Top row, left: Naheed Sarabi; center: Haroun Rahimi; right: Madiha Afzal. Bottom row, left: Kate Clark; right: William Byrd
Brookings Panel Spotlights Humanitarian Aid, Human Rights in Afghanistan
By Elaine Pasquini
Washington: The Brookings Institution held an April 25 webinar to discuss Afghanistan’s human rights and humanitarian crises and the policy options available for the international community to deal with the dire living conditions of Afghanistan’s 40 million people. According to the latest report from Martin Griffiths, the United Nation’s emergency relief coordinator, two-thirds of the country is in need of humanitarian assistance and an estimated six million people are on the brink of famine. World Bank data shows the country’s poverty rate approaching 97 percent.
The human rights crisis stems from the ruling Taliban’s ban on women and girls’ education beyond elementary school and restrictions on females working outside their homes which specifically affects the delivery of humanitarian assistance since the Taliban’s recent decision to prevent women from working with NGOs and even the United Nations, said Brookings fellow Madiha Afzal.
Last year, the UN provided some $3.25 billion in humanitarian assistance for Afghans out of an appeal for $4.4 billion. This year, the UN requested $4.6 billion in aid, however, presently it remains mostly unfunded and there are fears it will stay underfunded.
The sustainability and delivery of humanitarian assistance is under threat due to the Taliban’s actions which have tested the resolve of donors to contribute to the country, she said. There have been some exceptions granted and both NGOs and the UN are in communication with the Taliban, but it is unclear how things are really going to proceed.
The need to move beyond the current way of doing things is clear, Afzal stated. “What that path will be is not yet clear but it’s clear we need to move beyond the current paradigm that the international community has engaged in.”
Brookings visiting fellow Naheed Sarabi, a former assistant representative of the UN food program in Afghanistan who also formerly served in Afghanistan’s Ministry of Finance, noted that under the Republic national assistance programs provided basic services and channeled humanitarian assistance to every corner of Afghanistan.
Unfortunately, the Taliban’s lack of coordination, responsibility and accountability has contributed to the unequal distribution of aid throughout the country. The difficulty with women’s mobility has impacted their access to distribution centers for aid, but also the major blow has been on the women heads of households who do not have male members in their family to go to the distribution centers and access humanitarian aid, she explained.
American University of Afghanistan associate law professor Haroun Rahimi pointed out that when the Taliban took over the economic system was heavily dependent on foreign funds being sent into the country. But, despite this aid, a large portion of the economy, including the service industry, collapsed.
One bright spot, however, was the agricultural sector which was resilient and showed improved growth partly because major hostilities ceased in some parts of the country and farmers could grow more crops.
The Taliban’s ability to take over government institutions went fairly well, Rahimi acknowledged. “The basic structure of the government continued. The Taliban are still mostly paying the public servants.”
But, due to the Taliban’s restrictive edicts, along with general donor fatigue with regard to how to deal with Afghanistan’s fundamental problems, “the continuation of major foreign assistance to the country is in serious jeopardy,” he warned.
“If the Taliban aren’t willing to build the necessary institutions to make the economy work, I think maybe not doing anything would be better than just trying to appear that we are doing something,” Rahimi opined. “Afghanistan won’t become a flourishing economy unless it becomes a place where people want to live and invest.”
William Byrd, senior expert on Afghanistan at the United States Institute of Peace, argued that the international community needs to focus more on the long-term with respect to humanitarian aid rather than just engaging in short-term reaction to the Taliban’s behavior. “There’s been way too much reactivity and not enough forward thinking and forward planning,” he said.
There’s an urgent need for the international community, particularly the donors who actually fund the assistance, to take a broader perspective on this aid which is in the range of $3 billion annually – roughly 20 percent of their current economy, he noted. Bringing in massive aid to deal with a short-term crisis like a flood or other natural disaster is one thing, “but that simply doesn’t work when you have this type of protracted economic downturn.”
When aid in the amount of $3 billion per year is provided, including $2 billion per year in cash directly to the Afghan banking system, “the idea that somehow you’re not helping the Taliban at all is sort of ridiculous and should be thrown out,” Byrd insisted.
The main problem for Afghans now, Kate Clark, co-director of the Afghanistan Analysts Network, said, is the loss of “fundamental freedoms – the right to protest, a free press, a clear and transparent rule of law.” In addition, the government is not representative of Afghanistan’s population. “This is a much less inclusive ruling government than we saw under the Republic which for all its faults had a much more diverse group of people in power in terms of gender and ethnicity. We’re now down to male, largely Pashtun clerics that don’t reflect Afghanistan. Afghanistan needs a pluralist government to survive, and it really needs a government that respects all the citizens not just those it considers to be on their side.”
All the speakers agreed there are no good options for the UN and the international community in trying to help Afghans. “Everything is pretty grim…whether you’re an NGO on the ground trying to work out what to do with the ban on women working or if you look at the whole situation,” Clark said. “Working out a better way of doing things is really, really tough and…the way ahead is far from clear.”
(Elaine Pasquini is a freelance journalist. Her reports appear in the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs and Nuze.Ink.)
