-
Invisible Afghanistan
Yet Afghanistan is a country of almost 40 million people and the goldfish bowl focus on the drama of Kabul airport is rendering the vast majority of Afghans invisible at its expense. Their invisibility hides the existing humanitarian crisis and the potential for a bad situation to get much worse quite quickly with more seismic consequences both for Afghans and their neighbouring countries.
Let us not forget that the number of people internally displaced by conflict in Afghanistan has risen by 53% since the start of August, jumping from 360,000 to 550,000 in just two weeks. Amongst rising fears of a significant exodus of refugees a spokesperson for the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) said on Friday that "the vast majority of Afghans are not able to leave the country through regular channels."
UN agencies have warned of food shortages to Afghanistan as early as September without urgent aid funding. Before the Taliban takeover some 30% of Afghanistan GDP was comprised of humanitarian aid. A substantial presence of international aid agencies and donors has been thrown into total flux by the events of the past weeks. The banking system has been frozen and access to wages and funds for programming has combined with huge insecurity and of course thousands of humanitarian staff wanting to leave the country.
Donors such as Germany have frozen their funding and there was even talk of the UN having to halt operations and withdraw from the country. Much of this uncertainty isn’t going anywhere especially as huge questions remain as to what appetite the Taliban has for allowing humanitarian aid agencies to operate and whether the counterterrorism policies from the donor community will mean that can do so.
A significant increase in the need for aid matched by a dramatic restriction of aid access into the country is the recipe for disaster in a country that is already the sixth poorest in the world. The desperation of those trying to get flights from Kabul airport is clear to see but there appears little in the way of coverage of those living in other parts of the country highlighting the ordeal they are currently facing.
Those who live in parts of the country who’ve been affected by the vicious and intense bouts of fighting earlier in the year are perhaps the most vulnerable. Kabul of course escaped the kind of urban destruction seen in Mosul and Raqqa but other parts of Afghanistan weren’t so fortunate and the destroyed homes and schools would appear to have little prospect of being rebuilt anytime soon.
Whilst the debate in the Western political landscape focuses both on the merits of the Afghan withdraw and the competence of its operational reality, for the forgotten Afghan civilians outside of Kabul and the environs of the airport the crossroads that their country is at is one that they face in the context of remarkable isolation.
It doesn’t have to be this way, broadcasters and major news channels must try much harder to amplify the voices and stories of Afghans in other parts of the country. There is already a legacy issue of insufficient reporting from Afghanistan which partly explains the surprise felt by many as to the rise and rise of the Taliban, a story that would have been familiar to most observers who were actually paying attention. The chaos of Kabul airport will not conceivably last for much longer, what happens next when Afghanistan ceases to dominate the news is far more important for the longer-term future of the country and we can only hope that Afghans are invisible no more. levant
by: James Denselow levant
