Aid organisations are ready and able to help, writes Phoebe Wynn-Pope, but their hands are often tied. International sanctions against the Taliban have made it difficult to get funds into the country since the group took power in August | OPINION ...
A child stands outside her home in a neighbourhood where many internally displaced people have been living for years, in Kabul, Afghanistan, on Tuesday.Distributing food and medicine and paying aid workers’ wages necessitates some interaction with the Taliban, as the country’s de facto government. But in doing so, aid organisations risk violating sanctions, and the potential of severe penalties.
We’ve been here before, and I have personally seen the consequences. During the Bosnian conflict I visited orphanages in Belgrade where children, born of rape and deserted on the orphanage doorstep, were fed carrot juice while milk powder was sitting in trucks at the border. Without the support of international donors, Afghan women and their allies will witness their hard-fought progress slide further and further backwards. As Afghan women’s rights activist Jamila Afghani has put it: “we are not supporting Afghan women by starving them.”In the midst of drought, the World Food Program estimated that 40 percent of crops were lost this year. Around 23 million people – the equivalent of almost the entire population of Australia – are going hungry.
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