The US economic war on Afghanistan amounts to a humanitarian crime | Larry

The war in Afghanistan did not end when US and UK troops left Kabul airport last year: it merely took a different, but still lethal, form.

The response of President Joe Biden to the military humiliation inflicted on America by the Taliban has been a scorched earth policy designed to cause the maximum amount of economic damage to what was already one of the world’s poorest countries.

Prosecuting this war by other means involved freezing Afghan state assets held in New York. It meant the threat of sanctions against banks and other foreign companies doing business in Afghanistan. It has involved halting payments from the World Bank’s Afghanistan Reconstruction Trust Fund (ARTF). It meant no emergency Covid-19 financial help from the International Monetary Fund.

At the time, it was obvious this withdrawal of overseas financial aid – which accounted for almost half of Afghanistan’s gross domestic product in 2020 – would have a disastrous impact, and so it has proved.

While the illicit opium-based trade is still going strong, the rest of the economy has pretty much collapsed. On average, firms have laid off 60% of their workers. The price of basic foodstuffs has risen by 40%. More than half the population is in need of humanitarian assistance and the poverty rate is in the region of 90%. By some distance, these are the highest levels of distress anywhere in the world. The UN children’s fund (Unicef) estimates more than a million Afghan children are at risk of dying from malnutrition or hunger-related disease.

The statistics don’t capture the full picture, of people so desperate for food that they are selling their young daughters into marriage or having their organs removed for cash. What is clear is that rather than selectively targeting the Taliban, the US and its European allies are inflicting collective punishment on an entire country in the misguided belief that this is somehow upholding western values. Letting children go hungry does not uphold western values. Closing schools because teachers are going unpaid does not uphold estern values. Having lost the war, Washington is now losing the peace.

Some humanitarian funding is arriving in Afghanistan through UN agencies and some of the leading development charities, but it is a fraction of the aid that was flowing in to keep schools open and the salaries of public sector workers before the Taliban takeover. Precise estimates of the scale of short-term help being provided are difficult because conditions are so chaotic it is hard to say whether the cash being airlifted in is actually getting to where it is needed. But it is probably around 10% of the $8.5bn (£6.2bn) a year that was coming in before the Taliban takeover. As one observer put it, the west’s approach has been to torpedo the economy and then provide a couple of leaky lifeboats to pick up the survivors.

Afghanistan’s new rulers did not have an economic plan in August, and still don’t six months on. To an extent they don’t need one because they have a ready-made alibi: the economy is a mess because the Americans decided to make it so. There is not the slightest evidence that impoverishing the Afghan people is…