I recently wrote about the fascinating recent book Disaster by Choice. The author, Ilan Kelman, argues that natural disasters are primarily caused by human choice at varying scales of responsibility from individuals to policymakers and, in cases like climate change, the international community as a whole (with some countries bearing more than others). A recent 6.1 earthquake in Afghanistan (on June 22nd) demonstrates many of Kelman’s arguments playing out in a strikingly similar way to the 2010 earthquake in Haiti. The 2010 earthquake was a tragic inevitability following a history shaped by imperialism, corruption, and economic/political instability.
I want to write here about the post-9/11 history of Afghanistan, and how human decisions have created one of the worst humanitarian crises in the world. As with the Haitian earthquake, Afghan people are suffering from a set of decisions they had no part in making. Last week marked the first anniversary of the US ending its war in Afghanistan and what it left in its wake is somehow even worse - a clear sign that the war was never about helping the Afghan people.
The Russian invasion of Ukraine has dominated the media this year. Yet the US involvement in Afghanistan is receiving comparably little attention despite destroying the country for two decades and then abandoning the Afghan people. This abandonment followed a perversely fitting final act of violence by the US as a botched drone strike left ten people dead, including seven children and an aid worker.
The Afghan people are now entirely dependent on international aid after their economy has been strangled by sanctions, their nation has been destroyed by war, and an unstable US-imposed political structure provided fertile ground for the Taliban takeover a year ago. The aid needed for both the humanitarian crisis and the earthquake is lacking and completely inaccessible in some remote areas - mirroring what happened during the Haiti earthquake.
Another cruel reality is that natural disasters feed into a larger cycle of socioeconomic instability, meaning communities are left even more vulnerable in the future. This earthquake has destroyed homes and lives in an area where abject poverty and food insecurity were already the norms. Not only will aid be needed, but coherent long-term planning will be vital to ensure that disasters do not continue to burden Afghans, who have suffered immensely from earthquakes in recent decades. War-damaged infrastructure and a dysfunctional economic/political landscape make a rebuild in the short-term virtually impossible.
The Earthquake: A microcosm of the Crisis
As mentioned, the earthquake had a moderate magnitude of six. Earthquakes of a similar magnitude are common in the US and Japan and rarely lead to even a single death - due to the wealthier countries having more resilient infrastructure, and access to better education, healthcare, and planning. Last year, an earthquake in Fukushima, Japan, recorded as a seven on the Richter Scale, did not kill a single person despite being far more powerful than the quake experienced in Afghanistan - a magnitude seven quake involves ten times the amount of shaking as a six due to the logarithmic scale used. When assessing vulnerability, it is often useful to compare the impact of these disasters with similar events in less vulnerable nations.
Three natural factors did maximise the damage done by moderate shaking. The earthquake was shallow, occurring at only 10 km depth meaning, despite the low magnitude, it was close to the surface leading to more damage. The second factor was the timing of the earthquake, which began at 1:24 am local time while most people were sleeping. Additionally, the region is extremely remote with the local geography characterised by inaccessible terrain, extreme heat, and difficult accessibility - all of which can hinder an effective response where speed is often the difference between life and death for the many people trapped in the rubble.
These natural factors clearly increased the damage, but the death toll was far more a consequence of extreme vulnerability. Many social, political, and economic crises acted to compound the Afghan quake and ensure that destruction was so widespread. This disaster, however, is minuscule compared to the ongoing mass starvation in Afghanistan. While this is the case, it does highlight the significance of how crises often overlap and become even more devastating. Afghanistan is often referred to as “the graveyard of empires” as so many other countries have invaded and failed to succeed in taking over the land. While this has been the case in the more recent Soviet and US occupations (both attempts failed catastrophically), Afghan people have been abandoned and left to starve by the Americans who have told us for 20 years they were protecting Afghans.
Converging Crises in Afghanistan
Poverty, crime, terrorism, and corruption are all rampant in Afghanistan. Regular people always suffer the most during any war and Afghans have had no say in their country's path over recent decades. Their country has been the focal point of a confused proxy war between two global superpowers. Economic warfare waged primarily by the US, plus botched military operations (from the US and the Soviet Union before), compounded the issues that natural hazards, like earthquakes, prey upon.
After the US pulled out of Afghanistan last year, the Taliban assumed control and subjected the Afghan people to even more misery, human rights violations, and poverty. The illegitimate, unelected government emerged from a storied history of the US and then-Soviet regime battling in proxy wars. This geopolitical rivalry resulted in genocidal wars like in Vietnam, with the US government often backing dictators in many countries to depose leaders and supplant their own. In fact, the US has intervened in over 80 foreign elections since World War Two, far more than any other country. The U.S. war addiction turned towards the Middle East following 9/11 with almost unprecedented backing from both political parties and the majority of Americans. The government chose two countries that happened to be enormously resource-rich and went to war again.
Since 9/11, 176,000 people have died in the nation as a direct result of warfare, with millions more killed, displaced, and affected indirectly by poverty, famine, etc. The war became a bonanza for contractors, who vastly outnumbered the military on the ground in Afghanistan. By the time of the withdrawal, little was accomplished despite costing the American taxpayer >$2 trillion. A recent analysis from the Cost of War Project has shown that contractors made $108 billion throughout the occupation, with about a third of the money going to undisclosed recipients. Furthermore, the Pentagon has spent approximately $14 trillion in total since the Afghan occupation, which marked the beginning of the war on terror in its current form.
Poverty rates soared from 33.7% in 2007 to 54.5% in 2016. When the Taliban took control of the country, poverty was at 72% - it has continued to climb even more toward incomprehensible levels that are difficult to gauge due to the enormous scale. Poverty in Afghanistan grew as war profiteers became even more enormously wealthy - Bush, Obama, Trump, and Biden all gave defence contractors and lobbyists key positions of power linked to foreign policy, all of whom have helped fuel this crisis. No matter who is president and which political party has power, the U.S. continues to spread degradation, poverty, and war with virtually no accountability.
Another problem facing Afghanistan is the collapse of its healthcare system, clearly a devastating addition to the other crises in effect. According to the World Health Organisation, only 17% of health facilities and clinics were fully operational in late 2021. Furthermore, a brain drain due to refugees fleeing the war-torn area, a lack of funds to pay healthcare workers and fund equipment, plus medicine shortages are killing many people. This highlights where crises compound and reinforce other crises. Something as benign as an infection can cause death when the healthcare system is in such a poor state, so the extra stress imposed on a collapsing healthcare system will have an enormous impact on the suffering of the Afghan people. In the U.K. we have seen how overwhelmed hospitals can quickly worsen a crisis.
Since the U.S. invasion, there have been some improvements to Afghanistan's life expectancy, women’s rights, education, and health. However, they remain far below the global averages for all these statistics. Furthermore, war inevitably leads to other problems, especially one that lasts over 20 years (and took place in a country reeling from over a decade of Soviet occupation). The U.S. withdrawal and subsequent sanctions imposed against the Taliban government have already unravelled much of the progress made.
It should be so obvious already, but sanctions rarely ever work. Historically, economic warfare carried out by the U.S. penalises the victims of war more often than the oligarchs and leaders of targeted countries. It often results in humanitarian crises that kill hundreds of thousands of people, as will be the case with Afghanistan.
Issues With International Aid: Profiteering, Incompetence, and Lacking Oversight
The White House will pay $55 million in aid for the earthquake. This follows an unpopular decision by the White House to steal $7 billion from Afghanistan earlier this year. They stated that half of this money will go back into aid focusing on Afghanistan, with the rest supporting victims of 9/11. I suspect the bulk of these funds will end up funnelled into American companies that gain contracts to carry out aid work.
An enormous 64.4% of USAID money is swallowed up by consulting firms. Many of the companies routinely mismanage funds and are involved in scandals. Chemonics, the largest USAID contractor, botched its response to the Haiti earthquake in 2010 and was strongly criticized for mishandling an enormous $9.5 billion contract awarded in 2015.
Chemonics also had to pay $500,000 in compensation in 2016 due to racial discrimination in its hiring process. A previous company associated with USAID, International Relief and Development Inc. has been similarly “embroiled in scandal”, including the upper management giving themselves overinflated salaries. The founding minister and his wife made $4.4 million in salaries and bonuses between 2008 and 2012.
The organisation also hired USAID workers, offering them higher-paid positions to leave their government positions - a brazen example of the revolving door between the public and private sectors in action. This hiring process ensured that USAID treated International Relief and Development Inc. favourably, as they secured contracts on enormous infrastructure projects they were entirely unqualified to carry out effectively. The word nonprofit has now effectively been reduced to a tax loophole and is an unregulated, corrupt mess. Defence contractors profit from the weapons used to reduce countries to rubble while predatory nonprofits and contractors swoop in like vultures to “help” nations build while banks provide loans to desperate governments. War is an enormously profitable and easy way to transfer public money into the private sector.
The U.S. pledging large amounts of money is one thing, but how and where this money ends up needs to be scrutinised to ensure rescue operations in Afghanistan are effective and long-term. A recent article has highlighted the recklessness of spending on Afghan relief since 2001, estimating that roughly a third of the relief funds are unaccounted for due to corruption, waste, and abuse.
Improving the Current Situation
Three simple things can alleviate this crisis, which are as follows:
1. The first and most essential part of addressing the situation is for Biden to give back the stolen money to the Taliban. This response will be unpopular for obvious reasons and will be relentlessly attacked by Republicans as seeming “weak”, however, it is the right thing to do to at least help damage control. Even if lots of this money ends up in the hands of corrupt officials, at least the bulk will end up benefiting the Afghan people and helping stimulate their economy. Even if aid is effectively distributed, which is often not the case as I’ve outlined, it only serves as a stopgap solution.
Eventually, food will run out, yet money flowing directly into the economy will circulate throughout and be far more effective at reducing hunger long-term. The U.S. has done far more to export violence than the Taliban could ever hope to but I would never advocate for sanctions that starve half its population. Likewise, Afghan people shouldn’t be condemned for something beyond their control.
Giving the Taliban money is clearly not an ideal situation to be in. However, the U.S. created the conditions where the Taliban became the government and should swallow its pride and return the money. Some money is better than no money and it's worth reiterating that the stolen money equates to a third of the entire annual GDP of the nation.
2. An additional change is urgently needed to stop wasting aid money and to implement better oversight measures. Companies that squander money should be blacklisted for government contracts. An overhaul in the business culture where the government funnels money into the pockets of friendly donors rather than those equipped with the skills and resources to distribute aid effectively is long overdue in America. Food and healthcare are a priority for short-term relief, but aid should also emphasise long-term planning and ways to stimulate economic growth.
3. Third, and finally, the shaming of public officials and media who remain silent on this to protect U.S. interests will go a long way in ensuring assistance. Biden is intentionally starving the nation and has created one of the worst humanitarian crises in the world. He has been arming Ukrainians in their current battle against Russia, all while avoiding solutions that could help Afghans with the stroke of a pen and actively making the situation worse for millions of innocent people. Biden should receive as much disdain as Putin for his role in supporting the initial destabilising war and the fatal sanctions imposed.
I believe that the U.S. should be held accountable for its destructive foreign policy that has a profound impact on other people and should be forced to distribute funding to Afghanistan with oversight measures in place. The current Ukraine war costs the American taxpayer over $300 million per day, approximately the same as the Afghanistan war. Just as Ukrainians have the right to defend their land against hostile invaders, Afghans have a right not to starve to death. It is interesting to see how much attention the war crimes of the enemy receive while those carried out by allies are swept under the rug.
As if everything I have mentioned here isn’t horrifying enough, Afghanistan is extremely susceptible to climate change and has experienced severe droughts in recent years to add even more fuel to the geopolitical fire. The average Afghan emits 0.2 metric tons of CO2 per year, compared to 14.7 for the average American.
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Red Cross Afghan appeal Link: https://donate.redcross.org.uk/appeal/afghanistan-crisis-appeal
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