Ukraine vs. Afghanistan

Over $100 Billion has been allocated to Ukraine this year, but that still isn't enough. So NATO looked around and found billions more in a de facto slush fund.

The money, known as the Afghan National Army Trust Fund, supported equipment and training for troops. Kyiv has asked NATO nations to consider reallocating some of the $3.4 billion to help support their effort to fight Russia, two of the Western officials said...
The push to reallocate the Afghan funds appears mostly uncontroversial within the alliance...
The U.S. is not a participant in the Afghan National Army Trust Fund. But senior Biden officials have urged their European allies to continue to help finance Ukraine’s operations despite the growing financial strains.

The process of returning money from the account to donor countries has already begun, but the Afghan National Army Trust Fund is one of a number of such efforts aimed at helping Afghanistan that have been frozen, shut down or repurposed since the fall of Kabul.

Uncontroversial?
Let's consider the situation in Afghanistan right now, where two-thirds of the population - 28 million people will require humanitarian assistance next year.
Six million Afghanis are currently on the brink of famine. Women and children are being hit especially hard. Remember when we cared about the women of Afghanistan?

Meanwhile, the gender gap in food insecure individuals is large as “female -headed households are suffering disproportionate levels of hunger, with 99 percent now facing insufficient food consumption amid growing restrictions on women and girls” (WFP). Women have been sitting outside bakeries in the hopes of kind strangers buying bread for them in Kabul. An Afghan woman said “My daughters cry from hunger….I knock on the neighbors’ doors to ask for spare food. I ask the Taliban at the checkpoints if they have dry bread” (NPR). In both countries, food insecurity can also lead to social issues such as young women being forced off to marry just so their families have one less person to feed and in the hopes of them living a better life.

Well, it's not like we are ignoring Afghanistan. USAID reports that America has given Afghanistan $1.1 Billion in humanitarian aid since last summer, which is not an insignificant amount.
However, that number is deceptive because the reality is that we haven't "given" Afghanistan anything that we didn't originally steal from them.

The United States is preparing to announce the release of a significant portion of seized Afghan central bank funds after months of silence. The funds will be transferred to the Bank of International Settlements in Basel, Switzerland, and the U.S. will set up a trusteeship to oversee the disbursement of the money for the purposes of both monetary policy and humanitarian aid.
...“The [Da Afghanistan Bank] funds belong to DAB and should be returned to Afghanistan,” said Suhail Shaheen, a spokesperson for the Taliban who serves as head of the political office. “In this critical time when 99% of Afghans are living under the poverty line, it is direly needed that the reserve[s] return to the country.”

After the fall of Kabul to the Taliban, the U.S. seized $7 billion of foreign currency reserves from Da Afghanistan Bank and directed European allies to seize another $2 billion stored there. Without reserve currency to stabilize prices and balance exports and imports, the Afghan economy went berserk, with prices skyrocketing, the currency collapsing, and imports halting. Personal bank accounts were frozen, and paychecks for most workers stopped cold. The result has been a dystopian scenario: Widespread famine touching more than 90 percent of the population, even as food supplies remained plentiful. More than 1 million Afghans have fled the country because of these conditions.

While Europe has given Ukrainian refugees priority, a quarter of a million Afghan refugees have been deported back to this famine-stricken country from just Iran and Turkey alone.

Share
up
14 users have voted.

Comments

Cassiodorus's picture

Under imperialism the world-picture promoted by the war capitalists is that echoed by Immanuel Wallerstein and the world-systems theorists. In this picture, there is a "core," a "periphery," and a "semi-periphery." The core is composed of the trilateral nations: the US (and Commonwealth), Europe, and Japan. The periphery is, clearly, Afghanistan among others. The war capitalists think Afghanistan is good for minerals and opium and a bit of cheap labor. The exception to this tidy view is to be found in the semi-periphery. The semi-periphery are those countries of the periphery which hope through industrial might to distinguish themselves from the rest of the periphery. Brazil, India, and China come to mind. Russia is an aspiring semi-periphery, and thus in their view must be reduced to the periphery. Beyond the semi-periphery, the world-picture of world-systems theory is that of the core exploiting the resources of the periphery.

It appears that, given what this diary has said, the picture is static, at least in the minds of the imperialists (war capitalists) in power. Ukraine is core, because it's Europe, whereas Afghanistan is periphery, because it isn't.

up
6 users have voted.

“When there's no fight over programme, the election becomes a casting exercise. Trump's win is the unstoppable consequence of this situation.” - Jean-Luc Melanchon

lotlizard's picture

@Cassiodorus  

up
5 users have voted.