Afghanistan is crumbling under the rule of Taliban, US promises to send aid

On August 15, 2022, marking one year since the US withdrew its forces from Afghanistan, the country has been suffering under the rule of the Taliban. The ongoing crisis may have even more to do with US decisions than you think. Afghanistan has blessed the world with innumerable treasures like embroidery, traditional Pashto, Persian poetry, and the majestic Afghan hound. But the country now is struggling to feed its 38 million population as the ruling extremist organisation has forced people to the brink of starvation with rising malnutrition and lack of adequate healthcare, education, and financial facilities.

You may remember the staggering images on your television and mobile screens that captured the scenes of complete mayhem marked by chaos and desperation of Afghan citizens running to depart Afghanistan when the US announced it was withdrawing its troops from the country. The indelible images of a US Marine lifting a baby over the barbed wire topped wall at the Kabul airport or the 800 people jammed-packed on a jet fleeing their country captured by Technical Sergeant Justin Triola are etched in the memory of the world as they are forever part of the dark chapter of the South Asian country. 

Everything happened so fast that, apparently, the Taliban was surprised by the superpower exiting. The Afghan government fell quickly, and the Taliban took over. Many top US military officials have struggled since then to justify their hasty actions, which they blame on bad calculations. As General Mark Milley put forth his statement, " All the intel assessments failed to indicate any justification for our actions and there is no question about it that all of us got it wrong. It was a swing and a miss." That is the expression that US intelligence failed to estimate that 11 days was enough for the troops to exit Afghanistan. 

There are a lot of aspects that you can criticise about the US exit strategy. However, they managed to migrate roughly 80,000 Afghans who worked with the US and Afghan governments, since the withdrawal.

While on the other hand, the number of Afghans that remain in danger is somewhere in the hundreds of thousands, left stranded due to the limited time frame the United States had to execute a mammoth rescue operation. What happened was completely justified as it was the administration of the orange you're adorning despicable being who signed the deal to leave Afghanistan in the first place. His thought process to justify this action went something like this, the Bagram base is great, the lights are on, and dogs. No one likes dogs. The brave people of the Kabul Animal Rescue would disagree with his statement as they risked their lives to get as many dogs out of Afghanistan in the impossible time frame of 11 days before the Taliban took hold. The incoherent extraordinary brain function at full capacity failed to comprehend the after-effects of this complex situation and the people and animals it would impact. 

The turmoil that has unfolded since the US exit from Afghanistan may have faded as a hot topic of discussion. But the country is in a dire crisis that is getting worse for reasons and is in immediate need to be addressed. With the Taliban now in charge of the country, even though they tried to paint a slightly softer image for journalists through carefree photo ops, there is no denying that they are the epitome of radical extremism. Even if the Taliban members ride around in bumper cars on their visits to a fairground in Kabul and a trip to the zoo, it doesn't change the Taliban into a peace-loving organisation that will let anyone live under Islamic rule and security as long as everything is enjoyable and everyone can live in their own country the way they want. We do not associate the Taliban with the ideology of freedom to live and let live, but rather with fearmongers who terrorise and harass female journalists who report on the reality of their actions on the ground. The Taliban is not a monolith as different regional leaders rule with different degrees of severity, but there is no denying that they are an oppressive regime that chips away at the souls of innocent people who suffer at the hands of brutality.

The brutal reprisals against US allies and former Afghan government employees have been taken up by the Taliban. 500 Afghan government employees have been killed or forcibly disappeared during the Taliban’s first six months in power. On the bigger level, the Taliban has taken an absolute sledgehammer to women’s rights. On one hand, with the legitimate criticism of America’s occupation, this period saw Afghan women making strides. In 2001, there were few, if any, girls in schools, whereas by 2020, this number grew to roughly 40 per cent of girl students. In the same year, the percentage of women in the Afghan parliament was more than in the current sitting US Congress, which has sunk to absolute zero. The Taliban decree tried to control nearly every aspect of women’s lives with orders such as these: no woman can leave their homes unless necessary, and only women who can’t be replaced by men will be allowed to keep working. Fortunately, one area where women are allowed to work in Afghanistan is healthcare, due to the situations where men aren’t allowed to treat women as patients. The midwives in Afghanistan made appeals to the Taliban that they shouldn’t meddle in women’s rights to education and employment as they are paralysing one arm of the body of society and a country can’t just be run by men. As history bears witness, the world tried to do so for thousands of years, and look where it has got us. We are in a global pandemic. The planet is on fire and, to add to everything that the world is dealing with right now, the world’s richest man is a ventriloquist dummy from hell. There I said it.

In March, the Taliban went back on the promise after they took over and announced that girls would be prevented from receiving a secondary education in most areas. Even the Taliban members condemned this move and the reasoning behind it. Banning Afghan girls from attending school beyond 6th grade because they needed more time to decide on a school uniform for teenage girls is an abhorrent organisation that is obsessed with virtue and purity. Taking months to brainstorm a uniform for school girls is objectively perverted. 

Women have lost a great deal in the last year, on top of the cascading series of humanitarian crises. The UN estimates that 97 per cent of the population is at risk of sinking below the poverty line. A series of natural disasters like the ongoing drought has diminished the food production capacity of the country. Another massive earthquake in June and flooding just this month have exacerbated the fact that falling on a brand new Taliban is ill-equipped to take it on. The Taliban are a jihadist insurgency to a ruling group that spent 20 years building an organisation that is designed to fight and motivate people to engage in suicide bombings. People don't turn into government officials overnight as a militant insurgency group is low on the list of people you want leading a country's government. 

Although the US occupation wasn't a perfect magical wonderland, it was awful in its way as the Afghans lived under the specter of hellfire being rained down from unmanned death machines every day. The continued presence of the US in Afghanistan was untenable, but the exact circumstances of America's departure were substantially worse. While some understandable decisions were made, they had huge ramifications for the Afghan people. The Taliban's government is sanctioned by the US because the Taliban is a specially designated terrorist group.Some pre-existing sanctions apply to only part of the Taliban government.

The US State Department has announced a 10 million dollar reward for any information that leads to the arrest of Taliban member Sirajuddin Haqqani, who also happens to be the current acting Interior Minister of Afghanistan. The whole Afghan government under the Taliban has made it impossible for banks, businesses, and charities to operate and keep the economy functioning. The massive problem is that 75 per cent of the Afghan government's budget relies on foreign aid, which makes up the salaries of vital government service employees, teachers, and public sector employees, and that aid has immediately disappeared.

One of the worst and most crucial sectors affected is healthcare, where doctors have a minuscule amount of medical supplies; their budget has been zero since the takeover by the Taliban. The US forced the assets worth 7 billion dollars of the Afghan Central Bank to be held in America. Primarily to kneecap the entire Afghan banking system. As Afghanistan can't print its currency, the actions have led to a literal cash shortage where citizens have been standing in line for three days to withdraw cash from their bank accounts.

An unusual state of affairs and a unique humanitarian crisis have resulted in food being technically available but there isn't enough liquidity in the economy and, therefore, enough availability of paper currency to purchase food. The situation is very grim as half the population of Afghanistan is under 15 years of age. Many Afghans have nowhere to turn for food or money, and their families are forced to make harrowing choices. An increasingly common decision that can be done precisely once in a person's life is selling kidneys. Some parents are even resorting to selling some of their children to feed others, which is unimaginably heartbreaking to even contemplate. The people of Afghanistan are in dire need of help. 

US President, Joe Biden, has inherited this mess from an alarmingly blithe orange blob of human flesh (Donald Trump) who has a direct hand in aiding and abetting the situation in Afghanistan. While Biden's official statement is grammatically incorrect to "feel bad about the humanitarian crisis in Afghanistan", it is pretty disheartening to see a US official foreign policy boil down to such a simplistic statement of " You can't win them all." While the US is directly responsible for the problems in Afghanistan. The Biden administration has begun issuing sanctions exemptions to allow the free flow of humanitarian aid. With a pledge of hundreds of millions of dollars in aid to Afghanistan, more than any other company. In the face of stiff opposition from the right-wing politicians who argue against any kind of monetary assistance to the hands of the Taliban. The prospect of US aid falling into the hands of the Taliban is worrisome. 

For years now, a couple of charities have managed to circumvent this concern to find ways with, through, or around to help ordinary Afghan citizens. Moreover, even when America was present in Afghanistan, the Taliban effectively still controlled large parts of the country. The Afghan director at the International Rescue Committee has been financially constrained to help which has left them feeling frustrated. If you look at the math, letting 38 million people suffer for the actions of a few thousand, doesn't work or make sense. There is a strong case to find ways to get humanitarian aid to Afghanistan. 

While speaking as a long-term solution, no emergency aid is going to stand in for healthcare, education, and a functioning economy. Aid is bandaged, not a cure to the problems. A growing problem in offering humanitarian aid to just half the population, which is 20 million people under high and critical levels of food insecurity, is donor fatigue. But a sustainable way to help the country is by developing and building long-term solutions with a major focus on education, healthcare, and building infrastructure like investing in irrigation and waste management areas, especially areas affected by drought.

But the challenge is engaging with the Taliban in some shape or form. Additionally, there are mechanisms in place that don't benefit the Taliban, but none are perfect. It's hard to swallow that even one cent could go to the Taliban with their outward-facing life, laugh, live vibe, but they constantly remind us of their heinous treatment of women and the recent confirmation that the Taliban is harboring a known leader of Al Qaeda in a safe house. Withholding all forms of aid until the Taliban either give in or collapse isn't a viable strategy. Most importantly, waiting for a long period could potentially result in millions starving.

The sanctions will kill Afghan people faster than any violation of their rights, as a girl who is dying from hunger and her mother either sell her daughter from hunger or pressured her to marry. The issue of illiteracy and education is meaningless when people are dying of hunger.

The crisis in Afghanistan is at a fundamental level and the US is releasing billions in frozen money into a trust fund that the Taliban can't access to inject stability into the country's financial system, but it's conditional as this would only happen if the process is smoothly executed. The United Nations and World Bank have initiatives at work to try and bridge the gap between humanitarian assistance and long-term aid with adequate developmental funding.

The Afghans deserve better as they are feeling the effects of a government that they didn't choose. 

In reality, there is no simple solution without taking any risks, as 38 million are at risk, and it would be a colossal mistake if we did nothing.