Afghanistan’s decades of loss

With the western world’s attention now riveted to the unfolding chaos in Ukraine, the desperation of people in Afghanistan seems to have become old news. As a result, the UN’s goal to raise $4.4 billion to address the debilitating humanitarian crisis in Afghanistan has fallen short by nearly $2 billion. This reluctance of major donors to provide the required funds for the Humanitarian Response Plan for Afghanistan will severely constrain the provision of life saving assistance to over 22 million Afghans in desperate need of help.

Humanitarian agencies have persistently been warning of a growing crisis in Afghanistan after the halt in international aid, and the freezing of Afghan assets in the US, following the Taliban takeover in August 2021. Half of the Afghan population is facing acute hunger while the country is in the grip of the worst drought in decades. The healthcare sector has collapsed, and millions of children are out of school. Millions of people are internally displaced, and the Afghan economy is still in free fall.

Neighbouring states fear that the complete collapse of Afghanistan will cause further destabilisation in the region which will invariably spill across their borders. Yet, the international community is not ready to recognise the Taliban. The Taliban have just reneged on their promise to allow girls beyond sixth grade to return to school, they have begun implementing other draconian measures to constrain women’s movement, and they have further clamped down on the media. The targeting of civil rights activists and those who worked with NATO forces also continues. These on-ground actions indicate that the initial Taliban claims of striving for reconciliation and moderation cannot be taken seriously.

The international community has begrudgingly agreed to route some funds via humanitarian agencies to ease the plight of ordinary citizens. However, Afghanistan will need much more than humanitarian aid to survive as a nation state. But donor fatigue and growing concern that the Taliban are trying to assert control over humanitarian operations is creating further impediments to providing ordinary Afghans a lifeline to meet their most urgent needs.

It is perplexing to see the current dismal situation in Afghanistan despite the enormous amount of funds spent in the country over the past twenty years. The Watson Institute at Brown University estimates that the US alone had spent over $2 trillion in Afghanistan over the course of the past twenty years. Of course, much of this money was spent on the upkeep of the American military presence in the country, and another sizeable chunk of these funds was spent on training the Afghan army, which dissipated into thin air as soon as NATO forces left the country. Nonetheless, billions of dollars were spent on improving governance, on infrastructure development, and on the provision of basic social services to the Afghan people. Yet, the Afghan economy remained entirely dependent on foreign aid, and it collapsed as soon as the inflow of aid was halted. Beyond major cities like Kabul, Mazar, Jalalabad, Herat, and Kandahar, life for ordinary Afghans had not changed much in any case.

The blame for the dismal failure of state building in Afghanistan does not entirely rest on the corrupt Afghan government but also on an array of development agencies and private contractors who used up billions of dollars to implement top-heavy aid programs. According to internal assessments by the US Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, most of the US funded projects were carried out at exorbitant cost, despite serving very modest portions of the Afghan population.

Even if pragmatic elements within the Taliban manage to convince their hardline leaders to soften their stance to secure some semblance of recognition from the rest of the world, it is unlikely that Afghanistan will foreseeably see anywhere near the sort of money which poured into the country over these last two decades. It is thus a shame that the international community and both the Karzai and Ghani governments squandered their chances of making Afghanistan a stable and self-sustainable country.

Published in The Express Tribune, April 8^th, 2022.

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