If you followed the US media’s coverage of Joe Biden’s trip to Saudi Arabia, you might think the most consequential decision he faced was whether to shake Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s hand.
I'm visiting Afghanistan as a tourist, after having been away for some years, and since I suddenly became Twitter-famous the other day for making some general comments about life in Kabul, I've been trying to organize my thoughts on this issue.
TL/DR: the situation here is more complicated than most people realize, so this will be a little rambling.
It's important not to overlook the question of *how* the central bank funds should be released. Advocacy groups like "Unfreeze Afghanistan" are proposing that the money be handed over in tranches, with outside monitoring of how they're used. You can legitimately ask what right the US has to impose conditions of any kind, but if the goal is to improve the humanitarian situation I think this will be more effective than handing cash over with no strings attached. The World Food Program has already been forced to cancel some relief projects here because the local authorities insisted on controlling food distribution, so I doubt the central bank would start to function effectively just because $9 billion was made available.
I also think it's important to stress that the freezing of the central bank funds is only one of several factors crippling the economy. I would have said before I arrived that there are two others: a severe drought and a demand shock caused by the sudden stop of war-related spending.
The drought might be the single factor contributing the most to malnutrition in rural areas, but strictly in dollar terms I think the end of the war economy might have done more damage than anything else. (The FY2021 US military budget included $14 billion to be spent in Afghanistan, and that doesn't count inflows of non-military aid.) This was an unavoidable consequence of pulling NATO forces out and it's wrong to represent it as *primarily* a result of the funds freeze.
Now that I'm here, it turns out that there are several other issues I wasn't aware of.
Construction activity, which was a major source of unskilled employment, has completely stopped. The funds freeze might be one reason for that since real estate is probably the sector most dependent on a functional banking system, but I think it probably would have happened regardless. Private investment halted because investors didn't know what would happen next, and also because the Taliban says it will reclaim urban land plots that were grabbed by powerful people under the old regime.
I also heard something really surprising today, which I need to double-check because you hear a lot of weird stuff here. Apparently there's a general ban on any new construction, even if all you want to do is add another floor to your house. (Afghans are very shocked that any government would tell them what to do on their own land.) I'm pretty sure it's correct, though, because one of the people I had lunch with today is a carpenter who's unemployed because there's no new building allowed in his area of suburban Kabul.
I'm not bringing these things up to argue that the funds freeze is good. But it seems to me there are two competing narratives about the current situation in Afghanistan, and they're both wrong.
On the one hand: it's not true that the Taliban have created a totalitarian state here, at least not in the sense that most outsiders are probably visualizing it. Women are technically required to cover their faces but in central Kabul, a clear majority are ignoring the new policy. Outlying areas of town are more compliant, probably because there was more voluntary face-covering to begin with, but you still see women breaking the rules with no apparent consequences.
On the other hand: claims about large-scale starvation here are also grossly exaggerated, and to the extent they're true I don't think the functionality of the central bank is the main problem. The Famine Early Warning System recently identified two districts in central Afghanistan (Ghor province) where 20,000 people are living in famine conditions, but that's a small area and I think not well connected to the market economy.
It's true that millions of people are facing great hardship now, though well short of catastrophe. But the situation should be described accurately. Joe Biden is not causing a famine here and to the extent that he's made general food security worse, it's mainly by pulling the plug on the war.
You can see how the two narratives interact when people talk about the issue of girls' schools.
One group of people says the Taliban are bad because they shut the schools down (true but not the whole story, since the school system is collapsing anyway for lack of funds).
The other group says Biden is bad because he froze the central bank funds (true but not the country's most serious problem), that public services are disintegrating (also true but not primarily a result of sanctions), and that unfreezing the funds would stop the collapse (not true, I think).
He was responding to a very specific section of Breinart's piece. A section that did beg some questions that the fair response addressed. It was not off-topic imo.
Thank you very much for this article. Your work is very important in giving us a better understanding of the issues. I just subscribed to Jewish Currents.
Until the past weekend, I felt I was figuratively bearing the problems of the Middle East on my shoulders. Thank you so much for what you're doing to bring understand of the depth of the issues and their ramifications on the lives of innocent people throughout the region.
Peter, you are the perfect spokesperson and I am a proud listener.
Excellent commentary. The pretense of innocence has been sold to American citizens for decades, and our complicity-through selling arms and failing to use diplomatic clout- in warfare carried out by Saudi Arabia as well as Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and its imprisonment of Gaza makes such pretense all the more outrageous.
"Israel is “the best $3 billion investment we make,” he declared. “Were there not an Israel,” he added, “the United States of America would have to invent an Israel to protect our interests in the region.”
Hey Peter no one is an innocent. You of all people know that. When it comes to Iran we and the Brits blew up a legitimate government and installed the Shah and I suggest others here would d do well to read Democracy in Chains by Nancy McClean to see what we installed in Chile (and PS I think your subscribers would find her very interesting).
But.
Lets stop sermonizing about how bad the Saudis are, yes they are bad, and how we shouldn’t be selling them our military goods, many of which have been made popular by Israel’s success in using them. Oh and the notion that Yemen and Vietnam have some sort of equivalency p-l-e-a-s-e.
None of the players in the Middle East are the likes of Norway, Denmark an Luxembourg. And as you pointed out neither are we. The real politic of the Middle East is that today (not tomorrow I hope) Iran is the enemy. Iran is in fact needlessly aggressive regardless of what anyone thinks of them. They have their forces in Syria and proxies in throughout the Middle East. As you must know in the Middle East its muscle that gets respect. The various members of the Abraham Accords did not become Jew lovers overnight. Its Israel’s might and protection they seek.
We have to stop going off on all these moral tangents or at least stop being selective. After all Turkey is occupying half of Cypress (I hear no protest or comments) and similar occupations are going on Western Africa. And Iran, Iraq, Syria and Turkey occupy and persecute the Kurds a legitimate indigenous ethnic population. The pimples are everywhere.
The fact is if we do not supply these weapons to Saudi Arabia and its “league” we will be handing over Yemen to Iran’s proxies. So choose your bad guys. But it will be bad guys you are choosing and not choosing them simply opens the door for China and Russia.
Didn’t the Saudis and the UAE just say they had no interest in joining an anti-Iran coalition?
Maybe that’s all a public smokescreen and they are saying different things behind closed doors, but at face value both nations are purportedly serious in pursuing diplomatic alternatives to escalation. Intermittent Israeli air strikes into Syria are one thing, but a hot war in the Persian Gulf is something else entirely. Iran could cripple the economies of both nations in short order. You think Morocco, Sudan, and Bahrain are going to come to their rescue?
So it seems to be only Israel and (as usual) American hawks pushing for direct military confrontation with Iran.
“Israel has been stealing nuclear secrets and covertly making bombs since the 1950s. And western governments, including Britain and the US, turn a blind eye. But how can we expect Iran to curb its nuclear ambitions if the Israelis won't come clean?
The tale serves as a historical counterpoint to today's drawn-out struggle over Iran's nuclear ambitions. The parallels are not exact – Israel, unlike Iran, never signed up to the 1968 NPT so could not violate it. But it almost certainly broke a treaty banning nuclear tests, as well as countless national and international laws restricting the traffic in nuclear materials and technology.
The list of nations that secretly sold Israel the material and expertise to make nuclear warheads, or who turned a blind eye to its theft, include today's staunchest campaigners against proliferation: the US, France, Germany, Britain and even Norway.”
First of all, it’s hard to compare US and European policies directed towards the pro-western pre-1979 Iranian government and the current one. The those policies surely would have been different had Iran been an anti-western Islamic republic in the 1960’s.
In the near present, Iran agreed to the original JCPOA without requiring any constraints on Israel’s secret-not-secret nuclear weapons, presumably because they assess Israel is unlikely to use them. Iran also ceased their nuclear weapons program in 2003 for their own internal reasons—doubtfully for any perceived lessened threat from the Israelis.
I think the Israelis also believe it would be suicide for the Iranians to use nukes against Israel if they had them.
Unlike, say, India and Pakistan, I don’t think Israel and Iran are natural enemies. All the talk of apocalyptic threats to Israel from Iran today were the same kinds of things said about the Saudis 40 years ago.
I agree that Israel is pushing the US to act on Iran. And everyone else will be saying: “we are right behind you”, since they too would like Iran to fall but are incapable of doing much of anything.
It would be very foolish for Israel to go up against Iran regardless of the outcome. If you look at world history from the past century aggressors invariably wind up paying the price.
Israel has a lot more to gain by just being on the sidelines when it comes to Iran, with the possible exception of keeping them at bay in Syria. Sooner or later the Iranian regime will give way, it will collapse from within. It does not have the support of the Iranian people.
Israel’s best course is to daily remind the Iranian people through its Persian language broadcast that the Jewish people are historically linked to them. Jewish ancestry is from that part of the world. A Persian King let the exiled Babylonian Jews return to their homeland and the Maccabees were saved by the Persians when Antiochus, their Syrian Greek tormentor, decided to take on the Persians and was killed in battle. Judea thrived for a hundred years until the religious zealots decided to take on the Romans. Sounds familiar? I pray history does not repeat itself.
Great article ! I would love to have a credible individual who has a different view point comment on this article . It would assist me in confirming or not my views . Carl .
But Peter's with the Quincy Institute (my friend Masuda Sultan, of Unfreeze Afghanistan, has worked with them also) and although I'm absolutely in favor of releasing the funds, I think Quincy's discussion of this issue needs a little more nuance.
I'm visiting Afghanistan as a tourist, after having been away for some years, and since I suddenly became Twitter-famous the other day for making some general comments about life in Kabul, I've been trying to organize my thoughts on this issue.
TL/DR: the situation here is more complicated than most people realize, so this will be a little rambling.
It's important not to overlook the question of *how* the central bank funds should be released. Advocacy groups like "Unfreeze Afghanistan" are proposing that the money be handed over in tranches, with outside monitoring of how they're used. You can legitimately ask what right the US has to impose conditions of any kind, but if the goal is to improve the humanitarian situation I think this will be more effective than handing cash over with no strings attached. The World Food Program has already been forced to cancel some relief projects here because the local authorities insisted on controlling food distribution, so I doubt the central bank would start to function effectively just because $9 billion was made available.
I also think it's important to stress that the freezing of the central bank funds is only one of several factors crippling the economy. I would have said before I arrived that there are two others: a severe drought and a demand shock caused by the sudden stop of war-related spending.
The drought might be the single factor contributing the most to malnutrition in rural areas, but strictly in dollar terms I think the end of the war economy might have done more damage than anything else. (The FY2021 US military budget included $14 billion to be spent in Afghanistan, and that doesn't count inflows of non-military aid.) This was an unavoidable consequence of pulling NATO forces out and it's wrong to represent it as *primarily* a result of the funds freeze.
Now that I'm here, it turns out that there are several other issues I wasn't aware of.
Construction activity, which was a major source of unskilled employment, has completely stopped. The funds freeze might be one reason for that since real estate is probably the sector most dependent on a functional banking system, but I think it probably would have happened regardless. Private investment halted because investors didn't know what would happen next, and also because the Taliban says it will reclaim urban land plots that were grabbed by powerful people under the old regime.
I also heard something really surprising today, which I need to double-check because you hear a lot of weird stuff here. Apparently there's a general ban on any new construction, even if all you want to do is add another floor to your house. (Afghans are very shocked that any government would tell them what to do on their own land.) I'm pretty sure it's correct, though, because one of the people I had lunch with today is a carpenter who's unemployed because there's no new building allowed in his area of suburban Kabul.
I'm not bringing these things up to argue that the funds freeze is good. But it seems to me there are two competing narratives about the current situation in Afghanistan, and they're both wrong.
On the one hand: it's not true that the Taliban have created a totalitarian state here, at least not in the sense that most outsiders are probably visualizing it. Women are technically required to cover their faces but in central Kabul, a clear majority are ignoring the new policy. Outlying areas of town are more compliant, probably because there was more voluntary face-covering to begin with, but you still see women breaking the rules with no apparent consequences.
On the other hand: claims about large-scale starvation here are also grossly exaggerated, and to the extent they're true I don't think the functionality of the central bank is the main problem. The Famine Early Warning System recently identified two districts in central Afghanistan (Ghor province) where 20,000 people are living in famine conditions, but that's a small area and I think not well connected to the market economy.
It's true that millions of people are facing great hardship now, though well short of catastrophe. But the situation should be described accurately. Joe Biden is not causing a famine here and to the extent that he's made general food security worse, it's mainly by pulling the plug on the war.
You can see how the two narratives interact when people talk about the issue of girls' schools.
One group of people says the Taliban are bad because they shut the schools down (true but not the whole story, since the school system is collapsing anyway for lack of funds).
The other group says Biden is bad because he froze the central bank funds (true but not the country's most serious problem), that public services are disintegrating (also true but not primarily a result of sanctions), and that unfreezing the funds would stop the collapse (not true, I think).
I said it was complicated :)
You're using someone else's blog to drop your own off-topic post. I hope you got permission.
He was responding to a very specific section of Breinart's piece. A section that did beg some questions that the fair response addressed. It was not off-topic imo.
It's Beinart.
Afghanistan is a dead horse.
Thank you very much for this article. Your work is very important in giving us a better understanding of the issues. I just subscribed to Jewish Currents.
Heelen Michaels
That's terrific. Thank you!
Until the past weekend, I felt I was figuratively bearing the problems of the Middle East on my shoulders. Thank you so much for what you're doing to bring understand of the depth of the issues and their ramifications on the lives of innocent people throughout the region.
Peter, you are the perfect spokesperson and I am a proud listener.
Thank you Shirley. I truly appreciate it
Excellent commentary. The pretense of innocence has been sold to American citizens for decades, and our complicity-through selling arms and failing to use diplomatic clout- in warfare carried out by Saudi Arabia as well as Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and its imprisonment of Gaza makes such pretense all the more outrageous.
Thank you
How sanctimonious will you get?
Amen. Preach brother. The false narrative continuously propagated by the media, including the NYTimes pulls the wool over our eyes.
On the 24 July 1986, Joe Biden blasted George Schultz, the secretary of state on South African Apartheid.
https://youtu.be/0_v00iGJCLY
The same year he said
"Israel is “the best $3 billion investment we make,” he declared. “Were there not an Israel,” he added, “the United States of America would have to invent an Israel to protect our interests in the region.”
https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/ali-abunimah/joe-bidens-love-affair-israel-will-pick-where-it-left
The native American Indian might say, Joe speaks with a forked tongue.
Hey Peter no one is an innocent. You of all people know that. When it comes to Iran we and the Brits blew up a legitimate government and installed the Shah and I suggest others here would d do well to read Democracy in Chains by Nancy McClean to see what we installed in Chile (and PS I think your subscribers would find her very interesting).
But.
Lets stop sermonizing about how bad the Saudis are, yes they are bad, and how we shouldn’t be selling them our military goods, many of which have been made popular by Israel’s success in using them. Oh and the notion that Yemen and Vietnam have some sort of equivalency p-l-e-a-s-e.
None of the players in the Middle East are the likes of Norway, Denmark an Luxembourg. And as you pointed out neither are we. The real politic of the Middle East is that today (not tomorrow I hope) Iran is the enemy. Iran is in fact needlessly aggressive regardless of what anyone thinks of them. They have their forces in Syria and proxies in throughout the Middle East. As you must know in the Middle East its muscle that gets respect. The various members of the Abraham Accords did not become Jew lovers overnight. Its Israel’s might and protection they seek.
We have to stop going off on all these moral tangents or at least stop being selective. After all Turkey is occupying half of Cypress (I hear no protest or comments) and similar occupations are going on Western Africa. And Iran, Iraq, Syria and Turkey occupy and persecute the Kurds a legitimate indigenous ethnic population. The pimples are everywhere.
The fact is if we do not supply these weapons to Saudi Arabia and its “league” we will be handing over Yemen to Iran’s proxies. So choose your bad guys. But it will be bad guys you are choosing and not choosing them simply opens the door for China and Russia.
Didn’t the Saudis and the UAE just say they had no interest in joining an anti-Iran coalition?
Maybe that’s all a public smokescreen and they are saying different things behind closed doors, but at face value both nations are purportedly serious in pursuing diplomatic alternatives to escalation. Intermittent Israeli air strikes into Syria are one thing, but a hot war in the Persian Gulf is something else entirely. Iran could cripple the economies of both nations in short order. You think Morocco, Sudan, and Bahrain are going to come to their rescue?
So it seems to be only Israel and (as usual) American hawks pushing for direct military confrontation with Iran.
The truth about Israel's secret nuclear arsenal
“Israel has been stealing nuclear secrets and covertly making bombs since the 1950s. And western governments, including Britain and the US, turn a blind eye. But how can we expect Iran to curb its nuclear ambitions if the Israelis won't come clean?
The tale serves as a historical counterpoint to today's drawn-out struggle over Iran's nuclear ambitions. The parallels are not exact – Israel, unlike Iran, never signed up to the 1968 NPT so could not violate it. But it almost certainly broke a treaty banning nuclear tests, as well as countless national and international laws restricting the traffic in nuclear materials and technology.
The list of nations that secretly sold Israel the material and expertise to make nuclear warheads, or who turned a blind eye to its theft, include today's staunchest campaigners against proliferation: the US, France, Germany, Britain and even Norway.”
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jan/15/truth-israels-secret-nuclear-arsenal
First of all, it’s hard to compare US and European policies directed towards the pro-western pre-1979 Iranian government and the current one. The those policies surely would have been different had Iran been an anti-western Islamic republic in the 1960’s.
In the near present, Iran agreed to the original JCPOA without requiring any constraints on Israel’s secret-not-secret nuclear weapons, presumably because they assess Israel is unlikely to use them. Iran also ceased their nuclear weapons program in 2003 for their own internal reasons—doubtfully for any perceived lessened threat from the Israelis.
I think the Israelis also believe it would be suicide for the Iranians to use nukes against Israel if they had them.
Unlike, say, India and Pakistan, I don’t think Israel and Iran are natural enemies. All the talk of apocalyptic threats to Israel from Iran today were the same kinds of things said about the Saudis 40 years ago.
I agree that Israel is pushing the US to act on Iran. And everyone else will be saying: “we are right behind you”, since they too would like Iran to fall but are incapable of doing much of anything.
It would be very foolish for Israel to go up against Iran regardless of the outcome. If you look at world history from the past century aggressors invariably wind up paying the price.
Israel has a lot more to gain by just being on the sidelines when it comes to Iran, with the possible exception of keeping them at bay in Syria. Sooner or later the Iranian regime will give way, it will collapse from within. It does not have the support of the Iranian people.
Israel’s best course is to daily remind the Iranian people through its Persian language broadcast that the Jewish people are historically linked to them. Jewish ancestry is from that part of the world. A Persian King let the exiled Babylonian Jews return to their homeland and the Maccabees were saved by the Persians when Antiochus, their Syrian Greek tormentor, decided to take on the Persians and was killed in battle. Judea thrived for a hundred years until the religious zealots decided to take on the Romans. Sounds familiar? I pray history does not repeat itself.
Great article ! I would love to have a credible individual who has a different view point comment on this article . It would assist me in confirming or not my views . Carl .
It didn't start out that long :(
But Peter's with the Quincy Institute (my friend Masuda Sultan, of Unfreeze Afghanistan, has worked with them also) and although I'm absolutely in favor of releasing the funds, I think Quincy's discussion of this issue needs a little more nuance.