Afghanistan needs our help now more than ever

Hurting the Taliban hurts civilians more

Unless we lift our sanctions against the Taliban and facilitate the delivery of humanitarian aid to Afghanistan immediately, millions of Afghan civilians will die in what is rapidly becoming the world’s worst humanitarian crisis. Current estimates tell us that around 23 million people currently face food insecurity, and millions of them will die this winter if conditions don’t improve.

The reasons for this crisis are twofold: (1) Sanctions against the Taliban imposed by the United States and UN member states have prevented the Afghan government from accessing its bank accounts, thus halting almost all government expenditures and preventing any government assistance reaching its people; and (2) a massive drought has destroyed approximately 40% of crops in a country already ravaged by poverty and war. 

According to reporting by Al Jazeera, 75% of Afghanistan’s government expenditures previously came from international aid funding, which has now been all but cut off by US and UN sanctions against the Taliban, the terrorist group that seized power in August 2021 amidst the hectic retreat of NATO forces. NGOs are afraid to provide funding for fear of violating the sanctions, and the Afghan people are the ones who will bear the brunt of it. Now, according to an analysis by the UN World Food Programme, 22.8 million people are facing food insecurity and 8.8 million of those, including 1 million children, could die of famine this winter. 

That is more than 100 times as many civilians as died during the 20-year Afghanistan war, according to numbers provided in the “Costs of War” report by Brown University’s Watson Institute, which estimates that 71,000 Afghan and Pakistani civilians were killed during the conflict. 

A principled stance against the Taliban, freezing the assets of the Central Bank of Afghanistan and refusing humanitarian aid, will actually do more harm than good. Allowing the Taliban to access Afghanistan’s funds and resuming humanitarian aid will save millions of preventable deaths. It will save many times more lives than the Taliban could possibly harm or kill by terrorist activity, indeed many times more than the Taliban has harmed during the entire course of the conflict. Studies have shown that sanctions disproportionately hurt civilians and the poor, while elites and political figures manage to navigate them with little hardship. From the NGO representatives who authored the Al Jazeera article:

For women, the discrimination we are likely to see institutionalised under the Taliban will pale in comparison to the effects of the collapsing economy, which risk setting their right to healthcare and education back decades. The humanitarian crisis that we have only seen the beginning of will affect the Afghan people for generations to come. As women’s rights advocate Jamila Afghani put it in a conversation with the Swedish Committee: “We are not supporting Afghan women by starving them.”

It is worth mentioning also that the actions of western nations, mainly the United States but also Canada and other NATO members, precipitated the formation and rise of the Taliban, Al Qaeda, and the Islamic State. In the 1970s the CIA riled up religious fundamentalism in Afghanistan as a way to oppose communism, which was then gaining support there. When the USSR invaded Afghanistan to stomp out anti-communist rebels, the United States provided weapons and funding via the CIA to groups like the mujahideen, the predecessor to the Taliban. Decades later they would use these same weapons against us in the post-9/11 war on terror.  

According to the Costs of War report, “The war has exacerbated the effects of poverty, malnutrition, poor sanitation, lack of access to health care, and environmental degradation on Afghans’ health.” Since this war was directly and indirectly caused by the actions of the western nations, including Canada, this means we have a moral obligation to provide significant amounts of humanitarian aid to the people of Afghanistan. The first thing we should do is to lift our financial sanctions against Afghanistan and allow them to access the assets of their Central Bank and other major banks, where $10 billion is currently frozen. The other thing we should do is to provide significant humanitarian aid, by supporting the efforts of aid groups already operating in Afghanistan. Such groups include the UN World Food Programme, UNICEF, and the Red Cross. 

This crisis requires us to suspend our political convictions and separate our disgust for terrorism and violence from the suffering of millions of civilians whose situation we helped create. We must act decisively and pragmatically to prevent mass death and suffering among the world’s most desperate people. We must demand that our federal governments lift sanctions and allocate significant aid to mitigate the worst effects of the impending crisis. This will have the biggest impact, allowing the Afghan government to access funds to pay government employees and distribute aid, as well as allowing NGOs to resume their humanitarian efforts there. 

 “We need to separate the politics from the humanitarian imperative. The millions of women, of children, of men in the current crisis in Afghanistan are innocent people who are being condemned to a winter of absolute desperation and potentially death.”

Mary-Ellen McGroarty, the World Food Program’s country director for Afghanistan

This wouldn’t be the first time a war waged by Canada and other NATO members has resulted in a massive humanitarian crisis. Most recently the wars in Yemen and Syria have put millions of civilian lives in jeopardy. The ongoing war in Yemen, between the Iran-backed Houthi rebels and the Saudi-led coalition (supported by a profitable alliance with Canada), has put 20 million civilian lives in peril. Canada continues to supply military equipment including vehicles, rifles, and other tech to Saudi Arabia, which are then used in combat in Yemen. These weapons have been used to commit human rights violations by the Saudis, yet the Trudeau government refuses to cancel the contract. In the war in Syria, Canada conducted 251 airstrikes from 2014 to 2016 before the government ended that action. Today there are still more than 500 Canadian troops deployed in Iraq to participate in the Syrian war. There are currently 13 million people in Syria in need of humanitarian assistance, another 6.7 million internally displaced Syrians, and another 6.5 million refugees worldwide, most of whom are in camps in neighbouring Lebanon, Turkey, and Jordan. 

It should not be surprising that this is the consequence of the wars we wage across the world: countless innocent civilians will inevitably suffer and pay the price for our bloody actions. It should make us wonder whether our military interventions do more harm than good in any conflict which is less than unambiguous. But for now, we need to realize that we are morally responsible, at least in part, for these crises in the Middle East, and for helping resolve them. The current sanctions against Afghanistan amount to an economic war, and a continuation of the 20-year war we waged against that country. We need to act now to end these sanctions to prevent more suffering and death before it’s too late.