An estimated 2.4 million Afghan girls remain excluded from secondary education five years after the Taliban took over the country, a U.N. agency said Tuesday, renewing a call for an immediate restorat...
What I never seem to find is the Trail of Hunger and Death Behind U.S. Aid Cuts (archive.is). The abysmal Taliban policies towards women end up being used as a flog, seemingly to justify the sanctions that are killing thousands of people - including the 2.4M Afghan girls for whom we’re supposed to care about.
Incidentally, while the US continues to punish Afghans years after our two-decade long occupation officially ended, the country’s eastern neighbor Pakistan is now in open war over a border dispute, killing still more of the country’s vulnerable civilian population via air strikes across the south of the country. This conflict has also gone almost entirely unreported.
USAID is not a famine-prevention program. Its goal is not to save lives. Its leadership is not charged with a charitable mission. It is a tool of the State Department to promote fringe parties, bribe existing governments, and extort opposition parties that have inherited infrastructure laid down by prior administrations.
So about the famine…?
I’m bringing this up not as a gotcha, but to point out that many of these policies people paint with a single coarse brush shockingly do have a postive impact. If it’s an outsized one I imagine is unanswerable, but perhaps going forward we can all celebrate the deaths of programs like this a little less and lament the cessation of what good was done a little more.
We had a program that bought out local communities with food-aid when we were occupying the country militarily.
And then we yanked all the aid and kicked off a famine the day the last soldier took the last plane out of Kabul.
I’m bringing this up not as a gotcha
What’s the gotcha? USAID demonstrably not a famine prevention program, as illustrated by this series of events.
perhaps going forward we can celebrate the deaths of programs like this a little less and lament the cessation of what good was done a little more.
The difference between Bush-to-Biden Era policy and Trump 2 Era policy is “All Stick, No Carrot”. It’s an ineffective policy, because it assumes - incorrectly - that a fuel bomb can do more to bend people to your will than a food truck.
I am not going to lament a program that was used to turn civilian Afghans who’d been rendered destitute and desperate after our initial invasion into cheap, ill-equipped, and disposable goon-squads working on behalf of Northern Alliance child-rapists and opium smugglers.
The mistake we made was carpet bombing Afghanistan to begin with. Then transforming their breadbasket region into commercial poppy farms for global export.
Sending USAID in to plug the hole in national agriculture supply we created during the 2002 invasion, so that we can delay our military exodus by 23 years, isn’t something we should be celebrating.
And then we yanked all the aid and kicked off a famine the day the last soldier took the last plane out of Kabul.
I think you may have gotten the timeline confused here, USAID to Afghanistan continued until Trump took office in Jan 2025 - and per the Doha accord, the US withdrew it’s military (and diplomatic) presence from Afghanistan in august 2021. The Taliban declared the agreement void in 2025 as a response, though fortunately little has come of that from either side. To be clear, USAID payments were not cut off until ~3.5 years after the US withdrew it’s forces, and the current famine is the result of that cessation (medical shortages too, though that’s been greatly exacerbated by the Afghan/Pakistan war) (no argument that even with the barest abstraction it was similarly caused by the vast machine of imperialism)
Also unless I’m misunderstanding what you said here, the soviets were the ones that mined Herat during the soviet-afghan war. It wasn’t destroyed by the US invasion, it had been salted a decade before - british forces spent a great deal of their time trying to actually do the hearts-and-minds thing by demining much of the arable land (the US did do some demining, but almost all of the work was done by the Brits, Afghan army and Taliban-affiliated groups post-doha. Though as I understand it, UXOs are the greater threat left over from the era of the US war).
It’s always been a critical region for food supply - and it has (likely) returned to that role after the taliban’s 2022 ban of poppy cultivation. We know that poppy cultivation in the region seems to have stopped at least, though crop yields aren’t regularly published by the IEA as far as I am aware so it’s solidly in the realm of ‘informed speculation’ (most likely its been turned to Saffron production - a fairly lucrative trade but I will spare the world yet another lecture on the agrieconomics of rural Afghanistan…)
(unless you’re referring to something else as the breadbasket)
Because this is dozens to low hundreds of deaths in this total conflict and Russia is more than that per day. It’s a minor border skirmish. The type that can go on for decades.
Yes, despite casualties it is the definition of a minor border skirmish. It’s a neighbor dispute because there aren’t good fences or a steep border, because the mountains allows small groups to move easily hidden and Pakistan is both a sponsor of terrorism against India in targeted attacks and a victim of other groups.
I see articles about this nearly every week.
What I never seem to find is the Trail of Hunger and Death Behind U.S. Aid Cuts (archive.is). The abysmal Taliban policies towards women end up being used as a flog, seemingly to justify the sanctions that are killing thousands of people - including the 2.4M Afghan girls for whom we’re supposed to care about.
Incidentally, while the US continues to punish Afghans years after our two-decade long occupation officially ended, the country’s eastern neighbor Pakistan is now in open war over a border dispute, killing still more of the country’s vulnerable civilian population via air strikes across the south of the country. This conflict has also gone almost entirely unreported.
So about the famine…?
I’m bringing this up not as a gotcha, but to point out that many of these policies people paint with a single coarse brush shockingly do have a postive impact. If it’s an outsized one I imagine is unanswerable, but perhaps going forward we can all celebrate the deaths of programs like this a little less and lament the cessation of what good was done a little more.
We had a program that bought out local communities with food-aid when we were occupying the country militarily.
And then we yanked all the aid and kicked off a famine the day the last soldier took the last plane out of Kabul.
What’s the gotcha? USAID demonstrably not a famine prevention program, as illustrated by this series of events.
The difference between Bush-to-Biden Era policy and Trump 2 Era policy is “All Stick, No Carrot”. It’s an ineffective policy, because it assumes - incorrectly - that a fuel bomb can do more to bend people to your will than a food truck.
I am not going to lament a program that was used to turn civilian Afghans who’d been rendered destitute and desperate after our initial invasion into cheap, ill-equipped, and disposable goon-squads working on behalf of Northern Alliance child-rapists and opium smugglers.
The mistake we made was carpet bombing Afghanistan to begin with. Then transforming their breadbasket region into commercial poppy farms for global export.
Sending USAID in to plug the hole in national agriculture supply we created during the 2002 invasion, so that we can delay our military exodus by 23 years, isn’t something we should be celebrating.
Finally getting a second to respond:
I think you may have gotten the timeline confused here, USAID to Afghanistan continued until Trump took office in Jan 2025 - and per the Doha accord, the US withdrew it’s military (and diplomatic) presence from Afghanistan in august 2021. The Taliban declared the agreement void in 2025 as a response, though fortunately little has come of that from either side. To be clear, USAID payments were not cut off until ~3.5 years after the US withdrew it’s forces, and the current famine is the result of that cessation (medical shortages too, though that’s been greatly exacerbated by the Afghan/Pakistan war) (no argument that even with the barest abstraction it was similarly caused by the vast machine of imperialism)
Also unless I’m misunderstanding what you said here, the soviets were the ones that mined Herat during the soviet-afghan war. It wasn’t destroyed by the US invasion, it had been salted a decade before - british forces spent a great deal of their time trying to actually do the hearts-and-minds thing by demining much of the arable land (the US did do some demining, but almost all of the work was done by the Brits, Afghan army and Taliban-affiliated groups post-doha. Though as I understand it, UXOs are the greater threat left over from the era of the US war).
It’s always been a critical region for food supply - and it has (likely) returned to that role after the taliban’s 2022 ban of poppy cultivation. We know that poppy cultivation in the region seems to have stopped at least, though crop yields aren’t regularly published by the IEA as far as I am aware so it’s solidly in the realm of ‘informed speculation’ (most likely its been turned to Saffron production - a fairly lucrative trade but I will spare the world yet another lecture on the agrieconomics of rural Afghanistan…)
(unless you’re referring to something else as the breadbasket)
(edited for clarity)
There wasn’t one?
Because this is dozens to low hundreds of deaths in this total conflict and Russia is more than that per day. It’s a minor border skirmish. The type that can go on for decades.
… Minor border skirmish?
Yes, despite casualties it is the definition of a minor border skirmish. It’s a neighbor dispute because there aren’t good fences or a steep border, because the mountains allows small groups to move easily hidden and Pakistan is both a sponsor of terrorism against India in targeted attacks and a victim of other groups.
Okay sure but… did you mean to reply to me with that? It has nothing at all to do with anything I said.
Both horrors, and countless others, can be traced back to the US… No US-based media is allowed to report on all of them… Still wondering why?