“Sometimes we have dinner, sometimes we don’t”: Afghan food crisis becomes dilemma for West with Taliban

At noon, Shakeela Rahmati begins a long walk from her home, located in a poor neighborhood in the hills above the Afghan capital, Kabul.

Along the way, other women silently join the journey. It will take them three hours to reach the city center. But each day, they are driven by a gnawing hunger and the need to feed their children.

Their destination is a bakery, one of many in Kabul, where crowds of women have begun to gather in the late afternoon, patiently waiting for customers to give them some bread.

“Sometimes we have dinner, sometimes we don’t,” says Rahmati. “The situation has been bad for three years, but this last year was the worst. My husband tried to go to Iran to work, but he was deported.”

The United Nations says nearly half the country faces acute famine. According to a May report by the International Rescue Committee (IRC), 43% of Afghanistan’s population lives on less than one meal a day, with 90% of Afghans surveyed reporting that food is their primary need.

These are worrying statistics that sum up the first year of return to the Taliban regime, with the nation isolated and increasingly impoverished. When the United States and its allies left the country, they imposed sanctions, froze $9 billion in central bank funds and suspended foreign aid that once constituted nearly 80% of Afghanistan’s annual budget.

Outside the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, a large mural, one of the few written in English, trumpets the Taliban government’s official stance: “The Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan wants positive, peaceful relationships with the world.”

However, after a year of rule, the Taliban has still not been recognized by a single country in the world, with international funding still largely frozen. One of the main issues for Western countries has been the marginalization of minorities and women by the new government, which includes a ban on secondary education for girls.

The Taliban’s repeated promises to allow girls to return to school have yet to be fulfilled. In late June, Taliban Supreme Leader Haibatullah Akhundzada backed down against international pressure, saying Afghanistan would make its own rules.

“The fact is that the United States is trying to find moral justifications for collectively punishing the people of Afghanistan by freezing assets and imposing sanctions on Afghanistan as a whole,” said Foreign Ministry Spokesperson Abdul Qahar Balkhi, The CNN on Saturday (13).

“I do not believe that any conditions should be stipulated for the release of resources that do not belong to me, that did not belong to the previous government, and that did not belong to the government before the other. This is the collective money of the people of Afghanistan.”

Amid fears of total famine last winter, the US – through the World Bank – released more than $1 billion in aid funding.

“This is an example of an area where we want to continue to have pragmatic dialogue with the Taliban,” he told CNN a high-ranking US State Department official. “We will talk to them about access to humanitarian aid, about measures that we believe can improve the macroeconomic stability of the country.”

But a growing chorus of aid workers and economists say it’s not enough and that the continued freeze of Afghan funds is having a devastating effect.

“This is a message no one wants to hear,” Vicki Aken, director of the International Rescue Committee in Afghanistan, told CNN . “These policies are putting women at risk here. In the name of feminist politics, we are seeing women starve to death.”

According to a senior State Department official, the US is not close to recapitalizing the Afghan central bank. While there have been discussions on the matter, the official said there are still deep concerns about the possibility of assets being diverted to terrorism.

“We have no confidence that this institution has the safeguards and monitoring to manage assets responsibly and inclusively. Needless to say, the Taliban shelter of Al Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri reinforces the deep concerns we have long had about the diversion of funds to terrorist groups,” they said.

The Taliban refuses to acknowledge that al-Zawahiri, who was killed in a US drone strike earlier this month, was in the Afghan capital, further complicating efforts to normalize relations with the Taliban.

In Kabul’s markets, stalls are filled with fresh fruit and produce. The problem, vendors say, is that most people can’t afford them.

“The price of flour has doubled. The price of cooking oil has more than doubled,” says one salesman.

A few feet away, a boy digs through a dumpster, collecting plastic waste to resell.

“Humanitarian aid only buys time. It doesn’t develop, it doesn’t increase income, it doesn’t create jobs,” says Anthony Cordesman, president emeritus of strategy at the bipartisan research organization at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, D.C.

Cordesman warns that Afghanistan’s overall economic decline did not begin with the Taliban’s return to power, nor the country’s dependence on foreign aid.

“If we can find ways to negotiate an effective aid process, where we know the money will go to the people, where it will be distributed widely, where it will not simply support the Taliban government, then those are negotiation initiatives that we should pursue with the greatest of strength. possible”.

“But building a fabric of lies – the equivalent of an aid process based on a house of cards – taking that money, which could go to many other countries that can use aid effectively, makes no sense.”

As Kabul’s nights grow colder and its days get shorter, the fear among aid workers is that this winter will be even worse than the last.

“It’s not in the American interest to see the economy implode,” said the senior US State Department official. “We recognize that the humanitarian crisis remains serious and dire.”