On our minds: The American war in Afghanistan, which is not over for Afghans. |
Is the United States Driving Afghanistan Toward Famine? |
 | | Children at the Charahi Qambar refugee camp in Kabul.Victor J. Blue for The New York Times |
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American policies toward Afghanistan are pushing the country into an economic crisis that already shows signs of setting off a famine, according to increasingly urgent warnings from analysts, aid groups and economists. |
The danger of mass starvation has been rising since the American withdrawal in August, they say, when Washington placed severe economic restrictions on the Taliban government that are choking off the country's economy. |
The United Nations World Food Program predicts that 23 million people, more than half of Afghanistan's population, will face severe food insecurity as soon as next month. |
"Children are going to die," David Beasley, the U.N. program chief, told Reuters this week. "People are going to starve." |
Mr. Beasley was careful not to single out the United States. But he warned that if foreign restrictions on Afghanistan's economy remained in place, there would be a growing certainty of "millions of people, and especially children, dying." |
Afghanistan's crisis is more specific and more acute than insufficient foreign aid. American-imposed restrictions on the country's banking system are causing a severe shortage in hard currency. This is driving up inflation, making goods more expensive, just as it is also stifling the country's ability to maintain imports. Much of Afghanistan's food is imported. |
At some point, possibly soon, Afghanistan's rapidly dwindling currency reserves will be depleted. This is all but certain to cause a stop on imports, blocking millions of Afghans from access to food, economists say, as well as likely bank runs and currency devaluation. |
But despite intense American interest in Afghanistan's fate this summer, both supporters and critics of President Biden's withdrawal decision have largely moved on. Forestalling famine would require policy changes implicitly acknowledging Taliban rule, something that neither party is eager to encourage. |
Mr. Biden's Treasury Department announced recently that it had no intentions of lifting the restrictions driving the crisis. |
"I don't know much louder or more often I can say this: because of U.S. restrictions on the banking sector, the Afghan economy is collapsing," Fatima Ayub, a policy director at Crisis Action, a conflict aid group, wrote on Twitter of the announcement. "Millions of people will die if this problem isn't fixed in order to get cash and liquidity into the system." |
Afghanistan's Crisis, Explained |
Many countries run trade deficits, in which the value of their imports exceeds that of imports. Normally, this is fine. But Afghanistan suffers a condition common to war zones: It has very little domestic capacity and so must import goods, including food and electricity, worth several times the value of its exports. |
Trade deficits don't get charged on credit; they have to be paid for with hard currency. Afghanistan, to cover its deficit, sends out billions of dollars in currency every year. Some of this comes from tax revenue, most from foreign aid. |
Afghanistan had built up a stockpile of currency reserves: $9.4 billion, enough to cover about 18 months' worth of imports. But all of that is held in banks abroad, including $7 billion in the United States. But when the Taliban took over, Washington froze the money. |
The U.S. simultaneously halted its direct foreign aid, cutting off the flow of dollars that replenished those reserves. |
Now, Afghanistan has only $110 million to $220 million worth of reserves on hand, Afghan officials tell Stefanie Glinski, a journalist based in the country. |
When that runs out, it will cause what economists call a "sudden stop," in which imports largely halt. The government would also no longer be able to pay its civil servants, risking a shutdown in what few services remain. And regular citizens would no longer be able to get access to cash. |
The result would be blackouts resulting from electricity shortages, halted trade and transportation as fuel imports run dry and, worst of all, a severe food shortage. |
Worsening things, the value of Afghanistan's currency, the afghani, would most likely plummet as citizens and speculators rushed to exchange it for safer foreign currencies. That could set off hyperinflation, rendering what few goods remain unaffordable. |
"There is little doubt that at least some of the feedback pathways are primed and ready to explode in Afghanistan," Ed Dolan, a Yale University economist, wrote of the threat of hyperinflation. |
This would also obliterate the value of any money or assets that citizens or businesses hold, all but resetting the Afghan middle class — whose fate was a focal point of U.S. withdrawal debates — back to zero. |
The Taliban government is taking steps to forestall this, imposing restrictions on imports, withholding some civil servants' salaries and barring citizens from withdrawing more than $200 per week. |
But in several ways, the crisis has already begun. Many Afghans have abandoned the afghani for stabler foreign currencies. Inflation is spiking, putting basic goods out of many citizens' reach. The prices of fuel and cooking oil have more than doubled. The price of flour is up 20 percent. |
In parts of the country, it is even worse. Eggs and flour have more than doubled in price in Ghazni Province, according to Halima Kazem, a journalist. Such steep increases encourage hoarding, which drives up prices further. |
Partly as a result, 14 million Afghans already face food security, with three million children suffering from acute malnutrition, according to the World Food Program. |
International agencies or charities are largely unable to supply aid or food because of another American restriction: economic sanctions. |
Since 2002, the United States has designated the Taliban an international terrorist group, barring all business with them. Now that the Taliban are Afghanistan's government, this forbids most aid in the country, even if it is granted directly to Afghan civilians. |
The Treasury Department has opened some humanitarian exceptions to sanctions. But these are so narrow and vaguely defined that most international groups have concluded they have no choice but to stop all services in Afghanistan, according to a paper by the Center for Global Development. |
As a result, not only are aid groups unable to ameliorate the food shortages imperiling many civilians, they have had to pull back even from services they offered before the Taliban takeover. |
"Before the Taliban came into Kabul, we had estimated over 50 percent were living below the poverty line; by the beginning of next year it's going to be 97 percent," Kanni Wignaraja, a senior leader in the United Nations Development Program, told the BBC. |
"We've not seen this level of near universal poverty in any country in recent history," she added. |
Other factors have worsened the dangers. A drought has reduced domestic agricultural output. So has recent rural fighting. The Taliban government has struggled or failed to resume basic services. Thousands of civilians fled the Taliban's sweep through the country this summer, creating large displaced populations in Kabul and other cities. |
But the crisis is, in large part, American-made, imposed by deliberate policy choices with results that were predicted months in advance. |
"You've got to unfreeze these funds so people can survive," Mr. Beasley, the World Food Program chief, told Reuters. Mr. Beasley is a former Republican governor of South Carolina. |
Washington has not budged. Unfreezing Afghanistan's currency or easing sanctions would mean acknowledging Taliban rule and giving that government greater resources and odds of survival. |
Still, the costs of this policy are imposed largely on the very Afghan civilians whom American policy is ostensibly designed to protect. American war-making in Vietnam, and later Afghanistan, was sometimes sardonically described as "destroying the village in order to save it." Now the United States may be starving the village in order to save it. |
The Center for Global Development, in its report, suggested some middle-ground policies to forestall disaster without fully liberating the Taliban government from economic restrictions. |
Washington might "allow limited, monitored release of reserves to pay for essential imports" like food and fuel, or to prop up the value of the afghani, the report's authors wrote. Releasing the reserves conditionally could, they wrote, could "help meet the needs of ordinary Afghans facing food insecurity without giving the Taliban discretionary control." |
Even this, though, would require a shift from Washington, effectively cooperating with the Taliban in Afghanistan's reconstitution from food insecurity and runaway inflation. That may be hard for American policymakers and politicians to stomach. Even harder, perhaps, than imposing the conditions for a famine that may be increasingly imminent. |
"Sanctions and withholding funds won't affect the high-up Taliban, they have support and money for a lifetime," Ali M. Latifi, a Kabul-based Al Jazeera English reporter, tweeted. "So when you say not to release the funds, you are literally allowing millions to starve and insuring others lose their jobs." |
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