Afghanistan, a Failed Country in Duress

Taliban guards patrol the streets of Kabul

"Children are going to die. People are going to starve. Things are going to get a lot worse."

"I don't know how you don't have millions of people, and especially children, dying at the rate we are going, with the lack of funding and the collapsing of the economy."

"What we are predicting is coming true much faster than we anticipated. Kabul fell faster than anybody anticipated and the economy is falling faster than that."

"You've got to unfreeze these funds [repurposing development assistance to humanitarian aid] so people can survive."

David Beasley, executive director, World Food Program

Every day brings labourers looking for work - but there is little to go round

In the most sorrowful of sinister warnings, it has begun; children are dying and more will follow. Eight orphaned children, all under the age of ten, whose parents had died and who were left to fend for themselves, dependent on handouts from neighbours and strangers in a country where food is scarce and people are facing starvation, did die of starvation. Neglected, no one to be concerned for their welfare, they were simply unable to cope with the challenge of finding enough food somewhere to sustain their existence.

 

This happened in the capital city of Afghanistan. An estimated fifty percent of the population of poverty-wrenched Afghanistan now face food shortages. A serious situation is becoming utterly dire. The country looms on the brink of experiencing the worst humanitarian crisis in the world. Similar warnings are issued by the United Nations from time to time; starvation in Somalia, in Yemen, Democratic Republic of Congo, Liberia, Haiti, Central African Republic, and the list goes on. 

 

Tribal and sectarian conflict, internal and external challenges leading to war and persecution. Where there is war, farmers cannot cultivate their fields. Where there is conflict, people flee their towns and villages, becoming homeless and  refugees, finding both shelter and food and welcome hard to come by. A newly-impoverished Afghanistan, victimized by corruption, by ethnic, clan and sectarian violence, now the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, has seen international funding dry up, humanitarian charity unwilling to fund the Taliban.

 

Going to bed hungry is the new reality in a country that has seen decades of war

Drought, war and poverty have accompanied the rise to power of the Taliban; endemic, now acute. The eight dead children left on their own to survive, failed to and their bodies were found in West Kabul according to local leaders. Suffering from a tumour their bedridden father had died, and their mother, with heart disease soon followed their father in death, explained local cleric Mohammad Ali Bamiani. Neighbours occasionally brought them bread and water; it was their landlord who found the bodies.

 

The new Taliban administration in Afghanistan, nurtured by Pakistan, accepted by its near neighbours has been blacklisted from accessing overseas-located assets. Charitable funding meant to aid in reconstruction and development would be better used, suggested the World Food Program head, by transforming its purpose to feeding the hungry in Afghanistan. Who now resort to the desperate measures of selling anything they own to obtain food. 

 

To even hope to begin minimally feeding the 23 million food-vulnerable population as winter approaches, the UN food agency requires $220 million each month. Aid groups urge wealthy nations to swallow their distaste in dealing with a violently aggressive Islamist group by diplomatic engagement in hopes of preventing a social/economic collapse that could launch yet another catastrophic crisis of mass migration.

 

Most Afghans are now trying to feed themselves and their children after the economy collapsed