current situation in Afghanistan: it didn’t start because the Taliban took power.
For years the World Food Program (WFP) has listed Afghanistan as one of the countries most in need. The year before the Taliban take over WFP listed Afghanistan as the second most food insecure nation in the world (Congo was #1). Similarly, Afghanistan’s economy has worsened annually. A decade ago, 40% of Afghans were below the poverty line. In summer of 2020, again a year before the Taliban takeover, Afghanistan’s president Ashraf Ghani stated 90% of his people lived below the poverty line. As many as 70% were living on less than one dollar a day (the poverty line is $2.20/day).
Additional facts are legion, such as a 2017 report that found 50% of Afghan children are stunted.
This all occurred as the US spent $300 million A DAY on the war in Afghanistan for 20 years. The $9 billion in Afghan assets the US has frozen, and that would provide enormous relief to the tens of millions of starving, sick, freezing and homeless Afghans, is equivalent to what we spent in one month of killing Afghan farmers and enriching warlords for the last two decades.
Where is the accountability?
Thank you for the work you do Peter and the awareness you help build and grow.