Foreign Aid Is Not the Answer to Afghanistan’s Woes

In fact, it could make them worse.

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Last month, the United Nations put out a funding appeal asking for more than $5 billion of aid for Afghanistan, the largest such appeal ever for a single country. Since the Taliban took over last August, the country’s economy has crumbled and its currency has lost about 20 percent of its value. The evacuation of foreign humanitarian workers and the freezing of government funds by Western countries that refuse to recognize the Taliban government set the stage for the crisis, and an especially untimely drought have made matters worse. 

Half of Afghanistan’s population now faces acute hunger, and as many as 9 million are on the brink of famine. Odds are that the current humanitarian crisis will soon have a death toll far greater than the 20-year Afghanistan war. Despite this, it would be a great mistake to accede to the U.N.’s request for funding.

It’s not that foreign aid is wasteful (though it can be), or that we do not have an international responsibility to help those in need (we do). Rather, I would argue that Afghanistan’s particular situation cannot be solved by foreign aid, and that in fact, foreign aid in all likelihood would make matters worse.

What then makes Afghanistan such an exception?

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  1. Kurt Von Fuchs

    I initially thought you must be being sarcastic. I find the idea of increasing human suffering to move forward your political goals to be repugnant and completely inhuman

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    Dexember

    I did not support the idea of abandoning Afghanistan by removing the protection of our soldiers so that the Taliban would take over. But the rationale for doing that was in part, an isolationist impulse. Trumptards said we shouldn’t spend money on others. Progressive Hippies said the soldiers were doing evil. And a lot of normies weren’t paying attention. So we leave the country. And now people want us to give money and food to the Taliban?

    This is absurd. We have now all seen the stark example of the good of the American military with the image of Afghanistan before and after our surrender. If people really gave a shit about the Afghan people, we wouldn’t have left.

    And if you really want to help them now, support the reinvasion and overthrow the Taliban.

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  3. Pohl

    “A mass famine just a few months after the Taliban takeover . . . might do the trick.” Callous. Humanitarian aid to prevent mass famine should not have giant strings attached. The latter suggestions about refugee camps and how to distribute aid are a little better, but the strategy is ill-conceived.

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    Adicesa14

    Giving aid to the Taliban is insane. Consider the Palestinian Hamas, Iran, and other thuggish regimes. We supply them succor and they use it to purchase weapons and other wares to support their nefarious intentions. Their populations get little if any aid and continue to suffer.

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    DougCLE

    I can appreciate what the author is saying, and if we can deliver aid primarily through non-Taliban sources, whatever those may be, I’m all for it. But if we can’t, well... I’m not okay with starving little kiddies to turn their parents into revolutionaries. The Taliban will get theirs one day, but this isn’t the way to bring that about. The refugee camps will likely be necessary either way; I hope someone’s looking into how to get those set up.

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    Deb4711

    Reading this article helped me understand what bothers me about so much of the foreign affairs reporting in the Dispatch. IMHO, it compares poorly with the domestic political reporting, which provides clear, well-founded analysis --from a particular point of view, to be sure, but that point of view is fully acknowledged. In the foreign affairs reporting, by contrast, most of the writers are promoting their preferred policy goals. This is, of course, perfectly legitimate. However, in my view the two most frequent contributors cherry-pick their evidence and fail to acknowledge their priors -- which makes for very weak argumentation. But I figure, OK, they represent points of view that Dispatch editors think are legitimate topics of public discourse. But -- this one? Do the Dispatch editors really think that proposing to let 9 million people starve to death is a legitimate topic for public discourse?

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    Chris

    I understand there's a debate between letting people starve vs. underwriting the Taliban. A more detailed explanation of how foreign aid actually works, where the money goes, and perhaps some examples of success and failure in the past would be more useful than a highly speculative article attempting to use famine to exact regime change.

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    CVS

    All of this is so obvious I find it sad it needs to be said.

    We can do happy talk all day long. It won't change the fact that so long as the Taliban is in power, Afghans will suffer and die. Period. The rest is details.

    If you aren't even willing to take minimal steps to oppose it, like not funding the Taliban for God's sake (which this de-facto would do, and everyone knows it), you're complicit in their oppression.

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      Victor Clairmont

      I am late to this article.

      I think the framing of the piece is bad.

      If we deny aid it's because we do not want the Taliban to get American funds, as well as taking the bricks of the order we created and claiming they did it better.

      They want to rule? Then learn how a government works and treaties. We have zero obligation now to help them in that.

      The starving argument is a bad one honestly. It may be a product of what goes on, but that hinges on what the Taliban does, not us. They can court Beijing or Russia and drain their funds.

      After all, they signed a deal with China for rare earth mineral rights worth over a trillion dollars in Afghanistan.

      So they clearly negotiate, so why on earth do we have to aid them?

      So to everyone, including the author of this piece, think about that:

      The Taliban who runs Afghanistan signed a a deal worth trillions with China in rare earth minerals.

      If these idiots cannot negotiate for aid packages to keep them afloat, it is not on us.

      Its on them.

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        Paul Reichardt

        But this isn’t really the dynamic that is in play. It’s more complex.

        There’s a liquidity trap being created by the offshoring rush of private cash to keep it safe from the Taliban, who in turn have taken measures restricting domestic transactions to prevent the exodus. Meanwhile international financial institutions—who were designed in part to assist in these kind of liquidity crises—are hampered by sanctions and regulations against dealing with the unrecognized government so they can’t inject cash back into the country. So no one can get money to buy food and supplies from local govt to businesses to families to people.

        This has been building for months. With a few waivers authorized by heads of state, this could probably could have been resolved with a few dozen diplomats and bankers in a room with a box of ball-point pens and be intermediated through the Qataris. It’s not true that the Taliban won’t negotiate on the financial matters with western powers but rather we don’t like the terms or politicians are worried about domestic political downsides of negotiations.

        If there’s a moral case for a “responsibility to protect”, it should apply here to swallow our misgivings with the Taliban, at least in some limited sense, to offset the risk of mass famine.

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        1. Pohl

          Yes, there’s a good article at CSIS on this:
          https://www.csis.org/analysis/assessing-economic-crisis-response-options-afghanistan

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          Victor Clairmont

          They also have a multibillion drug trade to pull from in Afghanistan for funding.

          The liquidity issue I believe is more moot when one considers where the Taliban uses its funds for: Terrorism and the military? Or economic stability?

          Your people lack funding, so why not pull from these clearly huge resources to aid the population or buttress the effect?

          Foreign nations have their rights to not do businesses with other countries they do not recognize. North Korea for decades has been slammed with sanctions and the inability to trade with certain countries.

          Russia and China clearly wants to trade with Afghanistan. The Taliban can choose to invest in their own people that they persecute or not and deal with their friendlies and not expect help from their enemies.

          Governance is never easy, but after a war the losing side (us) has no reason to aid them. Russia did not aid Afghanistan after they withdrew from it decades ago either.

          We cannot make our citizens pay for the Talibans governance. We signed no treaty for this when we pulled out. They should have negotiated that before hand, they didn’t. To pay the people that harbored Al-Qaeda that was responsible for 9-11? I myself wanted out of Afghanistan, not to give reparations or money to a regime that will more than likely steal it.

          If this current administration (Biden) wishes to make the case for aid, that is fine. But the counter claim is this: the Taliban must learn to govern or face the consequences. If they did not think through this part (which it seems they did not), I do not believe it is on us to bail them out.

          Again, if the Taliban choose not to help their own population because they would rather fund their military and their terrorism, and not bother to trade with nations because of theological reasoning rather than practicality, they will unfortunately for their citizens suffer the fate that awaits the victors:

          A toll paid in blood. And the sad thing is this, I don’t believe they will learn a damn thing when the famines really kick in.

          And I cannot argue for giving money to the group that has brought so much misery for the world, especially our American brothers and sisters.

          Pride goeth before a fall, and the Taliban are about to find out the just because you win a war, doesn’t mean you’ve won a nation. Or that Allah will rain mana from heaven.

          Well, that’s how I would have argued if I were to take this article more serious. The “starve them for hostile takeover” was very cringe and I believe morally focused on the wrong aspects of something that might/might not happen.

          Damn what’s going on in Afghanistan sucks, and what’s coming will be terrible.

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            Paul Reichardt

            Or we could just give the Afghans their money back or let the IMF give loans and grants and it wouldn’t cost us a dime.

            Yet Joe Biden just stole $3.5B of frozen assets from the people of Afghanistan (the govt prior to the Taliban taking power who had nothing to do with Al Qaeda) as a give away to 9/11 families to reap domestic political rewards.

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    Paul Reichardt

    To be clear, we’re not just talking miserly concerns about US taxpayer funded “foreign aid”, but even just unfreezing Afghan assets abroad and allowing international institutions to issue loans and grants to alleviate the unfolding humanitarian catastrophe. It’s hard not to read the author's position as just ideology, cynicism, and/or just plain spite. In practical terms, it’s not a good look for the US in the eyes of the world.

    https://www.cnn.com/2022/02/11/politics/executive-order-afghanistan-9-11-humanitarian-aid/index.html

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    Peter Schwartz

    Sort of reminds me of “We had to destroy the village to save it.”

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