The multitude of crises facing Afghans

Afghans are on the verge of a famine -- will anyone care?

Since I last wrote this newsletter, almost everything has changed for Afghanistan, almost all of it for the worse. The Taliban has control over the country and is re-affirming its grip by extending its cruel, repressive rule. Rather than turn a new leaf, the Taliban — as expectedly — has followed the theocratic/autocratic playbook to a T. It has excluded almost all of Afghan society from power while spending its first 18 months in power erasing the hard-earned gains of the past 20 years.

Lots can be said about the painful change of power in August of 2021, because much of it was predicted by many of us, including those now exiled outside the country. The United States, inadvertent or not, brought the Taliban back to power as it slowly started losing the aimless war it started in 2001.

Now, in 2023, the multitude of crises facing Afghans is almost unbearable. Women can’t go to school as the Taliban have instilled gender apartheid while ethnically cleansing Afghanistan’s marginalized non-Pashtun communities. There is an unrelenting economic and humanitarian crisis, pushing almost the entirety of the Afghan population to the brink. Climate change and the fight for survival is forcing Afghans to seek safety elsewhere with nothing but closed pathways around them.

For four decades, the West has either had two policies in regards to Afghanistan. In the eighties, it fueled conflict through its covert supplies of arms. Then in the nineties, it was allowing the country to starve by pretending the country didn’t exist. Then after 2001, it went back to fueling conflict for two-long decades. It must be noted that the U.S. obviously wasn’t the only party to this war—the mujahedin, the Taliban the Soviets, Afghanistan’s neighbors all took part.

As America is eager to forget Afghanistan, it has turned to an old familiar policy yet again: letting Afghans starve to death. As the World Food Programme warns that “catastrophic hunger knocks on Afghanistan’s doors,” the world continues to look away. America is eager to send stinger missiles and drop bombs on Afghanistan, but can’t even find $93 million to ensure 9 million Afghans can be fed. This is Afghanistan’s biggest threat of famine in over 25 years, when widespread hunger was the baseline during the Taliban’s dark rule of the 90s.

“If foreign aid is cut or stopped, what should we do? There is no work, there is no money, so all of us will be dying in poverty and hunger.”

The question is: will the world even care?