Newsletter

Climate: in 2021, increasingly costly disasters, according to an NGO

KABUL: Few countries have experienced a 2021 year as tumultuous as Afghanistan, now in Taliban hands and in a dire humanitarian situation now that winter is hitting.

The rebels took over the country in mid-August with a speed that stunned everyone, even themselves, to the point that many Afghans still wonder what exactly happened and what the future will be made.

The world will be marked for a long time by these images of Afghans falling from the sky of Kabul, after having tried in vain to cling to the last evacuation planes abroad to flee the new regime or misery.

For the Taliban, the main challenge remains to transform a rebellion of often poorly educated fighters into an administration capable of managing a complex and diverse country.

For Westerners, led by the United States and their NATO allies, the fear is twofold: to see the country slide even more into poverty, causing a new exile of tens of thousands of Afghans, and that terrorist groups like Al-Qaeda, long an ally of the Taliban, used it as a refuge as before the attacks of September 11, 2001.

The Afghan in the street will seek above all to keep or find something to eat, a place to sleep and a job, with the risk for women of being excluded from public space, as under the Taliban for years. 1990.

“The consequences of regime change have been immediate and calamitous,” said analyst Kate Clark in a report published for the Afghanistan Analysts Network (AAN).

According to her, the Taliban precipitated their military victory and suddenly had “no plan to manage the Afghan state without external aid”.

“When they were in the rebellion, they taxed the populations of the regions they controlled, but could leave public services in the hands of the government and NGOs”, largely financed by international aid, she adds.

“Now they are in power (…) at the head of a state with greatly reduced income, while they must take care of an entire population” of some 40 million inhabitants.

Women on the wire

One of the major problems of the Taliban remains the collapse of the administration.

More than 120,000 Afghans were airlifted from Kabul airport in the chaotic final weeks of the US occupation in late August. An often qualified population which had worked with countries or foreign companies to manage for 20 years the billions of dollars of aid which carried at arm’s length the State budget.

Now deprived of this aid, the Taliban government can only count on its own resources, taxes and customs in particular.

He only announced at the end of November that he was going to pay salaries to civil servants, who have not received anything for several months, demotivating many of them.

“I go to the office every morning, but there is nothing to do,” sighs Hazrullah, an executive at the Foreign Ministry, who prefers to keep his last name silent: “Before, I was negotiating trade agreements with our neighbors. now we have no further education, no one knows anything. “

In many ministries, few Taliban officials seem to know how to use a computer.

The Taliban find it difficult to convince that they will be more open than under their iron rule between 1996 and 2001, when they oppressed women and harshly punished opponents.

In the cities at least, they give more freedom: women, for example, are no longer obliged to wear the burqa or to have a male chaperone with them to go out, even if they must again be accompanied on long journeys. .

But they give other more worrying signals: except in health, female civil servants have not returned to the office. They also announced the reopening of middle and high schools for boys, but not for girls.

“It is for their safety”, assure the Taliban, while the main risk for schools in recent years, the attacks of the Taliban, have disappeared with their seizure of power.

While it frightened the educated Afghans of the cities, the change of regime brought in many campaigns, more conservative and favorable to the former insurgents, what they waited for 20 years: the end of the Western bombings and peace.

Against the watch

The respite was short-lived, as the Taliban soon found themselves confronted with a bloody rebellion, that of their jihadist rivals the Islamic State (EI-K) group, which targets the Shiite minority in particular.

But it is above all the state of the country’s economy, already one of the poorest in the world and which is sinking with the end of international aid, which will dictate its future and that of the Afghans, now threatened by a crisis. major humanitarian aid.

Humanitarian organizations are sounding the alarm bells. The UN evokes a race against time: with the onset of the harsh winter, nearly 23 million Afghans, or 55% of the population, are threatened by famine.

Donors want to avoid dealing with a pariah regime at the international level that no country has recognized so far. And the Taliban believe their victory is clear enough not to have to compromise in exchange, especially on women’s rights.

Beam of hope, the UN Security Council on Wednesday adopted a resolution proposed by the United States facilitating humanitarian aid for one year. A resolution described as a “good step” by the Islamic regime.

At the local level, some NGOs manage to bypass the Taliban authorities to distribute some aid to the most needy.

But at the national level, the Taliban cannot give the image of a power subjugated abroad, and insist on having control of all aid, which inconveniences many donors.

All this does not encourage optimism for the future of this country ravaged by more than 40 years of war.

For Kate Clark, “the economic benefits of peace will remain marginal compared to the damage caused by the loss of foreign aid and the isolation that Afghanistan now faces.”

Comments

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Trending