Food distribution site in Kabul, June. Credit … Kiana Hayery for The New York Times
Since the Taliban took power from a Western-backed government last year, Afghanistan has struggled with severe drought, widespread famine, attacks by extremists and an economic crisis that has forced more than a million people to flee their homes.
At the same time, many Western governments that have renounced Taliban policies, not least in terms of human rights, have severed diplomatic relations. Many of the country’s assets abroad have been frozen and international support is collapsing.
The Taliban are struggling to attract more foreign aid for public services from Western donors after they issued decrees banning girls from attending high schools and restricting women’s rights. Under the previous Western-backed government, foreign aid financed 75 percent of the government budget, including health and education services, aid that was abruptly cut short after the Taliban seized power.
Afghans have struggled to emerge from decades of conflict: the 20-year war between the United States and its allies against extremists, the civil war of the 1990s, the Soviet occupation before that. The cumulative number of conflicts dating back to the 1970s has left more than half of the country’s roughly 40 million people in need of humanitarian assistance, according to the United Nations. Three quarters of the population live in acute poverty.
In January, the United Nations called for more than $ 5 billion in humanitarian aid to Afghanistan to prevent what Martin Griffiths, the UN emergency coordinator, said could turn into a “full-blown humanitarian catastrophe.” Much of that call was for food after the economic collapse plunged half the population into potentially life-threatening food insecurity.
“Part of Afghanistan’s population is already in a humanitarian crisis,” UN Resident Coordinator in Afghanistan Ramiz Alakbarov told a news conference on Wednesday. People have bought expired bread that would normally be fed to animals, he said, adding that the food crisis “adds weight.”
The problem of hunger has been exacerbated by a drought announced by the government a year ago, which has weakened the country’s already limited ability to cope with a lack of rainfall. Drought and conflict can feed each other, experts say, exacerbating competition for scarce resources and increasing poverty, which in itself causes greater instability.
For most of the past 20 years, southeastern Afghanistan near the Pakistani border has been plagued by insurgency. Police and military posts were often overrun by Taliban fighters, and the region benefited little from the US military presence.
Although relative calm has prevailed since the Western-backed government fled the Taliban, security remains a nationwide issue.
On Saturday, militants stormed a Sikh temple in the capital, Kabul, leaving several people dead and wounded, despite Taliban claims that they had eliminated the threat posed by the extremist group ISIL. Since April, terrorist attacks have killed more than 100 people, mostly civilians among Afghan Shiite and Sufi minority groups.
And earthquakes are another risk. Many of the country’s densely populated cities are located on or near several geological faults, some of which can cause earthquakes of magnitude up to 7.
In January, two earthquakes struck a remote mountainous region in western Afghanistan, killing at least 27 people and destroying hundreds of homes, officials said at the time.
In 2002, at least 1,500 people died in a series of earthquakes measuring 5 to 6 on the Richter scale in northern Afghanistan, destroying the regional capital of the Hindu Kush. A magnitude 6.9 earthquake in 1998 killed up to 4,000 people in northern Afghanistan.
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