Afghanistan: 'Tea is sometimes all I have to give my hungry baby'
Afghanistan: 'Tea is sometimes all I have to give my hungry baby'
Some Afghan women are struggling to feed their children following huge aid cuts.
Sohaila is a widow. She has six children, her youngest a 15-month-old girl named Husna Fakeeri. The tea that Sohaila refers to is what's traditionally drunk in Afghanistan, made with green leaves and hot water, without any milk or sugar. It contains nothing that's of any nutritional value for her baby.
Sohaila is one of the 10 million people who have stopped receiving emergency food assistance from the UN World Food Programme (WFP) over the past year - cuts necessitated by a massive funding shortfall. It's a crushing blow, especially for the estimated two million households run by women in Afghanistan.
Under Taliban rule, Sohaila says she can't go out to work and feed her family.
"There have been nights when we have had nothing to eat. I say to my children, where can I go begging at this time of night? They sleep in a state of hunger and when they wake up I wonder what I should do. If a neighbour brings us some food the children scramble, saying 'give me, give me'. I try to split it between them to calm them down," Sohaila says.
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It's amazing how the west leaves their responsibilities after 20 years of war.
Fighting for the Afghani people for 20 years, trying to teach them how to fight for themselves, and they still aren't fighting for themselves.
Nobody needed to "teach" them how to fight for themselves.
All the gd money spent on that shit would have been better spent rebuilding infrastructure, roads, markets, etc that Russia had destroyed. That's how you build goodwill vs creating more insurgents ... which is what happened instead.
America needs to dump its "great white saviour" complex.
The US was trying to rebuild infrastructure, the Taliban blew up a lot of it as a means to fight the US since the same roads can also deliver troops.
The US spent a very small portion of the $133+ billion dollars on infrastructure (which is not the same as their advertised 'restructuring' or 'reconstruction').
By some measures, life in Afghanistan has improved markedly since 2001. Infant mortality rates have dropped. The number of children in school has soared. The size of the Afghan economy has nearly quintupled.
but
... those interviewed said Washington foolishly tried to reinvent Afghanistan in its own image by imposing a centralized democracy and a free-market economy on an ancient, tribal society that was unsuited for either.
and
Congress and the White House made matters worse by drenching the destitute country with far more money than it could possibly absorb. The flood crested during Obama’s first term as president, as he escalated the number of U.S. troops in the war zone to 100,000.
It all failed because of
haphazard planning, misguided policies, bureaucratic feuding. Many said the overall nation-building strategy was further undermined by hubris, impatience, ignorance and a belief that money can fix anything. Much of the money, they said, ended up in the pockets of overpriced contractors or corrupt Afghan officials, while U.S.-financed schools, clinics and roads fell into disrepair, if they were built at all.
So money was being spent, but the US led coalition was trying to push change too much in the society, which fought back over several decades, and the USAl was bad at spending the money in Afghanistan? And it isn't like the US just left, but it was being pushed out both via a negotiated peace deal and eventually at gunpoint.
You can advocate to give aid to the Taliban government currently running Afghanistan, but it isn't like the US has the will or authority to do much more in the country currently.
The US was forcing/enforcing its own image on a sovereign nation who didn't need or want that ... just like they had so many times before. And it failed spectacularly like it had before.
Maybe next time they'll ask what help the people want and provide that instead ... but if Biden's demands on the Palestinian Authority are any indication, America hasn't learned anything from its failures.
It wasn't like the Taliban were asking for help in 2001.
Fr. I think Afghanistan demonstrates that the desire for change needs to come from within a country because even if you have an imperialist force come in and nation build for 20 years, it won’t stick. The best you can do is try and educate people.