These are excerpts from Ezra Klein’s column in today’s Times. It is worth noting that the United States is responsible for funding and creating the mujahedeen/taliban. It’s as if we put Hitler in power and then walked away. Our crimes against the Afghan people are only intensifying and it’s now all on Biden who doesn’t seem to give a damn. (Are the “crazy radicals” right? Do we only care about oppressed people who are white?)
It was Biden’s unforced error (precipitate half-assed withdrawal) that caused all this and his latest one (slashing humanitarian funds) that is making this catastrophe infinitely worse.
Again, we caused this catastrophe, starting in 1979. We should have stayed (with a limited troop commitment) until we ensured that innocent Afghan people would not suffer by our departure. After all, why do we have a military and an all-volunteer one at that if the enlisted men and women are not permitted to do the job so many are are most proud of: helping the innocent.
But, hey, we didn’t care about the Jews of Europe either. Although, unlike the case with Afghanistan, we didn’t create their oppressors. This one, though, is all on us, but mostly Biden.
EZRA KLEIN
If Joe Biden Doesn’t Change Course, This Will Be His Worst Failure
Feb. 20, 2022
Ninety-five percent of Afghans don’t have enough to eat. Nearly nine million are at risk of starvation. The U.N.’s emergency aid request, at more than $5 billion, is the largest it has ever made for a single country. “The current humanitarian crisis could kill far more Afghans than the past 20 years of war,” David Miliband, president of the International Rescue Committee, wrote recently.
And we bear much of the blame. We have turned a crisis into a catastrophe.
The drought in Afghanistan is the worst in decades. The Taliban is a brutal regime that has no idea how to manage an economy, and in many ways is barely trying. “Remember, the Emirate had not promised you the provision of food,” Mullah Muhammad Hassan, the head of the Taliban regime, said. “The Emirate has kept its promises. It is God who has promised his creatures the provision of food.”
But neither drought nor Taliban mismanagement fully explain the horror unfolding in Afghanistan. “The long and short of it is Western economic restrictions are creating an economic crisis in the country which is driving tens of millions Afghans into starvation,” Graeme Smith, an Afghanistan expert at the International Crisis Group, told me.
In August, President Biden withdrew American troops from Afghan soil. But even as we left Afghanistan’s land, we tightened a noose around its economy. The Afghan economy was built around our support. Roughly 45 percent of the G.D.P. and 75 percent of government spending was foreign aid. When we abruptly cut off that cash, we sent it into a tailspin.
Then we went further. We froze more than $9 billion that belonged to the Afghan government — the vast majority of its foreign reserves. Sanctions that had long applied to the Taliban as a terrorist group suddenly applied to the government of Afghanistan, and few companies or countries dared violate them. “If state collapse was the object of policy, it could hardly be better designed,” Miliband told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in unusually blunt testimony.
“You saw people who had jobs in August,” Shelley Thakral, who works for the World Food Program in Afghanistan, said. “Teachers, construction workers, people who worked in offices — they don’t have jobs anymore. I remember coming in November, and sitting in some of our distribution sites and seeing people who, especially in Kabul, were just lost. They were standing in line for food assistance for the first time in their lives.”
I was more sympathetic than many to the chaos that accompanied the American withdrawal. We lost too many of our own, and left behind too many who had risked their lives at our side, but the core of the catastrophe stemmed from failures previous administrations had covered up or refused to face. There is no good way to lose a war.
What’s happening now is different. Economic collapse was predictable, and it was predicted. As the economic historian Adam Tooze put it in August, “The Taliban may threaten Afghan freedom and rights, but it is the abrupt end to funding from the West that jeopardizes Afghanistan’s material survival.” That we did so little to stop it, and so much to worsen it, is unconscionable….
Faced with this mess, the Biden administration proposed a bizarre deal wherein the 9/11 families will get half the money [the $9 billion in frozen Afghan assets we hold] and the other half will be put toward Afghanistan’s humanitarian crisis, though no one yet knows how. The way the Biden administration sees it, it fought to make sure Afghans get some of that money back, at potential political cost.
But in both the sanctions and the seizures, you can see an almost Kafka-esque madness in the American position. They are expending all this effort to ameliorate the consequences of a sanctions regime they are implementing. They are desperately brokering deals to preserve foreign reserves that they are freezing. When I ask why they continue to impose these policies at all, the administration says that the Taliban has American prisoners, that it is a brutal regime that murders opponents and represses women, that it has links to terrorists, and that our sanctions grant us much-needed leverage.
But what is that leverage, exactly? “To destabilize Taliban rule, the U.S. is weaponizing the aid-dependent Afghan state that it built,” wrote Spencer Ackerman, a national security reporter, in his excellent newsletter, Forever Wars. “This economic weapon works by harming the Afghan people directly, with the hope that the suffering of the people prompts the end of the Taliban regime.”
That this will work — that these sanctions will destabilize the Taliban or persuade them to make the changes we want — is a hypothesis. It is only the Afghans’ suffering that is fact. You do not have to absolve the Taliban of their sins to wonder if this policy makes sense.
“The reality is that the only thing Washington has control over is its own actions,” Adam Weinstein, a research fellow at the Quincy Institute, and a former Marine who was deployed to Afghanistan in 2012, told me. “It has a choice here to not make things worse for Afghans. And it’s actively choosing instead to make them exponentially worse.”