Afghanistan

berbatrick said:
I knew about it about 3 months ago from twitter accounts. People were asking Biden and there was an attempted bill in Congress which was voted down ~2 weeks ago. I open the Guardian homepage everyday. I'm not sure it made the front page before this week.
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There have been several articles in the Guardian over the past months about this going back longer than your twitter feed showing it. Including an Editorial Board piece. Just because you haven't seen it doesn't mean it is not happening. Your twitter feed is curated to how you want it to be. Other people who use it don't all see what you see nor do you see what they see. And most people do not use twitter but can still see the news. Probably in better light because you have to actually take the time to read the articles and not just a headline or caption.

The west seems to think that freezing Afghanistan’s reserves, turning off financial flows from the International Monetary Fund and halting the World Bank’s activities will force the Taliban to provide assurances of good behaviour. The opposite will be the case. Food riots in Kabul will embolden the Taliban hardliners, lead to more repression, encourage the growth of the opium economy and drive the regime into the hands of China.
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https://www.theguardian.com/busines...ith-the-taliban-and-provide-financial-support

Today, Afghanistan’s achievements are under threat, and not just from the Taliban. Western governments are cutting the aid lifelines that sustain the country’s economy and finance health, education and other services. The International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank suspended operations. Bilateral donors have collectively pulled the plug on anything other than humanitarian support.

The policy is counterproductive. It threatens to reverse the human development gains made possible through 20 years of aid investment, allied to the quiet heroism of teachers such as Ahmed, health workers and Afghan civil society organisations. Sadly, the UK is complicit.
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https://www.theguardian.com/global-...stan-aid-cuts-could-undo-20-years-of-progress

Access to food aid and other life-saving services in Afghanistan is close to running out, the United Nations has warned, as concern mounts that the country is facing a “looming humanitarian catastrophe”.

The grim assessment from the UN’s Office for the coordination of humanitarian affairs [OCHA] came amid an appeal for an extra $200m (£145m) in emergency funding in Afghanistan after the Taliban’s takeover sparked a host of new issues.

The UN says 18 million people are facing a humanitarian disaster, and a further 18 million could quickly join them.

The warning came as the UN’s children’s agency, Unicef, disclosed that it had registered hundreds of children who had been separated from their families in the chaos of the evacuation from Kabul’s Hamid Karzai international airport.

The children included unaccompanied minors who ended up on flights to countries including Germany and Qatar.

With several key donors including Germany, the World Bank and EU suspending their aid programmes follow the Taliban’s lightning military conquest of the country last month, spiralling food prices, the impact or recent devastating drought and uncertainty over how the hardline Islamist movement will provide services to an impoverished and largely rural population, the question of aid has become ever more urgent.
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https://www.theguardian.com/global-...s-collapsing-and-aid-about-to-run-out-says-un

The global attention has dissipated, but the crisis is intensifying. The bleak year that Afghans have endured is turning to a still bleaker winter. The UN World Food Programme (WFP) predicts that almost 23 million people – more than half the population – will face crisis or emergency levels of acute food insecurity before spring: the highest rate ever recorded. On Thursday, the UN envoy to the country, Deborah Lyons, warned that it is on the brink of catastrophe.

This year, the WFP’s operations in Afghanistan are expected to cost $510m; it predicts that it will need almost five times that amount in 2022. The economy shrank by 40% after the Taliban seized power again in August, on top of the devastation wrought by long-running conflict, the pandemic and a severe drought. An economy heavily dependent on aid and other foreign cash has had the tap turned off. The population is larger than before, making subsistence farming tougher; migration is harder. People are running out of things to sell. Food and fuel prices have reportedly soared by up to 75%. Women have been especially hard-hit.
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https://www.theguardian.com/comment...iew-on-afghanistan-a-fast-developing-disaster

The war in Afghanistan did not end when US and UK troops left Kabul airport last year; it merely took a different, but still lethal, form.

The response of President Joe Biden to the military humiliation inflicted on America by the Taliban has been a scorched-earth policy designed to cause the maximum amount of economic damage to what was already one of the world’s poorest countries.

Prosecuting this war by other means involved freezing Afghan state assets held in New York. It meant the threat of sanctions against banks and other foreign companies doing business in Afghanistan. It has involved halting payments from the World Bank’s Afghanistan Reconstruction Trust Fund (ARTF). It meant no emergency Covid-19 financial help from the International Monetary Fund.

At the time, it was obvious that this withdrawal of overseas financial aid – which accounted for almost half of Afghanistan’s gross domestic product in 2020 – would have a disastrous impact, and so it has proved.

While the illicit opium-based trade is still going strong, the rest of the economy has pretty much collapsed. On average, firms have laid off 60% of their workers. The price of basic foodstuffs has risen by 40%. More than half the population is in need of humanitarian assistance and the poverty rate is in the region of 90%. By some distance, these are the highest levels of distress anywhere in the world. The UN children’s fund Unicef estimates that more than a million Afghan children are at risk of dying from malnutrition or hunger-related disease.
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https://www.theguardian.com/busines...-war-on-afghanistan-amounts-to-a-humanitarian
 
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Boycott said:
There have been several articles in the Guardian over the past months about this going back longer than your twitter feed showing it. Including an Editorial Board piece. Just because you haven't seen it doesn't mean it is not happening. Your twitter feed is curated to how you want it to be. Other people who use it don't all see what you see nor do you see what they see. And most people do not use twitter but can still see the news. Probably in better light because you have to actually take the time to read the articles and not just a headline or caption.



https://www.theguardian.com/busines...ith-the-taliban-and-provide-financial-support



https://www.theguardian.com/global-...stan-aid-cuts-could-undo-20-years-of-progress



https://www.theguardian.com/global-...s-collapsing-and-aid-about-to-run-out-says-un



https://www.theguardian.com/comment...iew-on-afghanistan-a-fast-developing-disaster



https://www.theguardian.com/busines...-war-on-afghanistan-amounts-to-a-humanitarian
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Cool googling.
1. I specified the front page, and I doubt many of those appeared on the front page. I specified stuff from earlier than 2 weeks ago, and one of these is from 6 days ago.

2. You've linked 5 articles. The 1st makes a tangential reference to Bank funds being frozen by the US, but that's not the main point of the article. The 2nd one doesn't mention this at all. The 3rd one doesn't mention this at all. The 4th one doesn't mention this at all. The 5th one is from this week.
 
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berbatrick said:
Cool googling.
1. I specified the front page, and I doubt many of those appeared on the front page. I specified stuff from earlier than 2 weeks ago, and one of these is from 6 days ago.

2. You've linked 5 articles. The 1st makes a tangential reference to funds being frozen by the US, but that's not the main point of the article. The 2nd one doesn't mention this at all. The 3rd one doesn't mention this at all. The 4th one doesn't mention this at all. The 5th one is from this week.
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If you don't think an editorial board article ("The Guardian view...") makes the front page then I doubt you actually read The Guardian. Moreover the point of these articles is that The Guardian (the site you chose to highlight) did in fact cover the topic of the humanitarian crisis in depth and ongoing as a result of the tap being turned off from the international community led by the US. The US froze those funds in August when the news was about nothing but Afghanistan. It doesn't take a genius to understand these things are related and what the broader analysis is about.

I read The Guardian and I read their pieces across various topics. Same with The Independent, the BBC, Reuters and others. I also do check out alternate sources but if you are actually independently minded you should apply the same standards editorially to alternate sources too. Twitter or youtube news pages are as full of deceit and clickbait as anything mainstream. And news of significance is not something they ignored and that you have to be on twitter 24/7 to know about it. if you actually read the comment I was responding to in the first place, this discussion is about the lazy line that the mainstream media is not covering a subject when in fact you are reacting to a story from by the mainstream media.
 
Boycott said:
If you don't think an editorial board article ("The Guardian view...") makes the front page then I doubt you actually read The Guardian. Moreover the point of these articles is that The Guardian (the site you chose to highlight) did in fact cover the topic of the humanitarian crisis in depth and ongoing as a result of the tap being turned off from the international community led by the US. The US froze those funds in August when the news was about nothing but Afghanistan. It doesn't take a genius to understand these things are related and what the broader analysis is about.
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Aid funding is one issue, which is linked to but different from Afghan national bank funds. The reason this thread was recently bumped wasn't because of the freeze in aid funding, it was because of the US' decision to appropriate a few billion dollars of 3rd world wealth (in the midst of a humanitarian crisis).
I don't live in the UK, I read the online edition. Not sure where every article comes up. I vaguely remember the humanitarian disaster stories in the Guardian and elsewhere. I don't specifically remember the freezing of Afghan funds being mentioned. And indeed it is mentioned as an aside in one of the 4 relevant stories you picked, and nowhere else.

Just to reiterate, there was even a bill proposed about this, which went to a vote in the US House, not some obscure event in a forgotten corner, and that didn't make the front page news either.
 
berbatrick said:
Aid funding is one issue, which is linked to but different from Afghan national bank funds. The reason this thread was recently bumped wasn't because of the freeze in aid funding, it was because of the US' decision to appropriate a few billion dollars of 3rd world wealth (in the midst of a humanitarian crisis).
I don't live in the UK, I read the online edition. Not sure where every article comes up. I vaguely remember the humanitarian disaster stories in the Guardian and elsewhere. I don't specifically remember the freezing of Afghan funds being mentioned. And indeed it is mentioned as an aside in one of the 4 relevant stories you picked, and nowhere else.

Just to reiterate, there was even a bill proposed about this, which went to a vote in the US House, not some obscure event in a forgotten corner, and that didn't make the front page news either.
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The BBC is the most visited news website in the world. They covered the story: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-58261659 online and on TV. I know because I watched it happen. It was heavily reported about the funding being frozen across the board because the entire month of August was non-stop Afghanistan news. To the point that a story about Boris Johnson prioritising dog evacuations over humans was a controversy in the UK.

The Independent is another UK paper I read as I said. This was a story I read months ago.

https://www.independent.co.uk/asia/south-asia/afghanistan-aid-foreign-funds-taliban-b1921134.html

Which was a great piece of analysis following the aftermath of the decision to freeze funds they reported here.

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/...istan-money-taliban-us-reserves-b1903511.html

My point is not to argue with you over whether it was right or wrong because I'm being pretty unequivocal it was a cruel thing to do and the wrong thing to do. I also don't think Joe Biden handled the exit well at all and made that point at the time in this thread with the only excuse that can be made for him is that perhaps there was no way to have done it better. A lot of people argue otherwise. What my point is, and this is the last I'll say of it since we're going in circles, is the notion that the media aren't talking about these things which is becoming a lazy strawman on this forum but also in general. The outrage that came to the breaking news about the 9/11 victims part of the story was because the New York Time broke that story and didn't just bury it as a side to the story of releasing the funds. Another example, the drone strikes that killed an aid worker and his family was investigated and exposed by the New York Times. And yet you still had people saying "the media won't talk about this" when one of the biggest newspapers in the world was responsible for getting that truth out there. Lots of people have made a living in recent years not doing any original reporting except pretend the media isn't talking about the things they (the 24/7 tweeter, the youtube host, the podcaster) does ..... which they only talk about because it was a media story first. The laziest and worst trope of this is the people who screenshot headlines of articles to make a gotcha point without ever posting the link to the actual article itself - probably because if people actually read the articles there's a lot more to be said by the author of the article who is not responsible for the headlines.
 
Our social infrastructure is so shit nowadays. Some of these problems sound as if they can be put down to people being fish out of water, but the system to integrate them and support them to stand on their own two foot is shockingly bereft.

 
More carnage yesterday directed at Afghan Shi’a:



Also reports of an attack on Sufis in Kunduz

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‘I am sure they will change’: Taliban swap guns for pens to learn about human rights
Young men who have spent most of their lives in combat are learning how to behave with civilians as the Taliban transitions from fighting to governing

“What is the problem with bringing weapons inside a hospital?” trainer Raouf asks.

“People will be scared,” a young Taliban member answers.

“It will have a bad effect on sick people,” another says.

This two-day class on international humanitarian law (IHL), organised by Geneva Call, a humanitarian organisation, takes place in Kandahar, southern Afghanistan.

“Did you ever bring your gun inside the hospital?” Raouf asks. All the fighters laugh. “Yes,” they say, “of course!”
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https://www.theguardian.com/global-...wap-guns-for-pens-to-learn-about-human-rights
 
Amanpour manages to score an interview with Siraj, who doesn't look at her once throughout while the cameras are rolling.

 
Afghanistan: 'I drug my hungry children to help them sleep'

Afghans are giving their hungry children medicines to sedate them - others have sold their daughters and organs to survive. In the second winter since the Taliban took over and foreign funds were frozen, millions are a step away from famine.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-63733683
 
If such basic denial of basic human rights is their “culture”

then EFF that culture. It needs to be ruined and rebuilt from scratch.

Afghans really deserve better. Very nice people.

hopefully the upcoming revolution in Iran and removal of theocratic terrorist regime can inspire Afghanistan too
 
They’re a bunch of hypocrites. Their leader’s daughters are both in a school in Doha iirc.
 
VorZakone said:
How is this legally even possible?
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Seems like abduction US military style. You can only hope the US courts do the right thing, but I'm not convinced they will.
 
RedTiger said:
It seems the long awaited Afghanistan and Pakistan conflict might be kicking off soon, many afghan troops are moving towards the durand line.
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They were going after TTP targets inside Afghanistan apparently. There's little the Afghan Taliban can do given that Pakistan have much better weapons, including planes and more.
 
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