I remember fondly lingering over breakfasts with my hosts on cold winter mornings during their winter break from school in Kabul, Afghanistan, during the past decade. Seated on the floor, wearing coats and hats and draped with blankets, we’d sip piping hot green tea as we shared fresh, warm wheels of bread purchased from the nearest baker.
But this winter, for desperate millions of Afghans, the bread isn’t there. The decades-long U.S. assault on Afghanistan’s people has now taken the vengeful form of freezing their shattered, starving country’s assets.
Our rented spaces in Afghanistan were like other homes in the working class area. They didn’t have central heating, flush toilets, refrigerators, or clean water. My Afghan friends lived very simple lives, but they tried to share their resources with others who were less fortunate.
They helped mothers in poverty to earn a living wage. manufacturing heavy, life-saving blanketsThey distributed blankets to refugees in camps without fuel money. They also organized a school for child laborers, working out ways to give the children’s families food rations in compensation for time spent studying rather than working as street vendors in Kabul.
Some of my young friends spoke with me and others who were part of our group that had traveled to Iraq between 1996 and 2003. We witnessed the effects of U.S.-led economic sanctions. directly contributedTo the deaths of half a million Iraqi children below the age of five. I remember the young Afghans that I told this story to shaking their heads, confused. They wondered why any country would want to punish infants and children who couldn’t possibly control a government.
Dominik Stillhart (head of the International Committee of the Red Cross) said that he had visited Afghanistan in the latter part of last year. felt livid over the collective punishment being imposed on Afghans through the freezing of the country’s assets. Referring to $9.5 billion of Afghan assets presently frozen by the United States, he recently emphasized that economic sanctions “meant to punish those in power in Kabul are instead freezing millions of people across Afghanistan out of the basics they need to survive.” The myopic effort to punish the Taliban by freezing Afghan assets has left the country on the brink of starvation.
These $9.5 Billion worth of frozen assets belong Afghans, which includes people who are without income or farmers who can’t feed their livestock and cultivate their land. These funds belong to those who are starving and freezing, and are being deprived from education and health care as the Afghan economy collapses under the pressure of U.S. sanctions.
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I recently received an email from a Kabul-based friend.
“Living conditions are very difficult for people who do not have bread to eat and fuel to heat their homes,” the young friend wrote. “A child died from cold in a house near me, and several families came to my house today to help them with money. One of them wept and told me that they had not eaten in forty-eight hour and that their two children were now unconscious from hunger and cold. She didn’t have the money to feed them. I wanted to share my heartache with you.”
Forty-eightMembers of Congress written to U.S. President Joe Biden calling for the unfreezing of Afghanistan’s assets. “By denying international reserves to Afghanistan’s private sector—including more than $7 billion belonging to Afghanistan and deposited at the [U.S.] Federal Reserve—the U.S. government is impacting the general population.”
The Congressmembers added, “We fear, as aid groups do, that maintaining this policy could cause more civilian deaths in the coming year than were lost in twenty years of war.”
For two decades, the United States’ support for puppet regimes in Afghanistan made that country dependent on foreign assistance as though it were on life support. 95% of the population, of which more than three-quarters are women and children were below the poverty line, while corruption, embezzlement and waste benefited many warlords including U.S. contractors.
After the United States invaded Afghanistan and engulfed them in a futile nightmare for twenty years, the United States owes the Afghan people reparations. Not starvation.
The eminent human rights advocate and international law professor Richard Falk recently emailed U.S. peace activists encouraging an upcoming February 14 Valentine Day’s initiative, which calls for the unfreezing of Afghan assets, lifting any residual sanctions, and opposing their maintenance. Professor Falk acknowledges that the disastrous U.S. mission in Afghanistan amounted to “twenty years of expensive, bloody, destructive futility that has left the country in a shambles with bleak future prospects.”
“After the experience of the past twenty years,” Falk writes in the email, “it seems time for the Afghans to be allowed to solve their problems without outside interference. I am sure many people of good will tried to help Afghanistan achieve more humane results than were on the agenda of the Taliban, but foreign interference particularly by the United States is not the way to achieve positive state-building goals.”
A few friends and I were able send a small amount to the friend who wrote to us and shared her pain at not being able to help the needy neighbors. “Thank you for hearing our Afghan pain,” she and her spouse responded.
It is crucial to listen now and not look away.
